The Secret Life of Oscar Wilde

by Neil McKenna

  In 1885, a conviction for sodomy meant a maximum sentence of life imprisonment. But there was a gap in the law: other sexual acts between men like mutual masturbation and fellatio were not the subject of legislation. Technically, it was perfectly legal for men to have non-penetrative sex with other men, although any sexual expression between men was viewed as utterly perverted. The law required a heavy burden of proof to obtain a conviction of sodomy. There had to be incontrovertible proof of penetration as well as proof of what the law quaintly called `emission of seed' in the partner's rectum. Unless ejaculation could be proved to have taken place, there was no case to answer.

  This had been demonstrated, in spectacular fashion, fifteen years earlier when, in April 1870, Ernest Boulton, known as `Stella', and Frederick Park, known as `Fanny', were arrested as they left the Strand Theatre dressed in full drag. The police had been watching them for weeks, and they were charged with conspiracy to commit sodomy with Lord Arthur Clinton, a Member of Parliament and the third son of the powerful Duke of Newcastle, and two other men. Stella and Fanny shared lodgings with Lord Arthur, who had had visiting cards printed for Stella in the name of `Lady Arthur Clinton'. Before the case came to trial, Lord Arthur conveniently died, apparently of scarlet fever, though suicide is a more likely explanation. The prosecution of Fanny and Stella failed because there was no concrete proof that Lord Arthur, or anyone else, had emitted his seed into their rectums, even though there was very strong evidence to suggest that Fanny and Stella had been regularly sodomised. The police surgeon who examined Stella and Fanny found that both their anuses were dilated to a considerable degree: `I have never seen anything like it before,' the shocked police surgeon, Mr James Paul, told the court. But anal dilation alone was neither proof of anal penetration nor of emission of seed.

  Labby wrote later that the main impetus behind his amendment was a widespread public perception that sex between men was `on the increase'. Sir Howard Vincent, the first Director of Criminal Investigations at Scotland Yard from 1878 to 1884, had declared that men soliciting sex with other men were `an increasing scourge'. The Yokel's Preceptor, a curious guide to the erotic pleasures and pitfalls of London, described what it perceived as an epidemic of male-to-male sex in the capital:

  The increase of these monsters in the shape of men, commonly designated margeries, poofs, etc., of late years, in the great Metropolis, renders it necessary for the safety of the public that they should be made known ... Will the reader credit it, but such is nevertheless the fact, that these monsters actually walk the street the same as the whores, looking out for a chance? Yes, the Quadrant, Fleet Street, Holborn, the Strand, etc., are actually thronged with them! Nay, it is not long since, in the neighbourhood of Charing Cross, they posted bills in the windows of several public houses, cautioning the public to `Beware of Sods!'

  Sex between men had from medieval times been seen not just as a sin and a crime - `the destestable and abominable Vice of Buggery', as the statute of Henry VIII called it - but more particularly as a contagion, a virus which could be spread by sexual contact. Labby and other campaigners for social purity were determined to stamp this contagion out. A year earlier, in 1884, the Dublin Castle Scandal had treated the British public to the unedifying spectacle of a network of sexual contacts between highly placed officials in the British administration in Dublin on the one hand and a ragtag and bobtail assortment of local men on the other.

  There were two aspects of the Dublin Castle Scandal that particularly shocked the amour propre of politicians, social purity campaigners and the public: the heresy that there should be sexual contact between the classes, and the existence of a social identity, a sub-cultural community, between men of wildly different classes. Both of these factors would work against Oscar when his turn in the dock came. William O'Brien, the Irish Nationalist MP and editor of the United Ireland newspaper, which first got wind of the Dublin Castle Scandal, described it as `a criminal confederacy, which for its extent and atrocity, almost staggered belief. It included men of all ranks, classes, professions, and outlawries, from aristocrats of the highest fashion to outcasts in the most loathsome dens.' These included: Jack Saul, a male prostitute (whose bawdy memoirs, The Sins of the Cities of the Plain; or the Recollections of a Mary Ann, Oscar certainly read); one `Lizzie', Captain of the Royal Dublin Fusiliers; `The Maid of Athens', or Malcolm Johnstone; and dozens more.

