Death must be so beautiful. To lie in the soft brown earth, with the grasses waving above one’s head, and listen to silence. To have no yesterday, and no tomorrow. To forget time, to forgive life, to be at peace.
Oscar Wilde, The Canterville Ghost, 1887
Irish. Brilliant. Flamboyant. Dead at 46 in a cheap Paris hotel room, broke and broken.
Six foot three in Victorian England. You couldn’t miss him. Didn’t want to miss him. He walked into a room and owned it.
Playwright. Poet. Novelist. The Picture of Dorian Gray. The Importance of Being Earnest. Witty as hell. Sharp. Dangerous. Said things like “I can resist everything except temptation” and meant it.
Lived openly. Loved openly. Men, specifically, which in Victorian England was a crime. Not just socially unacceptable… an actual crime.
1895: the Marquess of Queensberry, father of Wilde’s lover Lord Alfred Douglas, publicly accuses him of being a sodomite. Wilde sues for libel. Massive mistake. The trial exposes everything. He’s arrested, tried, convicted of “gross indecency.”
Two years hard labor. Reading Gaol. They broke him. Physically, mentally, spiritually. The guy who wrote comedies about upper-class British society spent two years doing hard labor in prison for loving the wrong person.
Released in 1897. Went to Paris. Wrote The Ballad of Reading Gaol. Lived in poverty under an assumed name. Three years later, November 30th, 1900, he’s dying of meningitis in the Hôtel d’Alsace.
Legend says his last words were “Either that wallpaper goes, or I do.” Probably bullshit, but it sounds like him.
Dead at 46. Buried here. His tomb, designed by Jacob Epstein, a modernist sphinx, became covered in lipstick kisses from admirers. Thousands of them. They had to put up a glass barrier to stop people from destroying it with love.
Persecuted. Imprisoned. Exiled. Died in poverty. All for being himself.
Victorian England got its pound of flesh. The world lost a genius because he loved men.
Shot on infrared film in Père Lachaise Cemetery. Signed Limited Edition 11” x17” print of 10; stamped on verso. Professional black & white printing on Hahnemühle fibre-based Matt paper.