Back to Blog
Was oscar wilde gay in later life7/16/2023 It seems we are in danger of creating a generation of potentially disconnected individuals, who rather than going to a gay bar, choose to spend the night in, waiting for a stranger to send them a message. The continual possibility of meeting someone different or better means that users don’t necessarily need to commit to connecting. Once downloaded, the app offers a digital network of people that can be loaded and reloaded with a simple swipe of the screen. Grindr offers instead a potentially unlimited amount of possible connections, but connections which are digital, not physical. It had something to do with the vibrancy and sensuality offered by being in a particular place, engaging sensually and physically with other people, reading them for signs of interest, right down to the smallest gesture. This excitement was not only to do with the illegal nature of the acts undertaken in secret. Wilde, at his parties and gatherings, taking risks and breaking the law, must have felt part of a group who came together to all feel something special and exciting. Downloading and using the app doesn’t automatically make you part of a network of people that are thinking and feeling intense emotional sensations. You might see someone you like on Grindr, but there is no promise they will respond to your message. It is the same type of connection that Wilde was interested in, but it doesn’t give people the intense, sensual involvement with another human being he was looking for. Grindr, now eight years old, allows people to make connections, if they like the look of someone’s body. Now those physical spaces are closing as members of the gay community go online to meet each other. At first they evolved into gay bars and clubs. Their philosophy that they should have their own dedicated spaces to meet still stands. Is this so different to how gay relationships are conducted now?Įvery part of gay culture today stems from the way that Wilde and the group of men he mixed with lived their lives. Wilde met and slept with many other men, continuing relationships for years, months, weeks, or maybe even only a night, before effectively dropping them and moving on. This was a time when same-sex desire and intercourse was illegal, seen as illicit and monstrous – an abhorrent illness which should be exercised from Christian culture. Before his imprisonment, Wilde was (I think almost uniquely) shockingly positive and active about his desire for other men. Oscar Wilde was born in Dublin in 1854 and died in Paris in 1900, a few years after his release from jail for “gross indecency” with other men. For Wilde, this meant he thought about whether it was aesthetically – not morally – right to sleep with someone. They argued that beauty and connections with beauty should be pursued even at the expense of conventional systems of morality, and what society considered right or wrong. Late-Victorian aesthetes proposed that beauty and sensation were the keys to an individual’s authentic experience of life. This belief came from his involvement in a movement called Aestheticism. He believed the most important goal in life was to experience emotion and sensuality, to have intense connections and embrace beauty. He adored being with crowds of immaculately dressed people in beautiful rooms. Wilde loved being part of this underground community. They were gatherings of forbidden passions and desires, shrouded in secrecy. In the late-Victorian period, Wilde’s membership of clandestine homoerotic networks of clubs and societies, was far more furtive. The openness about conducting such relationships would have amazed him.īut would Oscar Wilde have enjoyed the most famous gay dating app, Grindr, and the way it has contributed to gay culture? We know he would probably have welcomed the fact that gay men and women could easily meet new sexual partners. The idea that it would become normal to meet and flirt with an ever changing group of strangers, sending explicit pictures or a few cheeky sentences on a device you hold in your hand, would have amused the writer. Oscar Wilde and other men and women who, like him, desired same-sex relationships, had to resort to attending secret parties to meet potential partners. More than 100 years ago, of course, things were very different. In 2017, there is nothing shameful or illicit about using dating apps or digital tools to connect with someone else. It has never been so easy to find love, or sex, quickly.
0 Comments
Read More
Leave a Reply. |