  Social purity campaigners were also alarmed by the slow, steady rumblings of medical and legal debate about the rights and wrongs of sex between men. Beginning slowly in Germany in the 1860s, the debate grew in strength. A German lawyer, Karl Heinrich Ulrichs, was the pioneer, producing dozens of books and pamphlets arguing for the legal and social recognition of sex between men. It was Ulrichs, invoking Plato's Symposium, who had coined the German term Uranismus from the uranios or `heavenly love' of Aphrodite, daughter of Uranus. Translated into English this became `Uranianism' or `Uranian love'. Ulrichs fought on two fronts. First, he emphasised the naturalness and normalness of Uranian love. The Urning, he said, was someone who was born with anima muliebris virili corpore inclusa, a feminine soul in a male body. If sexuality was inborn, predetermined, a product of nature, Ulrichs argued, then there could be no justification for criminalising sex between men. Ulrichs went further and demanded for Uranians full social and legal equality with heterosexuals as well as the right to marry. Going further still, Ulrichs asserted that Uranian love was of a higher order than pandemos or common, heterosexual love.

  In Britain, John Addington Symonds's book A Problem in Greek Ethics had been privately printed and distributed in 1883. It was subtitled `An Inquiry into the Phenomenon of Sexual Inversion addressed especially to medical psychologists and jurists' and invoked the glories of Greek paiderastia, arguing essentially that what was good for the Greeks was good for the British.

  The slow and steady drip, drip, drip of legal, medical and social debate about sex between men alongside a series of high-profile scandals fuelled Labby's perception that the vice was on the increase. His amendment was designed to plug the gaps in the law. Section 11 of the Criminal Law Amendment Act stated that:

  Any male person who, in public or private commits or is a party to the commission of, or procures the commission by any male person, of any act of 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.

  The Labouchere Amendment, as it became known, had become law with only one change. Labby had wanted a maximum penalty of seven years with hard labour, but the Home Secretary and the Attorney General had persuaded him to reduce this to two years.

  John Addington Symonds was appalled by Section 11. He called it `a disgrace to legislation, by its vagueness of diction and the obvious incitement to false accusation'. It was the criminalisation of what had previously not been criminal and the catch-all wording of Labby's Amendment that worried Symonds. First of all, there seemed to be little or no burden of proof required. After all, how could anyone prove or disprove what had or had not happened in private? It was a green light for blackmailers, operating singly or in gangs. An allegation of gross indecency would be sufficient to cause a man to be arrested, committed for trial and ruined. Even before Labby's Amendment, men who had sex with men were vulnerable to blackmail; now, the threat of two years' hard labour, with no burden of proof required, signalled an open season for blackmailers. Then there was the element of the Amendment which criminalised anyone who `is a party to the commission of, or procures the commission of' a sexual act between men. What exactly did this mean? It was, in fact, a conspiracy clause, a catch-all clause that allowed the law to prosecute any man against whom charges of actual gross indecency would not stick, and it was used as such in successive prosecutions under the Amendment right up until 1967.

  Labby always thought two years quite insufficient to the crime of gross ind
ecency. It was the legislation under which Oscar was to be tried and convicted a decade later. When Oscar went to bed with Harry Marillier in Cambridge he had, overnight, become a criminal. Later, in The Picture of Dorian Gray, Oscar would directly refer to what he considered the real perniciousness of Section 11: by criminalising men's sexual desire for men, the law not only repressed desire, but it also warped and made that desire ugly:

  The only way to get rid of a temptation is to yield to it. Resist it, and your soul grows sick with longing for the things it has forbidden to itself, with desire for what its monstrous laws have made monstrous and unlawful.

