Redressing Oscar: Performance and the Trials of Oscar Wilde

and two subsequent criminal trials where, his apparent double life exposed, he was found guilty of "unnameable" acts of indecency with younger menwhich was what the original libel alleged. To many an appalling but titillating spectacle, the Wilde trials also represent an important moment in the history of modern male homosexuality, providing for historians a marker to locate the emergence of a distinct homosexual identity. In fact, the trials are often implicitly credited as the event where the Homosexual emerged as a social subject.' That the homosexual in question was a brilliant and controversial society dramatist who satirically fetishized society, and who fostered his own popular fetishization, only added to the irony and insidiousness of his persona. However, Wilde was not an ideal gay figure. Writing in 19o8 in his apologetic case studies about contemporary homosexuals-or "Uranians," as he calls them-Xavier Mayne disputes the validity of the "exaggerated personal cult for Wilde" that he observed among English homosexuals: