[In the following excerpt, Hornby offers a detrimental estimation of The Judas Kiss.]

The plays and film about Oscar Wilde that have come out lately all stress his role as gay martyr. Since he got two years in a brutal Victorian prison merely for acts performed with consenting adults, also losing his home, career, income, and contact with his wife and children, Wilde would certainly qualify for that description. Nonetheless, the interesting thing is that Wilde did not think of himself as being homosexual. The best of the many books that have come out on Wilde in this decade, Alan Sinfield’s The Wilde Century, convincingly argues that the very concept of the existence of a special category of human beings with an innate attraction to their own sex was unknown until the 1860s, and not widely known until after Wilde’s trials in 1895. Of course, homosexual acts were identified, being prohibited both in the Bible and in law, but not homosexual people. In conversation with Frank Harris after the trials, Wilde blamed his homosexual behavior not on his inner nature, but on his wife’s pregnancies, which made her unappealing.

The best thing about the recent film Wilde, starring the superb Stephen Fry, is that it shows Wilde as a kind and loving husband and father, who adored his wife and children, and they him. (The worst thing is that it also shows Wilde as a voyeur, watching his friend and former lover Lord Alfred Douglas having anal intercourse with another man: there is no evidence that this tasteless event ever took place.) He did not marry as a cover, nor in the naive belief that marriage would convert him; in fact, it appears that he did not have sex with men until after he married. Pinning a clinical label on Wilde that he would not have used himself reduces a man known for his greatness of soul. Similarly, treating the homosexual undercurrents that can be found in all of Wilde’s major works as if they were dominant themes reduces a great writer to a producer of political tracts.

Now David Hare, a major political playwright, has weighed in with a play about Wilde entitled The Judas Kiss, which transferred from London to Broadway in the spring, featuring the charismatic Irish star Liam Neeson. The first act takes place in 1895, in Wilde’s London hotel room just after the first trial, which was against Douglas’ father for libel in calling Wilde a “somdomite” [sic]. I was intrigued that Hare would start a play about the most famous homosexual in history with a heterosexual couple (a porter and a chambermaid) indulging in oral sex on the bed, before Wilde and his party have arrived. In fact, the event proves dramatically gratuitous, except possibly to debunk the traditional view of the Victorians as sexless. The focus shifts to Wilde himself, who has only a few hours to flee the country, since evidence surfaced at the trial that Wilde had indeed had sex with men. Wilde’s old friend Robbie Ross tries desperately to get Wilde to leave before being arrested, but Wilde lingers, partly to appease Douglas (or “Bosie”), who loathes the idea of victory for his despised father, and partly from a martyr complex.

Act Two is set in Naples in 1897, after Wilde’s release from prison. Wilde’s health is shattered, and both he and Bosie are broke, though this does not prevent the latter from enjoying the sexual favors of a young fisherman. Wilde is depicted as self-pitying and resentful, against Bosie for not having provided financial support at the trial and now in their squalid lodgings, as well as against friends who are trying to “help” by changing him morally: “I am punished not for my sin but because I have refused to learn the lesson of the sin.” The couple separate bitterly, with the ailing Wilde having only a few years to live.

The play thus has a strong gay liberationist thrust. Wilde accepts himself for what he is, while those who do not are betrayers, Judases. Bosie betrays not only by his failure to provide support, but because he will not acknowledge his own homosexuality: “It is not in my nature to love men—only a phase.” These are strange words coming from the young man who introduced Wilde to homosexual brothels! The term used for homosexuality throughout the play is “invert,” which was then just coming into use by sexologists like Krafft-Ebing and Havelock Ellis; again, it is unlikely that the real-life Wilde ever used it, or even heard it. The idea was that a male homosexual was a woman in a man’s body (and a lesbian vice versa), but there is nothing in the play to suggest that Wilde is effeminate, especially as played by the strapping Neeson. All in all, The Judas Kiss might have been a good piece of social realism if it dealt with contemporary homosexuals, but it fails to do justice to the complexity of Victorian attitudes about sex, or indeed, to the intricacies of human sexuality generally.