Huw Lemmey - Bad Gays

Bad Gays

Bad Gays

A Homosexual History

Huw Lemmey
and
Ben Miller

First published by Verso 2022
Huw Lemmey, Ben Miller 2022

All rights reserved

The moral rights of the authors have been asserted

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Verso
UK: 6 Meard Street, London W1F 0EG
US: 388 Atlantic Avenue, Brooklyn, NY 11217
versobooks.com

Verso is the imprint of New Left Books

ISBN-13: 978-1-83976-327-4
ISBN-13: 978-1-83976-330-4 (US EBK)
ISBN-13: 978-1-83976-329-8 (UK EBK)

British Library Cataloguing in Publication Data
A catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library

The Library of Congress Has Cataloged the Hardback Edition as Follows
A catalog record for this book is available from the Library of Congress

Typeset in Sabon by MJ & N Gavan, Truro, Cornwall
Printed and bound by CPI Group (UK) Ltd, Croydon, CRO 4YY

For our friends Virgil and Michael

[H]omosexuals are widely consigned to the same category of things as drugs, the category of illicit dirty things that people have to be protected from since the homosexual is continually taught by the world around him that his natural home is the sewer, the homosexual is uniquely equipped to discover what truly belongs and doesnt belong in the sewer

Gary Indiana, Three-Month Fever

Contents

In 1891, Oscar Wildes star was on the rise. For a decade he had been the talk of London, a literary wit who pioneered the fashion and philosophy of aestheticism. He had successfully published works of prose and collections of poetry, and was preparing his first novel, The Picture of Dorian Gray, for publication, a masterful account of a Faustian bargain dripping with desire, vanity, and corruption. England regarded this sparkling Irishman with a combination of fascination, admiration, and horror, but no one could deny he was becoming a titan of the national culture. Yet within five years, Wildes reputation, and his health, were destroyed. Sentenced to two years of backbreaking hard labour, Wilde was spat at by strangers as he was transported via train to jail. Upon release, he fled into exile, living in penury under an assumed name. Nobody wanted to be known as his friend. Less than a decade after he had reached the heights of literary stardom, Wilde was dead.

Its right and proper that we remember the role Wilde played within an otherwise staid and repressive Victorian culture, as well as the important, pioneering work he did describing, in public, a form of same-sex desire that otherwise lay hidden and criminalised on the margins. Wilde was one of the first men in British society to give a creative form to a sexuality that barely yet understood itself, let alone was understood or discussed by straight people. For that, conservative forces succeeded in destroying him. But at the core of Wildes story is his love for a terrible young man, a love that drove him close to madness and sparked the wildfire of events that led to his ruin.

That boy, a petulant and cruel son of the British aristocracy, was Lord Alfred Douglas, known by his affectionate nickname Bosie. Wilde and Bosie first met in 1891, when Bosie was a twenty-one-year-old undergraduate at Wildes alma mater, Magdalen College, Oxford. Bosie was an archetypal twink, popular and athletic, who cared more about his writing and activities in the new Uranian poetry movement, which idolized pederastic relationships between older and younger men, than his studies, which he never completed. In Wilde he found his ideal older lover and benefactor, whose work and plays he had already praised in Uranian journals.

Their tempestuous affair pushed Wildes homosexuality from the realm of flirtatious literary innuendo into that of reckless public identity. Besotted with the young poet, Wilde fell in with Bosies lifestyle and indulged his demands. The two lovers drank and partied together and became the subject of scurrilous rumours. They began to host wild sex parties with young working-class men, who they paid to fuck (or get fucked by). Wildes public image an educated and charming raconteur, married with children clashed with his private life, and while the conflict could hold for a few years, it wasnt long before the inevitable happened. Wilde was expecting it. In a letter to Bosie after his release from jail, he wrote:

It was like feasting with panthers. The danger was half the excitement. I used to feel as the snake-charmer must feel when he lures the cobra. They were to me the brightest of gilded snakes. Their poison was part of their perfection.

After clashing with Bosies father, the Marquess of Queens-berry, Wilde was left a calling card from the Marquess accusing him of being a sodomite. Queensberry, having two homosexual sons whom he regarded as having been corrupted by snob queers such as Wilde and thenprime minister Archibald Primrose, 5th Earl of Rosebery, was obsessed with homosexuality. Wildes friends told him to leave the case well alone, but, pushed by an impetuous and jealous Bosie, who hated his father, Wilde sued. There was a fatal hole in Wildes case he was a sodomite, and Queensberry could prove it. The civil trial not only humiliated Wilde in the eyes of a homophobic Victorian public, but instigated a further criminal trial for gross indecency. Wilde was found guilty and sentenced to hard labour, which, in the end, indirectly killed him.

Wildes imprisonment, as awful and scandalous as it was, came at what was both a dangerous and an auspicious time for the new figure of the homosexual in Europe. Within certain, albeit small, literary and scientific circles, a new identity was forming. Sexologists described a third sex somewhere between male and female. In cities thronging with the new proletarian masses and enriched by colonial plunder, a group of people became the first generation of activists pursuing something we might recognize as gay rights. They discussed same-sex desire with sensitivity, even respect, calling themselves Uranians, Urnings, or even Homosexuals. For such people, Wildes trial was an important moment in the development of what would, in the ensuing decades, become something like a coherent movement. Scandals, after all, brought public attention. The newspapers wrote about the dangerous homosexuals, and more people began to recognize themselves as such and be endangered, and intrigued, by what that recognition might mean.

Wildes utopian vision of love between men remains, in Britain and beyond, a creation myth of the public male homosexual identity. Speaking at his trial Wilde launched a passionate defence of homosexual desire:

It is in this century misunderstood, so much misunderstood that it may be described as the love that dare not speak its name, and on that account of it I am placed where I am now. It is beautiful, it is fine, it is the noblest form of affection. There is nothing unnatural about it.

Such a statement can almost be seen as a rallying cry for the century of LGBTQ rights activism that was to follow, and Wilde became one of its first martyrs.

Bosie became a footnote in the story: an embodiment of evil twink energy, a poisoned apple whose path through life left a wake of destruction that led to the great heros downfall. Yet Bosie the man, his desires, his attitudes, and his foibles was just as integral to the eruption of homosexuality into the public sphere as was Wilde. Bosie set the trial in motion. Indeed, it was actually Bosie, and not Wilde, who had coined the term the love that dare not speak its name in one of his poems. No less than Wilde, Bosie shaped and was shaped by the sexual attitudes and cultures of his time, and Bosies later life of far-right political involvement is just as unpleasant and illuminating as his years with Oscar.