I've been reading a lot about Oscar Wilde lately, and his case struck me as instructive to any erotic minority, not just homosexuals. So allow me to briefly summarize it, in hopes of deriving some lessons from it.

Wilde was a public intellectual, poet, and celebrity of Victorian England. He was best known for his plays satirizing social standards of the time, as well as more controversial works like the play Salome and the novel The Picture of Dorian Gray, which he claimed were made purely for aesthetics in defense of their shocking (at the time) contents. He married and had children, but later discovered with the encouragement of his friend Robbie Ross that he preferred young men, which was at the time a terrible sin punishable by hard labor.

At first, he was discreet with his dalliances. But in 1891, he met an Oxford undergraduate named Lord Alfred Douglas, and fell head over heels in love. Lord Alfred was a spoiled aristocrat, and Wilde (now a successful and wealthy playwright) indulged his every desire. Lord Alfred, unfortunately, had daddy issues, because his father, a brute called the Marquess of Queensbury, severely disapproved of their relationship, and admonished Wilde with shouts and shaking fists several times at his home and elsewhere. When the Marquess left his card at Wilde's social club, calling him a "posing somdomite" [sic], Alfred encouraged Wilde to sue his father for libel, merely for spite. Sadly, the Marquess was now given encouragement to prove that Wilde was homosexual.

He did this by engaging private detectives to enter the world of male prostitution and find witnesses to Wilde's proclivities. Because Wilde had engaged with rentboys at Douglas's encouragement, and because Douglas had let some of Wilde's letters to him fall into the hands of blackmailers, it was quickly proved that Wilde had slept with men. Wilde dropped his lawsuit, but it was too late: he was bankrupted by paying for the Marquess's legal expenses, and he was soon tried for gross indecency. In his trial, he at first laid out an impassioned defense of his actions: of particular interest was his definition of a euphemism used by Douglas in a poem:

"The love that dare not speak its name" in this century is such a great affection of an elder for a younger man as there was between David and Jonathan, such as Plato made the very basis of his philosophy, and such as you find in the sonnets of Michelangelo and Shakespeare. It is that deep spiritual affection that is as pure as it is perfect. It dictates and pervades great works of art, like those of Shakespeare and Michelangelo, and those two letters of mine, such as they are. It is in this century misunderstood, so much misunderstood that it may be described as "the love that dare not speak its name," and on that account of it I am placed where I am now. It is beautiful, it is fine, it is the noblest form of affection. There is nothing unnatural about it. It is intellectual, and it repeatedly exists between an older and a younger man, when the older man has intellect, and the younger man has all the joy, hope and glamour of life before him. That it should be so, the world does not understand. The world mocks at it, and sometimes puts one in the pillory for it.

Wilde grew despondent and helpless, and was found guilty. He was sentenced to two years hard labor, and experience from which he never recovered. He died penniless in exile, in Paris, France.

Now what, as zoos, can we take from this? I would say that because the social environment we face now is similar, in some ways, to that faced by homosexuals in the Victorian Era, this has a number of lessons for us. The first, of course, is to practice discretion, since there are a fair number of people who would take any opportunity to disgrace and ruin those they personally dislike, and we shouldn't make their jobs easy. The second is not to antagonize our enemies directly, or to accuse them of lying when they say something which is both true and provable: you don't know what proof they have, or what they can find with the right help. The third and final lesson is to keep a clear head, even in matters of passion. Our lovers are generally going to be less intelligent and more impulsive than us, and although this is delightful, we should not defer to their interests in unwise ways. By all means, pamper them as you will, but help them to understand context when it comes to asking for sex. For the same reason, the fact that someone else's animal, who is sadly still their legal property, is flirting and making a pass at you does not negate your responsibility to refrain from fooling around with them in circumstances which will probably lead to being caught, tried, and imprisoned.

Does anyone else have similar historical lessons that might be useful? Or is this yet another overextension of the analogy between gay and zoo problems? I'd love to see your comments.