(And what about those friends, whose arch conversations on art and manners, if not gay, are certainly high camp?) The character of Dorian may well have been as far “out” as any literary figure could be at the time, making Wilde’s novel the gayest to date.Ī slightly longer version of the following first appeared in the November-December 2005 issue. Then there are all those vague references to corruption and sensualism and unspecified nighttime activities that eventually incur the condemnation of his erstwhile friends. The way that his beauty is openly admired by Basil and Lord Harry in chapter one, the voluptuous adjectives by which it is described, Dorian’s longing to remain forever young-our gaydar is never long at rest.
OSCAR WILDE GAY BOOOK SERIES
Thus Dorian’s affairs are all with women, starting with the actress Sibyl Vane, for whom he professes his undying love-before it promptly dies and on he moves to a series of affairs of increasingly short duration with decreasingly respectable women.Īnd yet, there’s something about Dorian.
Wilde is not to blame, of course (and notwithstanding that a few of the most suggestive sentences were excised by his publisher): late Victorian society simply did not allow for a more explicit exploration of the love whose name could not be spoken, much less elevated to a central role in a novel. The novel’s very coyness on the matter of same-sex desire, its not daring to name “the love,” is what prevents it from being a shoo-in as the first gay novel in English. This obfuscation is what makes Dorian Gray’s place in the gay canon so open to debate. While Hattersley doesn’t directly address the question of The Picture of Dorian Gray’s primacy as a gay novel, he does venture that it was, “while cautious, implicitly homosexual”-at least for cognoscenti who knew what to look for. THE AUTHOR of this piece passed away in 2011, having contributed many articles to this publication over the years, including this feature-length review of a book with the somewhat salacious title, The Secret Life of Oscar Wilde (2005), by Neil McKenna.
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