The love that dare not speak its name

Some convictions are written into law before they are written into language. The law arrives first, in clauses and section numbers, and the language that will one day undo it has to be improvised, under oath, by a man who knows he is already lost. The reply that survives is not the reply that wins the verdict. It is the reply that, fifty years later, the country reads back to itself and understands as the moment its conscience changed sides.

THE MAN IN THE DOCK

He is forty years old, Oscar Fingal O'Flahertie Wills Wilde, born at 21 Westland Row in Dublin on the sixteenth of October 1854, son of Sir William Wilde the eye-surgeon and antiquary and of Lady Jane, Speranza of the Young Ireland verses. He has been schooled at Portora Royal in Enniskillen, at Trinity College Dublin, and at Magdalen College Oxford. He is the husband of Constance Lloyd, the father of Cyril and Vyvyan, the playwright of Lady Windermere's Fan, A Woman of No Importance, An Ideal Husband, and The Importance of Being Earnest, which is still running at the St James's with his name struck from the playbills. He has been on remand since the sixth of April. His own libel prosecution of the Marquess of Queensberry, the father of Lord Alfred Douglas, collapsed on the fifth of that month, and the Crown moved against him within hours of the collapse. The statute under which he stands charged is section eleven of the Criminal Law Amendment Act of 1885, the Labouchère amendment, which makes any act of gross indecency between men, in public or in private, a misdemeanour carrying two years' hard labour at the maximum. The amendment is ten years old. It was tacked onto a bill drafted to raise the age of consent for girls; it passed at one in the morning, almost without debate. It has, since 1885, made the private affections of every man like him a matter of indictment.

THE COURT ON THE FOURTH DAY

It is twenty past two on the afternoon of Wednesday the thirtieth of April 1895, in Court Number One of the Central Criminal Court at the Old Bailey. The light through the high east windows is the heavy spring light of a London afternoon. He is in a black frock coat over a cream waistcoat, a green carnation in the buttonhole, the buttonhole of a man whose private signal has, in the past three weeks, become the public emblem of the case against him. The bench is Mr Justice Charles. The Crown is led by Charles Frederick Gill QC, who has had him on the stand under cross-examination for an hour and a half. Gill has, in the last fifteen minutes, been reading aloud from the December 1894 number of The Chameleon, the Oxford undergraduate magazine, and has now arrived at the closing line of Lord Alfred Douglas's poem Two Loves. He puts the line to the witness with the faint hesitation of a prosecutor who has rehearsed the question and is unsure whether he has it quite right. The gallery is full. The English-language press of three continents is at the rail. Gill says, the last line of this poem reads, "I am the love that dare not speak its name." Was that in your opinion proper or improper?

THE SECOND BEFORE THE REPLY

He has, at the rail of the dock, the space of perhaps two heartbeats in which to choose how to answer, and he knows what each of the two doors costs. The first door is the denial. Gill is fishing for a phrase he can put to the jury as a confession out of the witness's own mouth, and the denial is the move every solicitor in the room expects: the line is a literary line, the line is Bosie's not mine, the line means whatever the reader cares to bring to it. The denial keeps the legal ground he stands on and surrenders the moral ground entirely; it concedes that the affection the line names is the indecent thing the prosecutor says it is, and merely declines to own it. The second door is the affirmation. The affirmation will not save him from the verdict; the indictment is going through this trial or the next, the conviction is coming, the tariff is fixed by statute at two years' hard labour and George Wyndham has told him at breakfast that under the carceral conditions of Pentonville two years is the outside of what a man of his constitution can serve and come out alive. The affirmation places the line, and the affection it names, in the line of David and Jonathan, of Plato, of Michelangelo and Shakespeare; it places it in the historical record on the side the country, in fifty years, may at last be on. He thinks, briefly and without ornament, that the trial is the trial and the reply is the legacy, and he opens his mouth.