  At some point during this year of criminalisation, Oscar met the man who was destined to be his devoted friend for the rest of his life. Robert Baldwin Ross was the son of John Ross, a distinguished Canadian politician who had died when Robert - or Robbie or Bobby as he was usually called - was just two. John Ross had expressed a wish that his five children be educated in Europe, a wish that his widow, Eliza, faithfully respected. The family moved to London when Robbie was four, eventually settling in Onslow Gardens.

  Robbie had just turned seventeen when he met Oscar but looked much younger. He was not conventionally handsome: slight and slender, with a round, moon-like face, a large intellectual expanse of forehead, a small tiltturned nose and a rather voluptuous mouth. Oscar said he had `the face of Puck and the heart of an angel'. And Bosie Douglas, who spent the latter part of his life and energies trying to bring about Robbie's absolute destruction, described him variously as `a rather pathetic-looking little creature, in appearance something like a kitten' and `a slender, attractive, impulsive boy'.

  The exact circumstances of when, where and how Oscar and Robbie met are unknown. Robbie rarely spoke about his early years, and Oscar never referred to the circumstances of their first meeting. Frank Harris later claimed, however, that Oscar had told him that he had met Robbie in a public lavatory, and that Robbie had importuned him. Certainly Robbie was sexually precocious. Unlike many Victorian young men who struggled painfully with their sexuality for years before coming to terms with it - if they ever did - Robbie seems never to have had any doubts or experienced any disquiet about his sexual orientation. He had spent six years at a prep school in Cobham, Surrey and would have learnt the rudimentary truths about boys and sex there. From the age of twelve, he was educated at home by tutors, and he travelled extensively in Europe, sometimes with his mother, and sometimes with his tutor. By the time he was seventeen, he was intellectually and socially precocious. He had seen far more of the world than most boys of his age and had probably explored and experienced his sexuality on his travels.

  It is entirely possible that Oscar and Robbie did meet in a public lavatory. Long after Oscar was dead and Robbie and Bosie had had a bitter falling out, Bosie obtained a deposition from an Inspector West of Scotland Yard, who said he had patrolled the Vine Street area of Piccadilly for fifteen years and `had known Ross during all those years as an habitual associate of sodomites and male prostitutes'. Robbie may well have started his explorations of the erotic underground of London by hanging around parks and open spaces and loitering in public lavatories. Under the heading of `Public Necessaries', the Public Health Act of 1875 had laid a duty upon urban authorities to provide an adequate supply of `urinals, waterclosets, earthclosets, privies, ashpits and other similar conveniences for public accommodation', which led to the construction of both street-level pissoirs and more elaborate underground public conveniences in the larger towns and cities. `Cottages', as they were and are known in Polari, the argot of men who love men, provided an ideal venue for men to meet like-minded men for sex. The technique was simple. Men would stand at urinals masturbating and eventually exposing their erect penises to other interested men. It was crude, but very effective; a fast and efficient means of establishing direct and mutual sexual interest. Often, men would masturbate each other while standing side by side at the urinals until one or both ejaculated. Sometimes they would withdraw to the lockable cubicles and engage in a range of sexual acts, or they might leave together and go to a park or to a house to enjoy sex.

  Then as now, `cottaging' was fraught with dangers: the dangers of discovery, of arrest, of assault. In the 1880s and 1890s, there was an additional danger of falling foul of blackmailers and robbers. In a process called by its perpetrators `copping for a steamer', young, attractive men would cruise public lavatories, looking for men who were well-dressed and were obviously moneyed. They would make contact, suggest going to a nearby hotel or rooms, have sex and then demand money with menaces. Sometimes, an accomplice would burst in claiming to be the youth's uncle or father and would only be prevented from calling the police by the payment of a large sum of money. Despite these manifest dangers, cottaging was an effective means of finding sexual partners in a city where the sub-culture of men who liked to have sex with boys and men, such as it was, was hidden, difficult to access and was equally vulnerable to blackmail. It was a way, too, for educated middle-class men to make sexual contact with working-class men.

