Was Oscar Wilde a child abuser?

I cannot quite understand why some people think of Oscar Wilde as a martyr. 

Certainly, what consenting adults do in bed should not be a crime. It's very difficult to understand why it ever was, though sodomy was a hanging offence in England until 1861 and decriminalising it between men in 1967 was unpopular with the general public. 

Lord Byron and his friends, homosexual or bisexual themselves, would visit convicted sodomites who awaited execution and jeer at them, according to something quoted in Byron and Greek Love: Homophobia in 19th-Century England by Louis Crompton Faber. I hope this is not true. This story made me suspect that there is a connection between homosexuality and sadism. Other evidence suggests that Byron visited the prisoners from compassion.

By the way, Muslims who formed a political party in England to make sodomy once more a capital offence were arrested by the police last year, which does not seem quite right in a democracy. They were simply proposing a change in the law. 

Oscar Wilde was a wonderful and very lovable man and one should not be self-righteous, especially about sexual sins, but nor should he be, nor would he have wanted to be, admired for his tragic flaw, which led him to be unfaithful to his wife and to sleep with young prostitutes. They became rent boys because of poverty and, as I imagine happens to all prostitutes except at the expensive end, had their young lives gravely damaged. 

Wilde became a Catholic on his deathbed, in articulo mortis.

One of Wilde's rent-boys was 16 and a homosexual act with a boy under 18 was a crime until 1998 in England. On the other hand, after homosexuality was legalised in England in 1967 I don't think men were prosecuted because of 16 year-olds. 

But there were references at Wilde's trial to a boy who looked 14. 

The age of the boys was irrelevant in 1895 and we don't know if the boy was under 16. The chambermaid at the Savoy told Lord Queensberry's solicitors that she had seen a boy asleep in Wilde's bed aged, as far as she could tell, about fourteen, but later, in court, she said she thought the boy could have been older, could have been sixteen, eighteen or even nineteen. Who knows where the truth lies?

Had he or another prostitute been under sixteen, in our day Wilde would have been tried and convicted. The whole scandal would have been comparable to the conviction of Rolf Harris and would have been as big a scandal now as in 1895.

British society, which is obsessed by paedophilia, still has very odd double standards. If you are a famous, long dead playwright sodomising minors is alright.


Wilde's punishment (hard labour) was terribly sad, but he brought the prosecution on himself by perjuring himself, when he sued the Marquess of Queensberry for defamation after Queensberry called Wilde a 'somdomite' (sic). 

Wilde was given bail and Arthur Balfour and others gave him the opportunity to flee the country, but Wilde chose to serve his sentence. 

I feel very sorry for Wilde, who really was in that overused phrase a tragic figure, but since this, cruel and unjust as it was, was the law, there is no real reason why a man who was well connected should get off while working class men were punished. To think otherwise is outrageous.

 

In his biography Ellmann says this well-known picture is of Oscar Wilde in drag as Salome. It is not in fact Wilde but a mannish looking Hungarian actress who looked a lot like him.

Paedophilia is a word I dislike as it was invented by the child abusers themselves, but we are now stuck with it. Was Oscar Wilde a paedophile? No. Interference with young teenagers is not paedophilia, which means interfering with pre-pubescent children, and should not be confused with it, but is equally damaging. 

Abuse is more than a matter of the age of the victim though - the age and sex of the adult is also relevant. I do not think a girl of nineteen sleeping with a boy of fifteen child abuse. I have known two beautiful women of thirty who slept with underage boys - that was not abuse either. When middle aged men sleep with thirteen year-olds or fourteen year-olds it is abuse, even if they are rock stars and the girls are willing.

I know an Englishwoman who grew up in an orphanage. She told me that all the boys in the orphanage were buggered by social workers, but none of the girls were touched. She added that she was herself pretty and therefore knew whereof she spoke. 

Some argue that it seems child molesters are disproportionately male homosexuals - for example among Catholic priests. I can only say that I have known several women who were interfered with as young teenagers, with tragic consequences - one who was raped by her father and brother. She poignantly told me that she forgave her brother because boys can't help what they do when they read magazines, but could not forgive her father.

I remember the Comte de Tilly, in his wonderful memoirs, said that to start ones life by being raped was a very poor school for virtue, by which he meant chastity or sexual restraint. It is much worse than that, of course, and child abuse is a crime which affects the victims' children and their children and grandchildren.