THE REPLY

He speaks for about ninety seconds, without notes, in the level voice of a man reading the lesson. The version preserved in Edward Marjoribanks's biography from the prosecutor Gill's own deposition runs: the love that dare not speak its name in this century is such a great affection of an elder for a younger man as there was between David and Jonathan, such as Plato made the very basis of his philosophy, and such as you find in the sonnets of Michelangelo and Shakespeare. It is that deep, spiritual affection that is as pure as it is perfect. It dictates and pervades great works of art like those of Shakespeare and Michelangelo, and those two letters of mine, such as they are. It is in this century misunderstood, so much misunderstood that it may be described as the love that dare not speak its name, and on account of it I am placed where I am now. It is beautiful, it is fine, it is the noblest form of affection. There is nothing unnatural about it. It is intellectual, and it repeatedly exists between an elder and a younger man, when the elder man has intellect, and the younger man has all the joy, hope and glamour of life before him. That it should be so the world does not understand. The world mocks at it and sometimes puts one in the pillory for it. The public gallery breaks into applause. Mr Justice Charles calls for order and threatens to clear the court. The witness sits down.

THE VERDICT

The trial continues for two further days and ends on the first of May in jury disagreement. The Crown retries him at once. The second trial opens on the twentieth of May before Mr Justice Wills, lasts six days, and concludes on the twenty-fifth of May 1895 with a guilty verdict on all counts under section eleven. The sentence is the statutory maximum: two years' hard labour. He is taken from the dock to Pentonville the same evening, the first six months in the oakum-shed and on the crank under the silent rule. He is transferred to Wandsworth, then on the twentieth of November to Reading Gaol, where Major James Nelson runs a more lenient regime and allows him books and paper. Constance Wilde petitions for separation and takes the boys, under the name Holland, to Switzerland. He never sees Cyril or Vyvyan again. Through the long winter and spring of 1897 he writes, in the cell at Reading, the manuscript that will be published in part as De Profundis, the letter to Lord Alfred Douglas that is half indictment and half absolution.

THE EXILE

He is released from Reading on the morning of the nineteenth of May 1897 and takes the night ferry from Newhaven to Dieppe. He never returns to England. He writes The Ballad of Reading Gaol in Berneval, signs it C.3.3. after his cell number, and publishes it in February 1898. He moves between Naples, Rome, and Paris in declining health and declining means. He dies of cerebral meningitis at the Hôtel d'Alsace, 13 rue des Beaux-Arts, Paris, on the thirtieth of November 1900, forty-six years old. He is buried first at Bagneux and removed in 1909 to Père Lachaise, where Jacob Epstein's flying angel is set above him in 1914.

THE RECORD

The reply on the love that dare not speak its name passed, in the form Gill deposed it, into the trial record, and from the trial record into the language of every campaign that came after it. The Wolfenden Report of 1957 recommended what the Labouchère amendment had forbidden. The Sexual Offences Act of 1967 decriminalised, in England and Wales, private acts between consenting men over twenty-one. The Policing and Crime Act 2017 extended a statutory pardon, posthumously, to every man convicted under section eleven, the clause known to the press as the Alan Turing law and on the statute book as a debt acknowledged at last to Wilde. The formal apology of the British government was issued on the thirty-first of January 2017, by letter from the Home Office to Merlin Holland, the playwright's grandson and literary executor. The country had taken one hundred and twenty-two years to write back. The reply itself, in Gill's transcription, is set in bronze on the wall of the Old Bailey lobby, a few yards from the door of Court Number One, where on a Wednesday afternoon in the heavy spring light a man in a black frock coat with a green carnation in the buttonhole answered a question he had not been asked, and lost the trial, and won the century.

Some convictions are written into law before they are written into language, and the language, when it is found, is found by the convicted. The verdict of the court fixes the tariff. The verdict of the country, when at last it is delivered, fixes the meaning. In the lobby of the Old Bailey, in the bronze beneath the line, the green carnation has long since been put away, but the sentence Gill wrote down is still legible to anyone who walks past it on the way to court.