Coda

Abstract This conclusion uses Oscar Wilde’s words at the end of his decisive trial to highlight the absence of a chapter devoted to him in LGBT Victorians. Wilde is arguably the most famous gay man in history and clearly the best-known among the Victorians, and yet he might have relatively little to say about the issues on which the book focuses. Despite the ubiquitous assumption that he articulated a form of male effeminacy, Wilde’s writings and public statements have little to contribute to thinking about sexual and gender nonconformity as interconnected, and instead tend to endorse a regressive model of pederasty that he (like Symonds) encountered at Oxford. The coda then reads elements of the Wilde trials with a focus on his co-defendant, Alfred Taylor, who was in closer connection to networks of gender nonconforming men and in an alleged marriage with Charles Spurrier Mason. Taylor’s co-presence in the dock, and yet relative invisibility in our understanding of the trials, thus come to symbolize the continued difficulty of reading the intersections between sexuality and gender identity.