Power Shagging: Oscar and Walt's Bedtime Boogie--by Reb MacRath

 

Walt Whitman never had a chance. Older artists seldom do when slathered with praise by ambitious wannabes eager to trade sex for favors. 

Oscar Wilde sailed from London on 12/14/1881 and arrived in New York on 01/02/1882 at a high point in his career, not only famous but moneyed. In the next ten months he would cross and recross the U.S. to deliver 150 lectures heard by tens of thousands of Americans. All of this was according to plan. But so far one big piece hadn't fallen into place: he had to meet the old poet whose uncensored Leaves of Grass was known only in England to those who'd scored bootlegged copies. (The British 'comely edition' deleted half the contents of the American 1867 edition.) Upon receipt of an invitation to meet, Wilde raced from a Philadelphia lecture to his hero's place in Camden, New Jersey on 01/18/1882.

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But before we proceed to the good part, lend an ear to the almighty Harriet Staff:

'Because mine is an evil and a petty mind, suitable more to wallowing in the sordid sexual goings-on of literary giants than in reading their work, I take every opportunity I can to inform people who may not have known that Walt Whitman and Oscar Wilde almost certainly had sex in 1882.

'You are either the kind of person to whom this matters a great deal, or the kind of person to whom it matters not at all. To the latter I say: yours is the narrow road and the straight, and I extend to you a hearty and fulsome handshake, as well as my sincerest wishes for your continued good health. To the former I say: Want to hear about the time Walt Whitman and Oscar Wilde (probably) hooked up??

'Of course you do. You’re my kind of person. Why do we ever talk about anything else? Let’s never do that again.'

--Harriet Staff, Poetry Foundation

https://www.poetryfoundation.org/harriet-books/2013/09/a-wilde-and-whitman-one-night-stand

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                    So here we are then on 01/18/1882...

Time: ten years before Whitman's death and thirteen years before the first of three trials that ruined Wilde. Today neither man has thoughts of any such things in his mind. At last, Oscar's meeting the hero whose endorsement he needs for his North American tour. And Whitman hopes to build support for an uncensored British edition of his life's work, Leaves of Grass. The time couldn't be better for the birth of Power Shagging.

Whitman had initially declined to meet the notorious British Aesthete derided by the American press as maidenly, girlish, womanish, epicene...and a 'Charlotte Ann', American slang for an effeminate Sodomite. But Wilde's glowing praise of him in the Philadelphia Press on 1/17, and the persistence of Joseph Marshall Stoddart, Philadelphia publisher, helped change Whitman's mind. And now Wilde arrived exactly as expected--or hoped:

Patent leather shoes...smoking cap...great outercoat down to his feet...Byronic shirt with sky-blue cravat...long and flowing hair...and, of course, that silver tongue.

"Sir," he said to the white-bearded, partly stroke-paralyzed poet, "I have come to you as to one with whom I have been acquainted almost from the cradle."

It's not hard to imagine Walt coo, "Do come in."

Now, the invitation had been for a meeting of just 60-90 minutes. Stoddart, though invited in, declined and offered to return in an hour. Instead, Whitman suggested that he come back in two or, better yet, three hours. 

The curtains have been drawn here. The meeting had no witnesses. No planted mics or cameras. But the veiled remarks the pair let slip do tell us more than enough.

According to Whitman, they polished off a bottle of elderberry wine before retiring to his den on the third floor where they could be on 'thee and thou terms'. Oscar put his hand on Walt's knee and seemed like a 'great big, splendid boy.' Wilde told the publisher only that upstairs they'd talked without end of the beauty of young boys and the insipid love of women. But Wilde later boasted that 'I have the kiss of Walt Whitman still on my lips'.

Thee-ing and thou-ing, indeed.

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Today such secrecy can't help but seem a bit silly when the love that dared not speak its name once now can't keep its mouth shut. But the word homosexual was coined only in 1890 by a German and was not common usage in English until the turn of the century. Sodomy was the big deal of the day with a penalty increased to death in 1828, then reduced in 1861 to penal servitude for life. 

In the course of his three trials Wilde denied vehemently that he was a Sodomite. To his way of thinking, he was no such thing since he was a married man who, very well, practiced oral and thigh sex with attractive young men on occasion. Well, all right, if you insist, far more than simply now and then. Recently, 52 pages of never-published statements from 32 witnesses were found, testimonies that would have lowered Kevin Spacey's jaw.

Even so, the court could only convict him, in the third trial, of gross indecency. As it turned out, however, the two-year sentence was more than sufficient to break him. He died a bankrupt pariah in Paris 11/30/1900 and received sixth-class burial outside the city at Bagneux. *

                                                        

In contrast, when Walt Whitman contracted a terminal illness, the NY Times kept a literary vigil for months till his death on 3/26/1892. 

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Power shagging nowadays is as commonplace as it is open, particularly in the performing arts. And no one thinks anything of a gorgeous young singer hooking up with an older tycoon. But Wilde was lucky to have missed our present cancel culture and the speed of scandal sheets. For a man who took enormous pride in never minding his tongue, there were risks for even the most clever quip...and unguarded moments. Today he'd have been branded a pedophile and predator for his words to the fifteen-year-old daughter of a friend: 

"Aimee! Aimee! If only you were a boy, how I would adore you!"

Whatever else they had in common, Whitman parted company here with the genius who'd once laid a hand on his knee.

Yet not even death could cheat Oscar of one final deathbed quip: 'My wallpaper and I are fighting a duel to the death. One or the other of us must go.'

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*A friend purchased a burial plot for Wilde at Pere Lachaise, where Moliere, Balzac, and Delacroix were buried with room awaiting in good time Edith Piaf and Jim Morrison. Wilde's remains were transferred there on 7/19/1909. Five years later, the now famous tomb was completed with a commissioned statue of a naked flying angel. (For those who enjoy irony, the architect's last name was Epstein.) Soon the angel was missing its privates, the tomb covered with lipstick kisses and loving graffiti. Reportedly, hundreds of thousands of worshiping fans visit the tomb every year.

Highly recommended for those who wish to dig deeper:

The Secret Life of Oscar Wilde by Neil McKenna, Basic Books, 2005

The Trials of Oscar Wilde, the 1960 film with Peter Finch and James Mason, free on YouTube

This is my report. 

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