Issue Number 1011 | After the Fall | Advocate.com After the Fall  |  | Advocate.com

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After the Fall
Oscar Wilde’s only grandson, Merlin Holland, wants to shed light on the years that followed his grandfather’s infamous imprisonment.
A shorter version of this story appeared in The Advocate  July 15, 2008
After the Fall

Constance Lloyd, your grandmother, was quite conservative compared to your grandfather. Why do you think he married her?
Because he loved her. 

They did love each other romantically?
What is love but other than romantic? I don’t think he loved her money. He didn’t need a smoke screen at that stage. The law against relations between men in the 1885 Criminal Law Amendment hadn’t been passed by the time they got married. The fact that he finally realized that he was more attracted to men than he was to women and became an out-and-out homosexual from probably the early 1890s onward, nobody’s going to dispute. Just give him the benefit of having loved his wife when he married her. 

Though most people think of Oscar Wilde as homosexual, wouldn’t the correct term to define his sexual orientation be bisexual?
Bisexual implies that throughout his life he indulged in both one and the other. I would say that he was probably heterosexual up to a certain point in his life, and then from that moment onward he became homosexual. I think the term bisexual is probably wrong. I think he was initially heterosexual, and then realized that he’s been channeled down the wrong path too long. One sees, one almost feels, in what he writes and in his letters, that there is a sense of his relief at a certain point in his life that he has discovered his true sexuality. 

So you wouldn’t think that references to his romantic involvements with women, particularly when he was young, are just to veil his true identity?
I’m not whitewashing anything. People love things to be pigeonholed, put into compartments, black-and-white. He was. He wasn’t. History tells us that it has happened to many people in the same way, and I don’t think it makes him any the less interesting. He is the most wonderful gay icon, but he’s flawed. He’s flawed because he did have relationships with women in the beginning, and he obviously had a relationship with my grandmother—otherwise my father and my uncle wouldn’t have been born, and I wouldn’t be here. 

That’s a good point.
There are some people who don’t really like that. It’s uncomfortable. It’s not a perfect gay icon. He’s a man who discovered his true nature and then made no bones about it and indulged in his homosexuality completely, which is obviously what got him put into prison. If it was a black-and-white story of Oscar just being homosexual from the year one and concealing it and finally coming to terms with it, it would make a much less interesting story. 

Your grandfather spent two years in prison doing hard labor for “gross indecency.” Isn’t it true that his homosexual acts were never officially proved?
You’re talking about legal definitions here, which are outside my capabilities. What is proof of homosexuality? The fact is that a large proportion of the witnesses were known blackmailers and rent boys who were being paid far more than their loss of earnings, their expenses, to give evidence. How much do you believe their evidence? I don’t know. Oscar had indulged in homosexual practices over a period of years after the time of his trial. Whether or not he was guilty of exactly those things which he was accused of in the trial, I don’t know.

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