high_revs t1_iuivkh0 wrote
oscar wilde had a wife??
MrsMaiselsBrisket t1_iuiyeu8 wrote
Yup, and two sons. His wife changed their surname to Holland to avoid scandal. One of the sons would later go on to die in WWI. Wilde has a living grandchild, Merlin Holland, and at least one great-grandchild.
Porrick t1_iuj2dsp wrote
I wonder if he was stoically "doing his duty" or if he was actually bi
DrSeuss19 t1_iuj794k wrote
I think he was bi leaning towards men. He definitely appreciated the beauty of women.
godisanelectricolive t1_iujksv7 wrote
He seemed to have had a fairly late-in-life sexual awakening about men. His earlier writings showed more interest in women and courted women such as the actress Lillie Langtry but by his thirties his interest seemed to have shifted solidly to men.
When they first met he wrote passionate love poems to his wife and they had children together. However, they stopped having sex after the birth of their second child which was around the same he first started having affairs with men.
It's impossible to for certain what his predilections were. Perhaps he was pretending earlier and stopped later on. Perhaps his attraction to some women was real but he also had a preference for men, that he was on the gayer side of the Kinsey scale. But once he started experimenting with male sexual partners he seemed to really like it.
high_revs t1_iuj79x5 wrote
But he was gay right?
MrsMaiselsBrisket t1_iujkj9x wrote
He definitely had relationships with men, one of which resulted in a huge scandal. I don’t know enough about him to tell you if he was exclusively gay, bi, etc. Not to mention sexuality was looked at from a different perspective at the time.
StrLord_Who t1_iuk6fo2 wrote
Yes he and his wife were madly in love with a very active sex life for many years. They were the Zelda and Fitzgerald of England. He was actually quite a ladies man when he was younger. There was one particular young man he became obsessed with later in life, Lord Alfred Douglas, (who was the one who introduced him to male prostitutes, etc.) but there is not a lot of evidence Wilde considered himself what we think of as "gay." The opposite, actually, even with all his activity in that arena. The full story, and what happened with "Bosie" who betrayed him is so much more interesting than "Oscar Wilde gay," I'm not quite sure how it got reduced to that. We have the transcript of his trial, it's absolutely fascinating. It's published as a book, I recommend it. He was just as devastatingly witty off the cuff as he is on the page.
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