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Coda The Turn The Wilde trials, which unfolded in the spring of 1895, were gripping public theater. Henry James was among the captivated. Wilde and the scene surrounding him struck James, as he would aver in a letter to Edmund Gosse, as hideously, atrociously dramatic & really interesting—so far as one can say that of a thing of which the interest is qualified by such a sickening horribility . It is the squalid gratuitousness of it all—of the mere exposure—that blurs the spectacle. But the fall—from nearly 20 years of a really unique kind of “brilliant” conspicuity . . . to that sordid prison-cell & this gulf of obscenity over which the ghoulish public hangs & gloats—it is beyond any utterance of irony or any pang of compassion! He was never in the smallest degree interesting to me—but this hideous human history has made him so—in a manner.1 It is easy enough to read James’s wrought fascination as the mark of that rich ambivalence with which his work, particularly his later work, is so replete: an ambivalence, as we have seen, about possibilities for sexual naming, identification, and legibility that the Wilde trials, with their lurid interplay of “exposure” and occlusion, explicitness and indirection, could only exacerbate.2 Following the trail of those ambivalences, over several chapters I have been especially interested in describing the trials and their aftermath as the occasion, for many in their penumbra, for a special kind of loss. My claim has been that one legacy of the transformations in sexual ordering the Wilde trials can be seen to exemplify—I have been calling that transformation, with tendentious insistence, the advent of “modern ” sexuality—is an estrangement, a steady making-strange, of ways of imagining sex otherwise: outside of solidifying taxonomies of hetero and Coda 191 homo, and in configurations unauthorized by those identities and their codings of the body’s capacities for pleasure, perturbation, and attachment more generally. Borrowing from the literature of the period, with its often errant and extravagant imaginings, and borrowing, too, from contemporary queer scholars like Christopher Castiglia and Molly McGarry, I have been interested in assembling something like an archive of uncreated futures, of possibilities that would not, in the end, eventuate into being.3 And yet it would surely be a mistake to imagine that the Wilde trials , whatever the horror of their outcome for Wilde himself or the fear that newly prosecutorial regard for erotically nonnormative people would incite, issued only in constraint, diminution, and loss. We need only think again of a man like J. A. Symonds, Whitman’s decades-long interlocutor , to be reminded of the affordances that might be found, at least by some, in the very modes and styles of sexual imagining that to others offered so little traction or promise. (Symonds is precisely the sort of figure that Foucault has in mind in his famous passage, in volume one of The History of Sexuality, on homosexuality and “reverse” discourse.4 ) It is from the seeds of German sexology, after all, that Symonds grows not only a defense of a homosexuality he is unafraid to name but a wider ratification , an ampler claim for dignity, that would itself flower over the next century into much broader and more radical claims. And while depictions of twentieth-century queer history as a steady movement from dispersal to mutual legibility, from invisibility to articulacy, from solitude to politics , may indeed be partial and in many pressing respects misbegotten, still its basic premise—that a newly emerging homosexuality offered new possibilities for queer life—is hardly without merit.5 The becoming-legible of homosexual identity, whatever its confinements and however unequally distributed its benefits, plainly made the world more rather than less habitable for some, richer in possibility, wider, freer. Still, I would want to remark again, with a nod back to Hawthorne, that not every kind of freedom is a cure for terror. So by way of conclusion, and in hopes of describing a bit more precisely something of what the transformations wrought in and around the trials might have felt like on the ground, I want to return to the figure with whom this study began and who has served, throughout, as a kind of touchstone: Henry James. For James, as we have seen, it is the inarticulability, the shaming namelessness, of same-sex desire that, at least at one early moment in his career, is the cause of great and disfiguring pain—such...

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