Joseph Bristow

Remapping the Sites of Modern Gay History: Legal Reform, Medico‐Legal Thought, Homosexual Scandal, Erotic Geography

E thirty years ago Jeffrey Weeks published his groundbreaking Coming Out: Homosexual Politics in Britain, from the Nineteenth Century to the Present (1977)—an immensely influential history of the British sexual reform movements from the 1870s to the 1970s. Its appearance was followed closely (and in some ways serendipitously) by Robert Hurley’s 1978 English translation of Michel Foucault’s commanding Introduction to his projected six-volume History of Sexuality. Foucault’s theoretical work dismissed the belief that during the Victorian period “modern Puritanism imposed its triple edict of taboo, nonexistence, and silence” wherever sexuality was concerned. These two remarkable books—if emerging from divergent intellectual contexts—took similar initiatives to explain how the category of the “homosexual” came to define a particular kind of modern sexual identity, one that differed markedly from earlier understandings of the man-loving man as a “sodomite.” Both Weeks’s and Foucault’s studies, though methodologically distinct from each other, advanced well beyond limited

Introduction: Oscar Wilde and the Cultures of Childhood

This introductory chapter opens with a discussion of Oscar Wilde’s enduring interest in the cultures of childhood. The first section begins with an analysis of the figure of the child in one of Wilde’s best-known fairy tales, “The Happy Prince,” before looking closely at his experience as a loving father to his two sons Cyril and Vyvyan, who were estranged from him after he was sentenced to prison in May 1895. Through reference to his son Vyvyan Holland’s memoir, Son of Oscar Wilde (1954), the chapter turns to Wilde’s grief when he realized in jail that he would never see his boys again. The analysis then moves to Wilde’s writings on his dismay at the mistreatment of juveniles in HM Reading Prison. Thereafter, the chapter examines Wilde’s long prison letter, later known as De Profundis, in which he speaks of the ways in which his incarceration reminded him that he was a child in the eyes of God. The second section provides an overview of the eight chapters that follow.

The Provenance of Oscar Wilde’s “Decay of Lying”

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The blackmailer and the sodomite: Oscar Wilde on trial

On 25 May 1895, Oscar Wilde went to jail after three humiliating trials – the first was Wilde’s failed suit against the Marquess of Queensberry who libelled him for ‘posing as a sodomite’; and the subsequent two involved the Crown’s prosecution of Wilde for committing acts of gross indecency with other men. This article revisits the trials by looking at sources that paint a rather different picture from the influential one that Ed Cohen and Alan Sinfield established in the 1990s. First, it shows that the prosecution persuaded the jury that it was far worse for Wilde to have committed sodomy on two young blackmailers (who also engaged in male prostitution) than the kinds of extortion of which, as they freely admitted, they were culpable. Secondly, the discussion suggests that it is unreasonable to claim that the trials defined the modern identity of the male homosexual.