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The Secret Life of Oscar Wilde
by Neil McKenna
Basic Books
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Oscar Wilde would have loved it-- being reinvented that is. In his short life-- he lived from 1856 to 1900-- Wilde was a self-declared genius at self-invention. He was poet, journalist, social reformer, socialist, playwright, wit, essayist, and-- in his most notorious self-invention-- public homosexual. So public, in fact, that at the height of his fame (just after the huge success of The Importance of Being Earnest) Wilde was arrested and convicted for "gross indecency," sentenced to two years in prison, and then went into exile where he died three years later.

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Since the 1950s there's been an outpouring of Wilde scholarship-- in the past decade, alone, three dozen major works dealing with everything from Wilde as an Irish writer to his key place in the art-for-art's-sake revolution-- but the amazing thing is that hardly any of these books take Wilde's homosexuality seriously. Sure, they all mention it-- they have to. And even the better work, such as Richard Ellman's 1984 major critical biography, are very problematic about Wilde's sexuality-- at best they see it as a tragic flaw that brought down a great writer; at worst they see it as pathology that ends in self-inflicted tragedy.

Now Neil McKenna's The Secret Life of Oscar Wilde-- which has been out in Great Britain for a year and is just about to be published in the US-- has put an end to all that. The genius of McKenna's book is that-- for the contemporary reader-- he reinvents Wilde as the flagrant, determined, and highly politicized homosexual that he was. (As I said, Wilde would have loved it.)

There are so many great things about The Secret Life of Oscar Wilde it's difficult to know where to begin. What McKenna has done-- and this is a brilliant, radical move in Wilde scholarship-- is to take as his premise that Wilde's homosexuality was integral to his physical, emotional, intellectual, and political life. When it is neither "tragic flaw" nor mental illness, the playwright's sexuality becomes the key to not only his work, but his actions as well. What makes McKenna's research so different from what has come before is that he has situated Wilde in the broad, comprehensive tapestry of gay life in England in the second half of the 19th century. This is exactly what most past biographers have failed to do-- the two exceptions are Neil Bartlett in his 1988 Who Was That Man? A Present for Mr. Oscar Wilde and Gary Schmidgall in his 1994 The Stranger Wilde-- and why they always end up presenting Wide as a disturbed, mostly closeted homosexual bent on self-destruction.

Using as his premise the idea that Wilde's gayness was a vital part of his life, McKenna has done incredible research to sketch out for us the world in which he lived. By relying on the writings of many of Wilde's homosexual contemporaries-- John Gray, Andrew Rafflovich, Robert Ross-- and by looking at the slowly, but steadily emerging homosexual subculture of late Victorian London, McKenna has found the key to rereading much of Wilde's own writings-- and actions. So, for example, McKenna's re-reading of The Picture of Dorian Gray (whose title character was based, in large part, on John Gray-- a completely obvious fact that most biographers have ignored) brings the essential homosexuality of the piece to the foreground rather then leaving it as barely noticeable subtext. McKenna points out that while Dorian Gray may get his last name from a friend, his first name is a clear reference to the Dorians-- a tribe in Attic Greece that scholars believe was most responsible for the institutionalization of paiderastia, "by which an older man became the lover and teacher of a youth." McKenna also quotes John Addington Symonds's A Problem in Greek Ethics to support his interpretation, and also discourses, quite fruitfully, on how the act of anal sodomy plays such an important, creative part in the novel as well as Wilde's own sexual imagination.

The Secret Life of Oscar Wilde is filled with such insights, including the "hidden"-- well, for those in the know, hardly hidden at all-- gay themes in The Importance of Being Earnest. Not only was its very title a play on Love in Earnest, a popular volume on Uranian poetry, but the play's obsession with eating and drinking corresponds to Wilde and his friends' sexual habits, in particular the wining-and-dining of young working-class youths. And the French uraniste-- a homonym of "earnest"-- was for a short time a coded signifier of homosexual desire: "Are you earnest?" functioned as an earlier form of "Are you a friend of Dorothy's?"

But McKenna's boldest, and most important, claim here is that Oscar Wilde understood himself to be not just a homosexual, but a crusader for the new (albeit very quiet) movement for homosexual visibility and the abolishment of laws and regulations that penalized homosexual behavior. And this makes perfect sense-- homosexuality was vital to Wilde's identity and his impulses to social justice and personal freedoms. One of the great mysteries of Wilde's life is why-- after receiving news that he was to be arrested for his sexual activities-- he never fled to France where he would have been safe. Most biographers, including Ellman, chalk this up to arrogance or a desire for self-destruction. McKenna argues that staying in England was an overt political move on the part of Wilde. He was not going to back down, but take the stand and defend not only his life, but the goodness and the intrinsic political worth of homosexuality.

It is here that McKenna's Wilde becomes not the tragic gay martyr, but the fearless (and perhaps foolhardy) political activist.

This is a biographical re- invention of which Wilde would have been proud.

Author Profile:  Michael Bronski
	Michael Bronski is the author of Culture Clash: The Making of Gay Sensibility and The Pleasure Principle: Sex, Backlash, and the Struggle for Gay Freedom. He writes frequently on sex, books, movies, and culture, and lives in Cambridge, Massachusetts.
	Email:	mabronski@aol.com