London · 1895
Oscar Wilde and “the love that dare not speak its name”
Dear reader,
In 1894, Oscar Wilde’s young lover, Lord Alfred Douglas, published a poem called Two Loves. It ended with a line that would become one of the most quoted in the history of queer life: “the love that dare not speak its name.”
A year later, in the spring of 1895, Wilde stood trial in London for “gross indecency”, and the prosecutor asked him what the phrase meant. Wilde answered without notes. He spoke of a great affection between an older and a younger man, the kind he said one finds between David and Jonathan, in the philosophy of Plato, in the sonnets of Michelangelo and Shakespeare. He called it beautiful and fine, and the noblest form of affection. Part of the gallery applauded.
He was convicted anyway, and sentenced to two years of hard labour. In prison he wrote a long letter to Douglas, later published as De Profundis. He died in Paris in 1900, at forty-six. More than a century later, in 2017, he was among the tens of thousands of men posthumously pardoned under British law.
Notice who Wilde named in his defence: Plato, Michelangelo, the oldest stories. He was standing in a long line of messengers, and he knew it. Every one of the letters in these Notes was, in its way, already in that courtroom.
The love that dared not speak its name has been speaking for three thousand years. Sometimes in poems, sometimes in marble, sometimes in a few lines on the back of a print. The point was never silence. The point was who was ready to listen.
With love, from the messenger,
Boté