My mother realized I was gay by discovering a florid essay on a male friend’s beauty written in the style of Walter Pater on my desk. Since my Ichideal and super-crush were both from the 19th century, my ties to the 21st became somewhat attenuated. Prescinding questions I practiced giving answers. I took a disintegrating copy of Theocritus from the darkened basement of the school library. Given that for his viva Wilde could translate the most recalcitrant passages of the New Testament by sight, sailing right through their tortured syntax and watery vocabulary, why shouldn’t I? I stayed up late reading Pindar and Homer. He favored the sunflower and the lily I chose the hyacinth. As an undergraduate Wilde wore a cello coat as a high school sophomore I swept along in floor-length camel. Instead of belting out songs from Cabaret in my bedroom, I learned ancient Greek and steeped myself in the iconography of the aesthetic movement. If photographs of Lord Alfred Douglas from the 1890s were my Rock Hudson pinups, Oscar Wilde was my Liza Minelli. Though my school was in Manhattan, I had read extensively in the literature of English public schools: Waugh, Rupert Brooke, John Addington Symonds, endless books of letters and minor biographies. By 2003 I was firmly convinced that “Bosie” Douglas was just as delightfully “boysie” as his mother’s nickname suggested. In a photograph reprinted in the 680-page biography of Oscar Wilde I pulled out of a pile at the Strand that year, Douglas looks exceptionally slight, sitting awkwardly with thin, unsmiling lips, high, fine cheekbones, narrow eyes, rounded shoulders and greasy, close-cropped hair parted to the left on a diagonal with four strands streaking his brow: exactly my type at the time. With a superficiality of which Wilde might have approved, I picked him for his cute boyfriend. I couldn’t see myself dancing into adulthood at Splash Bar I needed a different model. I wanted to know what everyone looked like. Scanning books of homoerotic photography like some analog Grindr, I combed the queer canon for plausible images of literary homosexuals.
Also, even though I was only 16 years old and he had been born to the 9th Marquess of Queensberry 133 years ago, I was in love with Wilde’s boyfriend Lord Alfred Douglas.
#Oscar wilde and alfred douglas skin#
The awkwardness of these facts, together with my large head, English names, darkening hair, and bookishly pale skin implied to my adolescent mind a certain correspondence. It was easy to imagine myself as Oscar Wilde because I lived in a crumbling outer-borough house and my parents were artists and he was from Ireland and his mother Speranza was a poet who collected folk tales. I removed myself from millennial New York. I borrowed his barely canonical books and found a politics of dandyish self-making that had nothing to do with the gyms, pre-code Hollywood divas, or subway urinals my few gay friends told me about. When I was a teenager, Oscar Wilde brought me back in queer time.
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