What will he mean in a perhaps not too distant time when homosexuality has ceased to be a conversation stopper? All of which leaves Wilde in an interesting limbo. And they no longer seem to need the tragicomic Oscar the young gays of today can revel in the wit and wisdom of Neil Patrick Harris. In many major cities, at least, gays and lesbians no longer seem to need a safe place in the form of a store. The Wilde Bookshop closed in 2009, a casualty not only of the decline of the bookselling business but also of the partial triumph of Rodwell’s mission. The multiple versions of “Dorian Gray”-the earliest surviving manuscript, which is at the Morgan Library the typescript sent to Lippincott’s, which Harvard University Press has just made available in an “uncensored” edition the published Lippincott’s text and the expanded book publication of 1891-show Wilde deciding, sentence by sentence, just how far he would go. (You could at least find me.) Whether or not Wilde saw himself as part of a cause, he did not lack courage. As recently as the late eighties, you could still find bookish young people coming to terms with their sexuality by way of reading Wilde. When, in 1967, Craig Rodwell opened a gay-and-lesbian bookstore in New York, he named it the Oscar Wilde Memorial Bookshop, and after the Stonewall riots of 1969 Rodwell used the bookstore’s mailing list to help organize the first gay-pride parade. A nascent gay-rights movement embraced him as a hero of defiance. Almost overnight, a legend was born: Wilde the homosexual martyr, Wilde the moral rebel. Wilde died in 1900, in a run-down Paris hotel, at the age of forty-six. You and he were inseparable.”) At the Wilde trials of 1895, the opposing attorneys read aloud from “Dorian Gray,” calling it a “sodomitical book.” Wilde went to prison not because he loved young men but because he flaunted that love, and “Dorian Gray” became the chief exhibit of his shamelessness. There was Sir Henry Ashton, who had to leave England, with a tarnished name. (Basil tells Dorian, “There was that wretched boy in the Guards who committed suicide. Once Dorian discovers his godlike powers, he carries out various heinous acts, including murder but to the Victorian sensibility his most unspeakable deed would have been his corruption of a series of young men. The opening pages leave little doubt that Basil Hallward, the painter of Dorian’s portrait, is in love with his subject. The furor was unsurprising: no work of mainstream English-language fiction had come so close to spelling out homosexual desire. Within five years, Wilde found himself convicted of “committing acts of gross indecency with certain male persons.” Most ominous was a short notice in the Scots Observer stating that although “Dorian Gray” was a work of literary quality, it dealt in “matters only fitted for the Criminal Investigation Department or a hearing in camera” and would be of interest mainly to “outlawed noblemen and perverted telegraph-boys”-an allusion to the recent Cleveland Street scandal, which had exposed the workings of a male brothel in London. James Gazette deemed it “nasty” and “nauseous,” and suggested that the Treasury or the Vigilance Society might wish to prosecute the author. The Daily Chronicle of London called the tale “unclean,” “poisonous,” and “heavy with the mephitic odours of moral and spiritual putrefaction.” The St. The story, telling of a man who never ages while his portrait turns decrepit, appeared in the July, 1890, issue of Lippincott’s, a Philadelphia magazine with English distribution. Oscar Wilde was not a man who lived in fear, but early reviews of “The Picture of Dorian Gray” must have given him pause. Even before Wilde sent the manuscript of “The Picture of Dorian Gray” to the typist, he was hesitating over its homoerotic content.
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