Oscar Wilde in the dock
Wilde on trial: on 26 April 1895, the trial began that brought down the celebrated playwright.
On 26 April 1895, a trial began at London's Old Bailey that made literary history and queer history at the same time. In the dock sat Oscar Wilde, the celebrated playwright whose comedy "The Importance of Being Earnest" had premiered only a few weeks earlier. The charge was "gross indecency" with young men.
It had all started with a card. The Marquess of Queensberry, father of Wilde's lover Lord Alfred Douglas, left it at Wilde's club, accusing him of sodomy. Wilde sued him for libel. A fateful mistake. Queensberry's lawyer announced a series of young men as witnesses, Wilde withdrew the case and was arrested shortly afterwards at the Cadogan Hotel. The magistrate is said to have deliberately delayed the arrest warrant to allow him to flee to France. Wilde stayed.
The charge was based on an 1885 law that criminalised all sexual acts between men. Women were never affected. In the courtroom, Wilde had to explain what was meant by "the love that dare not speak its name", a line from a poem by Douglas. His answer later became famous.
The jury could not agree on a verdict. That was not an acquittal. The government now sent in the Solicitor General, and in the next trial Wilde was found guilty. The sentence: two years' hard labour, the maximum the law allowed. Prison ruined his health. After his release he went into exile and died a few years later in Paris.
Wilde became the symbol of a justice system that declared love a crime. After that, it took more than seventy years in England before sex between men was at least partially decriminalised.