His humorously decadent stories…

• The Picture of Dorian Gray
• Lady Windermere’s Fan
• The Importance of Being Earnest.

Or, perhaps, even from the movie based on his life, Wilde starring Stephen Fry and Jude Law.

Wilde was, what we call today, a Professional Personality; a wittier Kardashian, a fashionably outrageous Lady Gaga, a finer Stephen Fry. The world was his oyster until he had the audacity to fall in love.

In the 1890s, Wilde was tried for “gross indecency” which was a law that made it a crime for two people of the same gender to have sex. He engaged in a loving, long-term partnership with the Lord Alfred “Boise” Douglas. It was Douglas’ angry father who set off a chain of events which led to legal actions, imprisonments, and the public disgrace of many high status London gentlemen.

Over the course of three highly publicized trials, the love between Wilde and his partner Lord Douglas was turned into a lascivious circus of blame, recriminations, sex scandals, and more.

In one of the most famous exchanges of the trials, Prosecutor Charles Gill asked Wilde about the meaning of a line in a poem which Wilde quoted in his letters to Douglas: “What is ‘the love that dare not speak its name’?” Wilde replied, “‘The love that dare not speak its name’ in this century is such a great affection of an elder for a younger man as there was between David and Jonathan, such as Plato made the very basis of his philosophy, and such as you find in the sonnets of Michelangelo and Shakespeare.”

Eventually, Wilde was convicted and imprisoned. When released, he was a broken man—physically, financially, and spiritually. He died soon after at the age of 46. His final words are  legendary: “This wallpaper and I are fighting a duel to the death. Either it goes or I do.”

The present-day play, Gross Indecency: The Three Trials of Oscar Wilde, combines texts from original source material, like trial transcripts and love letters, to tell the story of the people, the scandal, and what came afterwards. The original production ran Off-Broadway in 1997 and highlighted the growing movement for gay rights. When marriage equality was achieved in 2015, the play was referenced as a cultural touchstone that helped the public contextualize the historic importance of the Supreme Court’s decision.

With the newest iteration of the Supreme Court choosing to reevaluate many previous decisions, like Roe v. Wade, there is a renewed conversation around the rights of same sex couples to marry.

Even here in Indiana, there are debates about the rights of Queer people. For example, the State has failed to pass anti-bullying laws and policies covering LGBTQIA+ students and has also failed to ban the “panic defense” (a defense which allows perpetrators to plea for lesser sentences because they were scared by the identity of the victim).

And so, the lessons of the Three Trials continue to be debated and reconsidered. The IU production brings a new relevance to The Three Trials of Oscar Wilde by juxtaposing traditional Victorian setting with the sights, sounds, and conversations of today. It takes you on an entertaining ride through one of the funniest minds in history while also asking you complex questions about our society today.

Page content compiled by Professor Jaqueline Goldfinger, Gross Indecency dramaturg