Wilson Collection: Oscar Wilde
(Albumen photograph of Oscar Wilde, 1882, and front-page caricature of him from New York’s The Daily Graphic newspaper, January 19, 1882)
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Oscar Wilde
In 1882, in Colorado, during his American tour, miners cheered Oscar Wilde as "a bully boy with no glass eye" and named a mineshaft after him.[1]
But, in London, in 1895, the Irish playwright was hauled to court to face English injustice. For acting on his same-sex desires he was put on trial. Amid what his attorney called a “torrent of prejudice,” the court sentenced Wilde to prison with two years hard labor for so-called “gross indecency.”[2][3] Friends urged Wilde to flee. But, later, he wrote, to “have altered my life would have been to have admitted that Uranian [homosexual] love is ignoble. I hold it to be noble—more noble than other forms.”[4]
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