Would Oscar Wilde have survived in the #MeToo era?

Apart from the fact that one fled to Paris and the other failed to do so, what is the difference between the criminal cases of Roman Polanski and Oscar Wilde?

In 1978, anticipating his imprisonment after pleading guilty to unlawful sex with 13-year-old Samantha Gailey (now Geimer), the 44-year-old Polanski left California for France, never to return. In 1895, waiting to be taken into custody in advance of his trial, the 40-year-old Wilde, for reasons that remain unclear, ignored suggestions that he should leave London immediately and take the boat to freedom.

The worlds of 1970s California and 1890s England seem almost equally remote from us at this stage. But you could argue that the difference between the two individuals is that one wasn’t punished and the other very famously was, or that one is irritatingly alive while the other has achieved the status of sainted martyr. Prison, bankruptcy, illness and death followed Wilde’s conviction. Polanski, by contrast, managed to navigate the permissive (some might say slimy) moral ambiguities of the post-counter culture era, and continues to make films to this day, albeit with the minor inconvenience of having to stay outside the reach of American law enforcement. In 2003 he was presented in absentia with the Academy Award for best director for The Pianist. It’s only in the last 10 or 15 years, in the wake of the various scandals revealed by the #MeToo movement, that serious attempts have been made to call him to account. He’s no longer a member of the Academy, although he gets to keep his award.

Wilde’s case is complicated by the fact that the offences of which he was convicted are no longer regarded as crimes at all, and that the conviction itself is now seen as a milestone in the long struggle for equal rights for all, regardless of sexual orientation.

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But the awkward facts remain. Wilde was found to have had sexual encounters with a range of much younger men, as well as teenagers below the age of 18, nearly all of them from far less affluent backgrounds than his. Some were sex workers, which Richard Ellmann seemed to regard as a mitigating factor in his 1987 biography. Others, including 16-year-old Alphonse Conway and 17-year-old Walter Grainger, were not (although it’s debatable how relevant that is). Along with his lover, Lord Alfred Douglas, Wilde met Conway in the seaside town of Worthing before taking him to bed. Grainger, who was Douglas’s servant, testified that Wilde “placed his penis between my legs and satisfied himself”.

If cancel culture is the intersection between celebrity and social censoriousness, then Wilde was the original of the species. It is undeniable that he was the victim of a cruel and stupid legal system, but is what he did with Alphonse Conway, Walter Grainger and others really so different from what Polanski did with Samantha Geimer? Both men took advantage of positions of power and privilege to sexually exploit minors.

From surviving the Holocaust to the loss of his wife, Sharon Tate, at the hands of the Manson gang and on to his 1970s conviction, Polanski has never lacked a dark side, in his life or his films. We can reasonably assume there won’t be any statues of him going up anywhere in the near future. But Wilde’s secular canonisation has had a distorting effect on public understanding of the intriguing complexities of his life and work. All his love of paradox, double meaning and contradiction gets ironed out in service of a simpler hero myth in which people are either good or bad.

Without an inquisition at its disposal to keep heretics at bay, modern institutions will surely find it impossible to get around the fact that all human beings are imperfect

This new, two-dimensional Wilde serves as a symbolic representation of the long struggle for human rights for same-sex-attracted people. After all, he was imprisoned not for (as we would put it now) the sexual abuse of children but for the “crime” of sodomy and gross indecency. He is fixed in the contemporary public imagination as a victim of Victorian hypocrisy and prudishness, and as a harbinger of the liberation struggle to come. Which is why tens of thousands of Pride marchers will make their way today through the streets of Dublin and past Danny Osborne’s statue of him in Merrion Square.

Trinity College Dublin discovered recently how tricky it can be to find icons for our age, when plans for a bust of Simone de Beauvoir in its Old Library foundered over allegations the writer and philosopher had sex with young students whom she had shared as lovers with Jean-Paul Sartre. Without an inquisition at its disposal to keep heretics at bay, modern institutions will surely find it impossible to get around the fact that all human beings are imperfect and many do terrible things. Best to leave the saints to the churches.