The blackmailer and the sodomite: Oscar Wilde on trial

Abstract

On 25 May 1895, Oscar Wilde went to jail after three humiliating trials – the first was Wilde’s failed suit against the Marquess of Queensberry who libelled him for ‘posing as a sodomite’; and the subsequent two involved the Crown’s prosecution of Wilde for committing acts of gross indecency with other men. This article revisits the trials by looking at sources that paint a rather different picture from the influential one that Ed Cohen and Alan Sinfield established in the 1990s. First, it shows that the prosecution persuaded the jury that it was far worse for Wilde to have committed sodomy on two young blackmailers (who also engaged in male prostitution) than the kinds of extortion of which, as they freely admitted, they were culpable. Secondly, the discussion suggests that it is unreasonable to claim that the trials defined the modern identity of the male homosexual.

From Reading to Rio: Oscar Wilde in Brazil

“…The third trial, less than a month later, secured a conviction against Wilde, with Mr. Justice Alfred Wills sentencing Wilde to the "rare" maximum sentence under the law of two years hard labor with solitary confinement. 16 Andrew Elfenbein sums up recent scholarship on the trials that challenges assumptions of the hostility toward Wilde and the sense that his conviction was a foregone conclusion. Of the second trial, he states, Despite fierce press against Wilde and supposed government pressure to convict him, when he was initially prosecuted for gross indecency, he was not found guilty.…”

Humanities Research Software Design: The Wilde Trials Web App

“…Although the Galignani Messenger report shared essentially the same news report, it excluded this remarkable admission, as well as the fuller questioning about extortion (see Figure 11). is omission was not simply an instance of trimming, but a strategic cut that minimized disclosure about sexual blackmail and the larger cultural process of the trials that linked sodomy to blackmail (Bristow, 2016). at the Galignani Messenger moderately censored some of the sexual information from the London papers invites questions about the extranational reach of Britain's journalistic convention of silence around homosexual matters (Cocks, 2003;Powell, 2009), and overturns expectations of finding sexual tolerance and expressive freedom in a newspaper based in the City of Light.…”