Wilde and Sexuality

Abstract As perhaps the most famous gay icon of the last 200 years, Wilde can be disappointing as a theorist or advocate for homosexuality. This chapter considers this paradox in three ways. First, it thinks about the particularities of Wilde’s sexual biography to ask whether he’s better considered as bisexual—or whether, given the obvious differences in how hetero- and homosexuality were treated in nineteenth-century society and law, such a term is anachronistic. The second section sees Wilde as the product of Victorian Oxford and its classicist emphasis, focusing on how its curricular emphasis promoted a particular understanding of same-sex desire, rooted in ancient Greek pederasty, that feels regressive in comparison to two competing models: the European sexological emphasis on linking homosexuality and gender nonconformity; and a more democratic model associated especially with the poetry of Walt Whitman that figured same-sex desire along less hierarchical or class-based lines. The third section turns to Wilde’s published work and sees its sometimes guarded or coded advocacy of homosexuality as inextricably linked to its trenchant critiques of heterosexual relations and marriage. The strongest arguments for same-sex desire in Dorian Gray or the comedies derive from their assessment that men and women have increasingly little in common and no stable basis for mutual commitment beyond the minimal requirement of species reproduction. This was a widely held view in the late nineteenth century.