It’s Okay to Like Good Art by Bad People
In 1895, the popular satirist and dandy Oscar Wilde was tried and sentenced to a prison term, with hard labor, for “gross indecency,” meaning sexual acts with men. The ordeal effectively ended his career, shortened his life, and made his name synonymous with depravity for at least a generation. The young Katherine Mansfield, struggling with her alarming attraction to women, wrote to a friend in 1909 that thinking about Wilde had led to “fits of madness” like those that drove him to “his ruin and his mental decay.”
More than a century later, Wilde is a canonical figure, the preeminent wit of Victorian literature and the beau ideal of the queer aesthetic—campy, ironic, a gender-boundary provocateur. To most of his contemporaries, Wilde wound up being a monster. To us, he’s an icon. But if he were held to today’s standards of appropriate sexual behavior, homosexual or heterosexual, he’d be a monster again. Wilde didn’t just sleep with men. He slept with “rent boys” (male prostitutes) and teenage boys picked up for brief trysts.
As far as I know, no one has demanded that high-school students stop putting on . This unconcern is a little odd. Other artists—Woody Allen, Kevin Spacey, Plácido Domingo—have come under moral scrutiny and been declared beyond the pale or at least seriously suspect. Why is Wilde exempt? Because he’s dead? That can’t entirely explain it. After all, the painter Paul Gauguin, who had sex with the teenage girls he used as models during his time in Tahiti, has recently been the object of a major critical reassessment. Is Wilde exempt because his droll quips are still quite devastating, and still hit their targets? Anyone taking on Wilde would have to be willing to come off as one of the sanctimonious buffoons he made fun of. But above all, I think, he’s spared because he represents—indeed, was a martyr to—one of the great causes of our time, which is
