Trial

            The British ruling class during the Victorian period was for a brief period was the more homogeneous than it had ever been.  For about fifty years they all went to public schools all went to major universities, they all went to clubs, they married late, they were bachelors for a long time.  There was a great deal of homosexual activity at public school, much more then there is now because the boys had much less adult supervision within the boarding houses.  To that extent there was quite a serious hypocrisy amongst people about Oscar Wilde, because at school one could not avoid seeing homosexual acts.  Many of the men who became eminent participated at school, even if they rejected it later and because there was no fixed idea of being a homosexual, it was simply one more thing in their lives to feel guilty about.   They didn’t have the cultural language to address homosexuality, and so Wilde’s flamboyant lifestyle was not immediately identified as gay.  Although these activities were taking place, the physical acts involved in homosexuality were illegal and immoral.  There was a very strong sense of what constituted sin, and this was exhaustive and, as it was, intellectually sufficient, requiring no elaboration: fornication was a sin, adultery was a sin, and sodomy was a sin.  To commit the act of sodomy reflected on an individual's morals, but did not imply a psychological profile.  That is to say that there was not yet a gay stereotype, that of “ the homosexual” who because of his sexual orientation has definable characteristics, disposition, and tastes.

            The homosexual relationship between Wilde and Lord Alfred Douglas was very disturbing to Douglas’s father, the Marquis of Queensburry.  In 1895, Queesnburry stormed into Wilde’s club, The Albermaerle, and finding him absent left a calling card, addressed “To Oscar Wilde posing Sodomite” (misspelling the insult).  Douglas, who hated his father, persuaded Wilde to sue the Marques for libel.  As a homosexuality was itself illegal, Queensburry was able to destroy Wilde’s case at the trial by submitting love letters to his son and others and calling witness rent boys who would describe Wilde’s sexual encounters in open court.  Oscar lost the case and was consequently arrested by the crown.  With essentially no credible defense against the charges of homosexual conduct, he was convinced and sentenced to two years hard labor, the latter part in Reading Gaol.  Dickinson-like prison conditions caused a calamitous series of illnesses for Wilde who was unaccustomed to this kind of lifestyle. Wilde died three years after is release due to illnesses his suffered from in prison.