It’s Only Fashion

James Davidson

  • The Wilde Century: Effeminacy, Oscar Wilde and the Queer Moment by Alan Sinfield
    Cassell, 216 pp, £10.99, July 1994, ISBN 0 304 32905 3
  • Cultural Politics: Queer Reading by Alan Sinfield
    Routledge, 105 pp, £25.00, November 1994, ISBN 0 415 10948 5
  • Hellenism and Homosexuality in Victorian Oxford by Linda Dowling
    Cornell, 173 pp, £21.50, June 1994, ISBN 0 8014 2960 9

The newspapers covering the trial in 1895 found it difficult to put the hideous words into print. Most hoped that those who needed to know would know enough already. Others assumed that a lacuna would be explicit of indecency: ‘“Oscar Wilde posing as —”’ was how the Marquess’s offending calling-card appeared in the Evening Standard. Lord Queensberry’s ‘Somdomite’ was displaying his characteristic ineffability by causing the tongue to stumble and producing gaps in public discourse.

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