Sex and Punishment: Four Thousand Years of Judging Desire (54 page)

For the moment, however, the visits by the rent boys and Queensberry’s rage must have seemed to Wilde like the kind of surreal encounters an enriched life such as his would naturally invite. He had much bigger matters at hand, not least of which the fact that two of his plays,
An Ideal Husband
and
The Importance of Being Earnest
, were running simultaneously on both sides of the Atlantic. Yet Queensberry could not rest while his son pursued a “most loathsome and disgusting relationship” with the playwright. He showed up to the opening of
The Importance of Being Earnest
with a “grotesque bouquet of vegetables,” evidently for hurling at the stage, but guards at the theater had been warned of his arrival and he was refused admittance. A few days later, he went to Wilde’s London club, the Albemarle, where he left a calling card reading: “To Oscar Wilde posing as a somdomite” (the last word misspelled in his angry haste). Wilde read the card about ten days later, after which he made the single worst decision of his life.

Rather than ignore the scrawled message, Wilde consulted a lawyer, who asked him point-blank if the accusation was true. In the first of several fateful lies that would sink him, Wilde solemnly said no. “If you are innocent, then you should succeed” in court, the lawyer replied, and a lawsuit for criminal libel was filed. Interestingly, despite his appearance of wealth, Wilde was insolvent at the time. His debts to the posh Avondale Hotel, for example, had gotten to the point where the hotel had impounded his luggage and refused to release it—thus it would have been difficult to flee the country even if he had wanted to, and as friends such as George Bernard Shaw advised him to do. Bosie, no less implacable than his father, offered to foot the legal bill. The Douglas family “had often discussed the possibility of getting [Queensberry] put into a lunatic asylum so as to keep him out of the way,” according to Bosie, and a jail sentence for libel seemed just as effective.

Perhaps Wilde thought he could succeed as Lord Euston had done; perhaps he also thought his brilliance could win over anyone in court, especially when matched against Queensberry’s buffoonery. Most likely, he saw the trial as a set piece for good dialogue, one that could even further elevate his reputation as a genius and drive crowds to his plays. However, Wilde had sealed his fate by taking a false position: He was not only “posing” as a sodomite, by law he
was
one, and he had seriously underestimated the fury of his opposition. With the help of private investigators and some of Wilde’s more spiteful enemies, Queensberry lined up incriminating letters and a stable of pimps and male prostitutes to testify against Wilde. He also planned to take Wilde to task for some of the more turgid passages in his writings.

Everyone except Wilde himself seemed to know that the libel case would be a disaster, but he found out soon enough. His penchant for lying didn’t help his credibility in court, either. (In Wilde’s aesthetic universe, a lie was almost more valuable than the truth because of its creative possibilities.) In the first minutes of his testimony, Wilde stated that he was thirty-nine years old, which was two years shy of the truth. He may have thought it just and harmless to trim a couple of years from his age, but it was exactly what Queensberry’s superb lawyer, Edward Carson, needed to kick off a brutal, multiday cross-examination that ensured Wilde’s defeat. Carson used Wilde’s birth certificate to show that not only was he older than he admitted, he was also much older than Bosie, who was in his early twenties when their relationship began.

Carson pressed Wilde like a well-spoken steamroller, demanding that he explain homoerotic passages in his work—particularly in
Dorian Gray
. Wilde deftly parried many of Carson’s early questions at first, and the match of minds seemed to be a draw until the subject turned to Wilde’s own sex life. When the questions started to focus on rent boys and the pricey gifts he had given to a pier-side newsboy, “the faces of the twelve good men and true in the jury box plainly showed signs of surprise,” according to one observer. As Carson named boy after boy whom Wilde had known in questionable circumstances, the jury’s countenance grew grimmer.

Everything fell apart when Carson referred to a young servant of Bosie’s and asked Wilde if he had ever kissed the boy. Unable to resist a sharp response, Wilde replied: “Oh, dear, no! He was a peculiarly plain boy. He was, unfortunately, extremely ugly.” That was it. Carson pressed him relentlessly, demanding: “Why, why, why did you add that?”

