DRAMATURGY NOTE:

To paraphrase Oscar Wilde, art often reveals the audience more than it reveals the artist. This is certainly true in the case of The Picture of Dorian Gray. The book was hugely controversial at its initial release, with some calling for Wilde’s imprisonment just for writing it. The book was heavily edited, both with and without Wilde’s consent, and a 500-word passage would be cut, which was only found in print again for the first time in 2011. It would later even be used as evidence against him in his trial for ‘gross indecency’ (a coded legal term for any sexually-charged intimacy between men). The reaction was clear: Dorian Gray was immoral. Perverted. Queer.  

Oscar Wilde released it during a time of heightened panic around homosexuality, following a recent broadening of laws against homosexuality and a string of scandals involving influential individuals being outed for engaging with other men. We find ourselves now in another lavender scare–a term coined initially for the mass, institutional moral panic around queerness in the 1940s. Trans people are being denied safety, privacy, and healthcare. Gay marriage is being threatened. Books are being banned. Institutions are taking calculated steps to erase queer people and our history from the public memory.  

In a political climate like this, what people take from challenging art is revealing. We see it in a certain major streaming service’s decision to make Basil and Dorian siblings in their adaptation of The Picture of Dorian Gray. We see it in the institutional censorship of art like Félix González-Torres’ Untitled (Portrait of Ross in L.A.). We see it in paranoia and outcry around drag. ‘Drag artists should be imprisoned! It’s immoral! Perverted! Queer.’ Sound familiar?  

So what do we do about this? We mourn. We protest. We dance. We make art. Art like Dorian, that centers the adversity and the joy of queerness, is necessary. We cannot be moralized out of the public eye, no matter how often they will try. Because queerness represents possibility and freedom. Because we have color and joy and community. When Oscar Wilde died, he was spurned by the society that had once praised his work, exiled from England and abandoned by most of his former peers. Robbie Ross, Wilde’s longtime lover, became his literary executor. He made sure Wilde received a proper burial. With help, he published a definitive collection of Wilde’s work and eventually transferred all rights and money earned from publication or performance of Wilde’s plays to his sons. Eight years after Wilde’s death, Ross commissioned the sculpture now found over Wilde’s tomb, in which his own ashes were later placed. Almost a century after his death, after years of derision and dismissal, Wilde’s works–The Picture of Dorian Gray most notably–would finally gain the appreciation they deserved. During the 1990s-2010s, visitors to Wilde’s grave would apply lipstick and kiss the limestone sculpture. So many people left lasting marks to their love of Wilde that the kisses began to eat away at the limestone, causing a barrier to be erected around the sculpture for its protection. Perhaps our love for Oscar Wilde tells us more about our own grief and hope than it tells us about him.

– Juno Hunter, Dramaturg