  It is perfectly possible, though, that Robbie met Oscar through more conventional avenues. Robbie's older brother, Alec, who had recently graduated from Cambridge and was living the life of a minor man of letters, could easily have met Oscar through London's narrow and incestuous literary and journalistic world. However Robbie and Oscar came to meet, they very quickly became lovers.

  Sex with Robbie was probably a very different affair from sex with Frank Miles, Rennell Rodd or Harry Marillier. Although he was just seventeen, Robbie was extremely sexually sophisticated and knew exactly what he wanted out of his sexual encounters. This slender, attractive and impulsive boy was a beacon for men who were attracted to younger men or boys and who often wanted to anally penetrate them. For his part, Robbie was polymorphously perverse. He liked older men to `play male' to him, taking the receptive role in anal sex, and it is possible that it was with Robbie that Oscar first experienced anal sex. But Robbie also liked sex with younger men and teenage boys, especially from the working classes. Robbie's sexual entanglements with teenage boys would in the years to come pose the gravest threat to him. In 1893 he narrowly escaped prosecution over an ill-advised love affair with a sixteenyear-old schoolboy.

  But what was perhaps most important as far as Oscar was concerned was that Robbie had a joyous acceptance of himself as a lover of men. There was no doubt, no self-recrimination, no anguished and prolonged attempts to divert his passions towards women. He was one of the few late-Victorian men who were open with their families about their sexuality, telling his mother and his older brothers when he was nineteen. It was a very courageous and a very foolhardy step to take. Oscar could not help but be dazzled, fascinated and intrigued by a boy who was so sexually knowing, so gloriously accepting of his sexuality.

  No letters between Oscar and Robbie survive from this first period of their relationship, but there can be no doubt that Oscar fell violently in love with Robbie, at least for a while. As with all Oscar's love affairs, the intensity of their relationship was short-lived, and neither of them made any attempt at monogamy. Oscar sought sex elsewhere, as did Robbie. But unlike most of Oscar's other relationships, his love affair with Robbie became a deep and abiding friendship, occasionally punctuated by sex. Robbie had a remarkable gift for friendship, especially with literary men. He shared his mother's and his older brother's taste for literature and art. He was well-informed, witty, had remarkable powers of conversation for one so young, and could appreciate and communicate with Oscar in ways that Constance could not.

  Bosie Douglas said later that Robbie's gift for friendship was nothing more or less than `flattery laid on with a trowel':

  He could, when he liked, make himself very agreeable, and he always contrived to convey to the particular person with whom he wished to ingratiate himself that he or she was the object of his profound and respectful admiration. When you had had ten minutes' conversation with him you went away with a pleasing feeling th
at you were really an important person, and that Ross appreciated it, and would never be likely to forget it.

  No doubt there was an element of flattery in Robbie's relationships with literary men, but there was also discrimination, appreciation, understanding and sympathy. Robbie knew the limitations of his own talents but had the gift of recognising and helping to nurture the talents of others. He sensed Oscar's remarkable but, up until that point, latent genius. Their friendship would become a creative partnership which was to last until death.

  It is no coincidence that the period of Oscar's greatest work began at about the time he first met Robbie. They were often together, closeted in Oscar's Moorish smoking room in Tite Street, endlessly talking, endlessly laughing and endlessly discussing l'amour de l'impossible. As he had done with Harry Marillier and would do with so many others, Oscar introduced Robbie to Constance, who also found him delightful. The following summer, in 1887, Robbie came to stay at Tite Street as a paying guest while Mrs Ross was travelling on the continent. He was attending a crammer's establishment in Covent Garden before going up to Cambridge the following year, and it was felt that his education would suffer if he went abroad with his mother. The arrangement suited Oscar and Robbie perfectly. The first flush of passion between them had long since passed, but there was almost certainly the occasional sexual encounter, after Constance had gone to bed, or when she was away. But the chief glory of their friendship lay in their shared interests in literature, in art and, most importantly in the endlessly fascinating topic of sex.

  Poets and lovers

  `How much more poetic it is to marry one and love man)'.'