Albumen photograph of Oscar Wilde, 1882

In 1882, in Colorado, during his American tour, miners cheered Oscar Wilde as "a bully boy with no glass eye" and named a mineshaft after him.[1]

But, in London, in 1895, the Irish playwright was hauled into court to face English injustice. For acting on his same-sex desires he was put on trial. Amid what his attorney called a “torrent of prejudice,” the court sentenced Wilde to prison with two years hard labor for so-called “gross indecency.”[2][3] Friends urged Wilde to flee. Later, he wrote, to “have altered my life would have been to have admitted that Uranian [homosexual] love is ignoble. I hold it to be noble—more noble than other forms.”[4]

Sources

1. Richard Ellmann, Oscar Wilde (New York: Knopf, 1988), 204.

2. Ellmann, 476.

3. Neil McKenna, The Secret Life of Oscar Wilde (New York: Basic, 2005), 389, 397.

4. McKenna, 396.