1/4/2024 0 Comments Owas oscar wilde gay![]() Gay liberation, already a key political and social development in the UK and North America in the 1960s, found a new focus in Ireland in 1974, five years after the Stonewall riots in New York, with the foundation of the Irish Gay Rights Movement, in Dublin. As Ireland experienced radical economic, legal and social change during the last half of the 20th century and into the 21st, there began a reconsideration of the public role of Irish lesbian and gay lives. The slow process of change began when the Wolfenden report on homosexual offences and prostitution was published, in England, in 1957. ![]() Witness the banning of Kate O'Brien's beautifully realised, highly civilised autobiographical novel The Land of Spices, declared obscene and condemned by the Censorship Board for one sentence: "She saw her father and Etienne in the embrace of love." When any representation of the homoerotic made it into the public arena, it was met with vehement opposition. We sometimes glean some momentary glimpse of covert lives, hidden from view, existing outside the public gaze. ![]() In one sense much of the history of this particular past in 20th-century Ireland is a history of criminal investigation and legal prosecution. Papers from the case include a number of letters that police seized to help secure conviction, letters that reveal touching evidence of a lively network of friends and lovers in the Dublin of the time, an underground culture of men who loved other men.Ī similar high-profile legal case came with the furore around the 1907 theft of the Irish crown jewels, when opportunistic nationalist anger against crown administrators was expressed in virulently homophobic newspaper outpourings. These included the Dublin Castle scandal of 1884, when a number of men working in the Castle administration were tried for having homosexual relations. ![]() In one particular foreign country, our Irish judicial past, Wilde’s London trial was paralleled by a number of high-profile cases in which men who were found to have had relationships with other men were also imprisoned. In the aftermath of his trials for “gross indecency” at the Old Bailey in 1895, when he was convicted and sentenced to two years of hard labour, Wilde was bankrupted, his plays removed from the West End stage and his name erased from all public discussion except as a codename for “unspeakables of the Oscar Wilde sort” – or gay men, as we would now call them. It is part of a series of milestones in Irish gay rights. I couldn’t help reflecting that this contemporary embracing of Wilde as a proud part of our literary heritage is a relatively recent development, and a very welcome one. Consider the changes in the laws, social conventions and public perceptions around sexuality. They lived, worked, loved and hated much as we do now, and private lives were made around a variety of acknowledged and unacknowledged relationships, creating as many kinds of families as we have today.īut, in one crucial sense, the past – specifically our own Irish past – is indeed a foreign country. Surely people are much the same now in this country as they were 100 years ago, in that foreign country called the past. LP Hartley's novel The Go-Between opens in a wonderfully arresting and thought-provoking way: "The past is a foreign country: they do things differently there."īut is our past really a foreign country? My experience of writing biography, literary history and historical fiction has brought me to the conclusion that the past may be a foreign country in terms of clothes, hairstyles, social structures and laws but that private lives were as various, contradictory and rewardingly complex as our own. ![]()
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