We have glimpses of the troubled relationship from Wilde’s long letter De Profundis (‘from the depths’) written to Bosie from jail. Dorian Gray is both prophetic and key to the actual tragedy. In the London reality, a middle-aged man fell for a beautiful young man and tragedy followed. In the novel a middle-aged man falls for a beautiful young man and tragedy follows. The interplay of reality-meets-fiction is a subject of fascination in its own right. It was this book which drew Bosie to Wilde in the first place – he was obsessed with Dorian Gray. His one novel, The Picture of Dorian Gray, was overtly gay in its themes and used against him at his trials. His classic comic plays include The Importance of Being Ernest and Lady Windermere’s Fan. This was during Wilde’s most successful period as a playwright and novelist in the early 1890s. The relationship in its first phase was passionate and volatile punctuated by rows and separations. Rupert Everett’s fine movie The Happy Prince (2018) covers this last act of their relationship and is worth watching. It is not commonly known that after his release, Wilde – in self-exile in continental Europe – resumed his relationship with Bosie, at least for a short while. There is little doubt that Wilde’s public humiliation and time in jail contributed to his premature death at the age of 46. It is straightforward but requires a nuanced understanding to obtain the most useful results. My interest was whether such relationships serve a useful soul purpose for both parties – and I applied draconic astrology to this question. I recently gave a talk at the 2022 UK Astrological Association conference on Wilde/Bosie (and other troubled pairings) and I defined a ‘nightmare relationship’ simply as ‘a bond that starts in love or lust but then transitions into war.’ Wilde indulged and forgave while Bosie leeched and mocked. In terms of the tragic outcomes for both and in terms of their interpersonal battles. The Wilde/Bosie relationship was a nightmare on two levels. Gin-sozzled toothless crones danced in the street. After two trials for gross indecency and sodomy, Wilde was jailed for two years hard labour. Wilde’s defamation case threw up evidence that interested state prosecutors, and the rest is history. Nothing in Charles Dickens’ novels had ever shone a light on this demographic. This failed because the Marquess dug up evidence of Wilde’s use of renters. Later, on a club card, Queensberry wrote that Wilde was a ‘somdomite’ (he meant sodomite) and in consequence Wilde launched a foolish defamation suit. On one occasion Queensberry was stopped from pelting Wilde with vegetables at a London theatre. At some stage Wilde got drawn into the feud between Bosie and his grotesque father, the 9th Marquess of Queensberry, who regarded the two men’s suspected homosexual relationship as an abomination. Their love survived this disappointment as it eased into a platonic tension. Their interludes together featured ravishing conversations in London’s finest restaurants and bouts of illegal non-penetrative sex (probably intercrural, aka coitus interfemoris involving the joy of legs) in London’s finest hotels.īosie introduced his lover to the world of gay incensed brothels and their ‘renters’ (male sex workers), perhaps because Wilde was not physically to his taste. Two men – the famous, middle-aged playwright Oscar Wilde and the young, pretty aristocrat Lord Alfred Douglas nicknamed Bosie – had fallen in love. A scandal erupted that makes the lurid Depp/Heard court case of 2022 look like a village panto. In Britain’s 1890s, Queen Victoria’s long, dreary, po-faced reign of sexual hypocrisy experienced a reality wake-up call on a spectacular scale. Source: Gillman & Co, Public domain, via Wikimedia Commonsįinding the soul purposes of doomed or very troubled relationships through the horoscope. Oscar Wilde and Lord Alfred Douglas in 1893
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