🏳️🌈TODAY’S PRIDE HERO🏳️🌈
Oscar Wilde (1864-1900)
Author
A colourful agent provocateur in Victorian society, his art, like his paradoxes, seeking to subvert as well as sparkle. He is best remembered for his plays, and his novel The Picture of Dorian Gray.
#LGBTVoices
Oscar Wilde (1864-1900)
Author
A colourful agent provocateur in Victorian society, his art, like his paradoxes, seeking to subvert as well as sparkle. He is best remembered for his plays, and his novel The Picture of Dorian Gray.
#LGBTVoices
Oscar Wilde was born at 21 Westland Row, Dublin, now home of the Oscar Wilde Centre, Trinity College. Wilde's mother was of Italian descent, and under the pseudonym "Speranza" wrote poetry for the revolutionary Young Irelanders in 1848 and was a lifelong Irish nationalist.
In mid-1891 Lionel Johnson introduced Wilde to Lord Alfred Douglas, an undergraduate at Oxford at the time. Known to his family and friends as "Bosie", he was a handsome and spoilt young man. An intimate friendship sprang up between Wilde and Douglas and by 1893 Wilde was.....
infatuated with Douglas and they consorted together regularly in a tempestuous affair. If Wilde was relatively indiscreet, even flamboyant, in the way he acted, Douglas was reckless. Wilde, earning up to £100 a week indulged Douglas's every whim: material, artistic or sexual.
At the height of his fame and success, while The Importance of Being Earnest (1895) was still being performed in London, Wilde had the Marquess of Queensberry prosecuted for criminal libel. The Marquess was the father of Wilde's lover, Lord Alfred Douglas.
The libel trial unearthed evidence that caused Wilde to drop his charges and led to his own arrest and trial for gross indecency with men. After two more trials he was convicted and sentenced to two years' hard labour, the maximum penalty, and was jailed from 1895 to 1897.
During his last year in prison, he wrote De Profundis (published posthumously in 1905), a long letter which discusses his spiritual journey through his trials, forming a dark counterpoint to his earlier philosophy of pleasure.
On his release, he left immediately for France, never to return to Ireland or Britain. There he wrote his last work, The Ballad of Reading Gaol (1898), a long poem commemorating the harsh rhythms of prison life. He died destitute in Paris at the age of 46.
Members of #LGBTVoices tweeted about a different Pride Hero every day throughout the month of June.
It was great learning so much about our past. We hope you enjoy reading about these resisters.
twitter.com/i/moments/1002…
It was great learning so much about our past. We hope you enjoy reading about these resisters.
twitter.com/i/moments/1002…
Correction: born 1854. (Typo).
@threadreaderapp unroll please!
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