The First Gay Irishman? Ireland and the Wilde Trials

To be sure, sexuality is not a fixed entity, either in an individual or in a culture. Nonetheless, a post-modern idea of Wilde (and everything else) as endlessly elusive can obscure the real determinants in cultural change. Twentieth-century uses of Wilde's name, certainly, have depended on simplifications, mistaken apprehensions and downright falsehoods. However, the point is not Wilde's true identity but the identity that the trials foisted on him. It was not who he was but who we have made him to be. I want to suggest that there is unfinished business here; that Ireland, as much as England and the United States, might claim the name of Wilde as a gay icon.

Alan Sinfield²

Like Sinfield, my interest is with some "unfinished business" in Irish cultural studies, an examination of how Oscar Wilde's name and his crime provoked public discourse around homosexuality in modern Irish culture. If perceptions of sexual identity evolve partly through public events, how did Irish media and literary sources configure Wilde's homosexuality during the 1895 trials and after? As Sinfield suggests, the question is not simply about who Wilde actually was, either sexually or racially, but of what we make him stand for. In this essay I chart the revealing ways in which Wilde's homosexuality became a contested discourse within twentieth-century Ireland, a discourse that became intertwined with Irish cultural nationalism.

Michel Foucault has argued in The History of Sexuality (1978) that only by the nineteenth century did the homosexual become a type or a personage with a past and a case history. In Ireland, as in other societies toward the end of the nineteenth century, modern ideas of sexual identity began to take shape and draw meaning from visible mainstream cultural events. In analyzing how the idea of the homosexual was formed, Foucault studied the history of the conditions shaping institutional and discursive notions of homosexuality in Europe. I contend that the study of twentieth-century Irish homosexuality formulation must begin with an account of Wilde's visible presence as sexual other, through the analysis of the strategies of normalization used to police his unnameable sin within Irish media and literary accounts. In any perception of homosexuality in modern Ireland, Oscar Wilde, famous for his writings and notorious for his sexuality, links Irishness and "queerness."

Much has been written on British media treatments of the Wilde trials, but little or nothing on the Irish sources. We can, however, observe the formulation of the notion of homosexuality in modern Ireland within the island's media coverage of the Wilde trials and in subsequent Irish accounts of his life and his sexuality. In this essay, I argue that the local media coverage of the trials drew out an ambivalent and often contradictory contestation around Wilde's sexual sin from within Irish cultural discourse. The Irish newspapers struck a markedly differing note from that of their British counterparts, and subsequent writers from Ireland, notably George Bernard Shaw, William Butler Yeats, James Joyce, Brendan Behan, and others "nationalized" Wilde (a word I borrow from Margot Norris) by claiming him as a figure of affirming dissidence.³ In this national appropriation of Wilde, these later artists could reconfigure his unsettling sexual sin by seeing it as the causal factor within an episode of anti-imperialist defiance. My argument is that Wilde came to be seen by subsequent Irish authors as a disruptive figure of anti-colonial resistance and that this reconstruction mitigated his aberrant homosexuality for those writers and indeed for their society. Even the powerfully homophobic culture that twentieth-century Ireland was to develop located strategies by which the unspeakable Oscar could be reclaimed as Wilde, the Irish rebel.

Ambiguities abound in Wilde's life and work, not least around his own representations of himself as a sexual being. Nevertheless the useful and incontestable fact remains that, in May 1895, an Irishman named himself publicly as a lover of other men, although qualifying this declaration of homosexual identity by claiming that his love for other men had never been expressed...