By the author of this autobiography
Oscar Wilde presents a different phase of homosexuality from the author, that is, active pederasty. Apparently his was the active rôle in pædicatio or inter femora. According to Frank Harris, Wilde’s confidant and the author of his best biography, Wilde thus analyzes his penchant: “What is the food of passion but beauty, beauty alone, beauty always, and in beauty of form and vigor of life there is no comparison [with the female sex]. If you loved beauty as intensely as I do, you would feel as I feel. It is beauty which gives me joy, makes me drunk as with wine, blind with insatiable desire.” “There are people in the world who cannot understand the deep affection that an artist can feel for a friend with a beautiful personality.”
Like the author, Wilde was born and reared in the best environment and enjoyed unexcelled educational advantages. But as a boy and youth, he betrayed no feminine mental traits. Unlike the author, he was not feminesque physically. Further, while the author during youth and early “manhood” was notably small, Wilde grew to be one of the largest of men, six feet, two inches in height, and of stout build.
Apparently instinct did not become sufficiently powerful to cry for appeasement until he became a student at Oxford. While one of the leaders in scholarship and already a society favorite, it was nevertheless being whispered that he was a pederast. This was due to his openness, he not seeming to care if every one knew of his penchant, and not realizing that he was guilty of anything scandalous.
Having graduated from Oxford with the highest honors, Wilde took up his residence in London. Unlike the author, he was capable cum femina, but did not marry until twenty-nine. Two sons resulted. Marriage and fatherhood are the two strongest arguments against him in any judgment on his pederasty.
Hardly another human being has at the age of thirty achieved such fame. In the family of the author, then a boy of ten, and living in a different country and 3,000 miles away, the name “Oscar Wilde” was a household term. Even every child of the village was as familiar with that name as with that of the man next door. This fame resulted from his being the idol of England’s aristocracy, the greatest social light of the nineteenth century in any land, one of the most brilliant conversationalists that ever breathed, a poet of high rank, and the foremost English playwright of his generation.
But notwithstanding that during the late eighties and early nineties of the nineteenth century, Wilde was the most widely known and the most talked about man in London, he was so disdainful of the opinion of mankind as to visit regularly—not incognito, but under his own illustrious name—the leading maison publique of London which catered exclusively to active pederasts. He here made the acquaintance of adolescents—little better than gutter-snipes—some of whom he subsequently entertained in private rooms of London’s foremost hostelry. He also had a habit of leaving his meek, long-suffering wife at home with the children, and taking up his residence in a furnished apartment, where he entertained his adolescent friends. Occasional visits would be paid his wife and children. Some of London’s leaders of thought, although at the same time “men-about-town,” have been known to exclaim at what they witnessed in the city’s drinking palaces: “Is this the great Oscar Wilde who sits, chats, and drinks here with ragamuffins whom he has picked up off the street!”
Blackmail was looked upon as an every-day occurrence. As money both came and went easily, he never gave it a second thought.
Gradually stories of his doings spread throughout all grades of London society. The middle and lower classes soon came to hold his name in abomination, but comparatively few of the “upper crust”—with whom he exclusively associated apart from his nights with adolescent menials—held anything against him because of his almost unrivaled talents and delightful personality.
In 1895, at the age of forty-one, Wilde had reached the zenith of earthly glory. But the puritan element had naturally come to hold him in the greatest detestation. He was thoroughly pagan in thought and in his published works. Particularly was he thoroughly saturated with the writings and ideas of the ancient Greeks, with whom pederasty was common and open. Unlike the author, he had had no religious training, and when adult seems always to have turned the cold shoulder on the Church. Some of his writings were positively blasphemous. He would boast also that for him morality was non-existent—only the beautiful. While possibly irresponsible to a considerable degree for his pederasty, he was decidedly to be blamed for flaunting it in the face of everybody. On the whole, he was, because of his exalted position and his writings, the most pernicious influence of the 19th century on British morals. The puritan element were quick to take advantage of his arrest under the charge of being a “corrupter of youth,” and jumped into the fray. The slums of London were combed in order to find witnesses.