Oscar Wilde as Queer Theologian

Abstract

The third section of Same-Sex Desire in Victorian Religious Culture concerns writers of the late nineteenth century. In this concluding portion, I examine the place of homoeroticism in relation to the religious life in quite a different context than in the prior two parts. Almost all of the writers considered here are people whose homosexual acts could hardly be denied. Chapter 5 concerns Wilde, whose homosexual activity led to his trial and imprisonment. Likewise, the authors analysed in the following chapter, John Gray and Marc-Andre Raffalovich, were clearly part of the homoerotic subculture of the 1880s and 1890s. Their homosexuality as an identity cannot be debated. Michael Field, whose poetic and sexual sapphism has been well established, is the subject of Chapter 7. Hence the writers considered in Part 3 of this book force the notion of ‘queer religious space’ into a new territory. Most of the authors in Parts 1 and 2 are figures whose same-sex genital activity would seriously be doubted. Long-standing friendships in Newman might have been possible, and advocacy of such intimate — but celibate — unions was surely present in Dalgairns. Religious devotion certainly was the most important force — greater than romantic love of human friends — in the lives of Christina Rossetti and Gerard Manley Hopkins. In all of these writers, I have suggested at most a devotional homoerotic, a queer relationship to the Divine that expressed same-sex desire in the love of God, with perhaps circumstantial evidence for same-sex desire for other mortals.