On the advice of his lawyer, Wilde gave up the libel case before the rent boys began to give their testimony, but only after Carson forced Wilde’s side to admit that Queensberry’s actions had been justified. In effect, Wilde admitted that he was a homosexual. When Queensberry was acquitted, there were cheers in the courtroom’s public gallery, and prostitutes danced in the streets. However, that was only the beginning of the end. On the very afternoon the libel case collapsed, a warrant was issued for Wilde’s arrest. He was taken into custody that evening, just as the late-edition newspapers gloated that he was “damned and done for.”
²¹

The charge, “gross indecency,” came under the same law the moral reformers had pushed through in 1885, during the frenzy of the “Maiden Tribute” scandal. It had primarily been intended to protect girls from white slavery, but its fine print went much further than that. In the moments just before the bill passed in the House of Commons, Henry Labouchere had inserted a clause creating a new offense: indecency between men. The bill passed with almost no discussion about that addition.

It is doubtful whether anyone in Parliament realized at the time just how much they had changed English criminal law. It had always been illegal for adults to act indecently in
public
, or to corrupt youth, but under what became known as the “Labouchere Amendment,” the
private
pleasures of men with other men became public crimes:

Any male person who, in public or private, commits, or is party to the commission of, or procures or attempts to procure the commission by any male person of, any act or gross indecency with another male person, shall be guilty of a misdemeanour, and being convicted thereof shall be liable at the discretion of the court to be imprisoned for any term not exceeding two years, with or without hard labour.

Wilde’s loss in court sparked what a friend called an “orgy of Philistine rancour” in which “everyone tried to outdo his neighbour in expressions of loathing and abhorrence.” Almost immediately, Wilde went from being one of the world’s most sought-after playwrights and dinner guests to the most hated man in England. His plays were shut down, he ran out of the little money he had left, and in less than a few weeks the entire contents of his household were sold to pay off his creditors.

Two criminal trials against him followed. In the first, the jury failed to agree on a verdict after Wilde made an exceptional speech in which he likened his affection for young men to the exalted male-male relations of the ancient Greeks. The second brought a conviction and a sentence of the maximum two years’ imprisonment with hard labor, although the judge opined that it was “totally inadequate for a case such as this.”

More expressions of joy followed on the streets. One woman, referring to the writer’s famous foppish coif, provoked laughter outside the courthouse when she exclaimed: “’E’ll ’ave ’is ’air cut reglar now!”
The Daily Telegraph
expressed the same sentiment in finer language: “[W]e have had enough of Oscar Wilde,” it announced. He “has been the means of inflicting ... as much moral damage of the most hideous and repulsive kind as no single individual could well cause.”
The London Evening News
agreed: “England has tolerated the man Wilde and others of his kind too long . . . [W]e venture to hope that the conviction of Wilde for these abominable vices, which were the natural outcome of his diseased intellectual condition, will be a salutary warning.”

The suddenness and depth of Wilde’s fall from grace are still a stunning thing. After his arrest, his supporters put up his bail, but he was unable to find repose for one minute. When he and Bosie checked into a London hotel (presumably under false names) and were about to sit down to dinner, the hotel-keeper rushed into the dining room and told him he must leave at once. At another hotel later that night, guests threatened to tear the place apart if Wilde were permitted to stay. Wilde ended up at the house of his mother and brother, where he begged for shelter and then collapsed on the threshold. Depressed, confused, and ill, he rejected the advice of his remaining friends and his wife to flee the country. Again, we are left with “perhaps” questions. Perhaps he stayed on account of his mother’s threat never to speak to him again if he fled. Perhaps it was his fear of a fugitive life “slinking about the Continent.” Whatever it was, he drifted around France and Italy for two years after his jail term, finally dying in a dingy Paris hotel room in 1900.

