Who Was That Man?

Neil Bartlett is very well known in the LGBT community with such classics as "Ready To Catch Him if He Should Fall". So when I read reviews of this book I was interested. It is both a biography of Oscar Wilde with a comparison of his life's struggles with gay people today. The look back at Mr. Wilde's work seemed to be short-changed in favor of spending a LOT more time and energy on "today" gay community. In two sentences it could have been said that in Oscar's time he was convicted for being gay, and there was a period in our time where the same thing still held. Then it changed for those people living in the 1960's and beyond. But this had nothing to do with Oscar's trials and tribulations. There were really two books here and trying to meld them into one does not work.

Who was that Man ? is a meditation and celebration of the form and meaning of gay life in London in the 19th century and the 1970s and 80s. Neil Bartlett puts together a collage of thoughts, excerpts and pictures to find the common threads of behavior and the disparate ways of understanding. He analyzes Wilde's work and life to find its relevance and irrelevance to today; the ways in which Wilde's downfall and persecution cast its shadow; the not very hidden subtext of all of Wilde's work that Wilde desperately denied as he fought for his life. Bartlett has ransacked the British Museum Library and the Collected Works of Oscar Wilde to uncover and restore forgotten history. Read together with Richard Ellman's biography and Neil Mc Kenna's Secret Life of Oscar Wilde, this book illuminates and goes far to explain Wilde's intentionally fascinating life and works. But more than that it casts light on the whole swath of gay experience.

A gay Londoner of the 80s goes searching for his roots and finds Oscar Wilde, a complex figure early on in the history of the cultural and social construction of twentieth-century homosexuality. If you're interested in Wilde, this is a very good book to read along with Richard Ellman's more standard biography.