The Wilde trials
²²
helped to perfect the image of the new English homosexual: pretentious, unmanly, and decadent. Homosexuals were, in the later words of an English judge, “stamped with the hallmark of a specialised and extraordinary class as much as if they had carried on their bodies some physical peculiarities.” Because the likes of Wilde were seen as threats to the “wholesome, manly and simple ideals of English life,” there was no option but to put them away. “Open the windows,” exclaimed one newspaper upon Wilde’s arrest, “Let in the fresh air!” The Labouchere Amendment, which slammed shut the doors of liberty to homosexuals, would remain in place until 1967.
²³

IN FRANCE, THE movement to classify people and especially homosexuals by their sexual habits was as strong as it was in England. Sodomy had been decriminalized since the French Revolution, but that brought little peace to men continually hunted under public indecency laws. One police inspector developed an elaborate taxonomy for homosexuals. There were the effeminate
périlleuses
, who sold sex for money or blackmail; the
travaill-euses
, working-class men in traditional occupations; and the
honteuses
, men of all classes who went to cruising spots but were ashamed of doing so. There were also the part-time
amateurs
and the
renifleurs
(“sniffers”), who enjoyed the ambiance of public urinals. In one month alone in the 1850s, police made more than two hundred arrests in the water closets of the Les Halles markets alone.

As in England, the French public’s special ire was reserved for upper-class men who preyed upon their young inferiors. When one was caught, newspaper sales soared on a wave of middle-class and moral superiority. Such was the case when the nobleman and wealthy lawyer Charles-Eugène Le Bègue de Germiny, known as “le Comte de Germiny,” was arrested in 1876 at a notorious Paris urinal along with an eighteen-year-old working-class boy, Edmond-Pierre Chouard. The de Germiny case was among the most sensational of its day, to the point that the count’s very name morphed into a synonym, in popular speech, for homosexuality—“Germinisme.”

From a press perspective, the case started out well and just got better. It took four police officers to subdue de Germiny, which earned him charges of both indecency and resisting arrest. His flailing also undercut his later story that he was merely conducting his own civic-minded investigation into the “scenes of immorality” that unfolded in public urinals. He later said that, while taking a stroll, “the idea came to me that I should conduct a sort of inquiry in regards to the activities of certain habitués of these areas, of which the indecency revolts the residents of the neighbourhood.” When he went in, he indeed saw people of “suspicious appearances,” including Chouard, whom he claimed only to have “observed” for some time before police came on the scene. As for resisting arrest, he said he believed he had been set up by local ruffians for a blackmail charge, against which he naturally put up a fight.

No one believed that story for a second, especially when it was lined up against the other evidence in the case. In truth, when the police entered the urinal, de Germiny had already been engaged in “obscene touching” with Chouard, and he had admitted as much in a signed statement before the trial. Chouard testified that de Germiny was the sexual aggressor, and he had refused the older man’s advances only to be caught when buttoning his pants after a “natural act.” For the public and the press, it was less a question of who made the first move than one class taking unfair advantage of another. The papers contrasted the “almost infantile countenance” of Chouard with the aristocratic bearing of his older, well-connected codefendant. The count’s many more advantages in life were repeatedly pointed out, as if to show that the cards of justice were already stacked in favor of a lawyer from an old family. Chouard was an innocent youth, despite his prior vagrancy conviction; de Germiny, a dirty middle-aged man.

The court seemed to agree, at least in part. Despite his considerable connections with the Paris courts, de Germiny was sentenced to two months in jail and a fine of two hundred francs—a heavy sentence by contemporary standards. Chouard got a fifteen-day jail term and a fine of sixteen francs. (Only a few weeks after Chouard did his prison time, he was named in a police report with a number of “vagabond” criminals, and six months later he was arrested on the Champs-Elysées for “obscene touching” with another man.)
²⁴

Had they ever met, de Germiny and Wilde would have probably hated each other. One was a true aristocrat and proud member of the ruling class, while the other was an extravagant bohemian who took every opportunity to insult respectable society and its values. However, in the realm of homosexual stereotypes, they were similar in key respects. Both were men of position with sexual tastes for rough young lads. Wilde caused his own ruin when he told his attorney “on my honour as a gentleman” that Queensberry’s accusation against him was untrue. Trouble came to de Germiny in the form of a vice squad, but it was the lawyer’s stupid decision to attract attention by walking in a notorious cruising spot six times in one evening.