Forbidden Words: Taboo and the Censoring of Language

154 Forbidden Words
eldest son Drumlanrig over homosexual relations with Lord Roseberry, and
he was infuriated at Bosie’s love affair with Wilde. When Queensbury left his
card at Wilde’s club (The Albemarle) addressed ‘To Oscar Wilde posing
Somdomite [sic]’, Wilde prosecuted him for libel. The action failed, and
instead Wilde was tried and convicted with fellow queer Alfred Taylor, under
the 1885 Act. Wilde was universally condemned before being convicted; the
press mocked him, his books were withdrawn from sale and his name was
removed from playbills and theatre programmes, even though The Importance
of Being Earnest was playing to full houses at the time. Justice Sir Alfred
Wills summed up:
That you, Taylor, kept a kind of male brothel it is impossible to doubt. And that you,
Wilde, have been the centre of a circle of extensive corruption of the most hideous
kind among young men, it is equally impossible to doubt. (Ellmann 1988: 448)
A sentence of two years hard labour all but killed Wilde. He was released in
May 1897 and died in exile in November 1900, at the age of forty-six. His
mortification is expressed in De Profundis and the Ballad of Reading Gaol.
The biography of Oscar Wilde is a tragic story, and many less celebrated
homosexual men have suffered almost as much.
Buggery is ‘penile–anal intercourse’. In Middle English, bugger originally
meant ‘heretic’, after a Bulgar sect (bugger ( bulgar). Buggery, colloquially
browning, is a heretical practice because, in the eyes of the church and state, it
is an abomination. The last man to be hanged for buggery in Britain died in
1835; but until the second half of the twentieth century, homosexuality was
very secretive. Like Oscar Wilde, many middle- and upper-class male homosexuals
had affairs with people of their own class, but also engaged in casual
encounters with rough trade. It was a way for the lower classes to earn a bob
or two and experience some of the benefits of a richer life. In 1967, homosexual
acts in private between consenting men were decriminalized in the
UK. Nonetheless, the numerous convictions for gross indecency (which
excludes buggery) have barely dropped off. Entrapment is common for gays
cruising for trade on streets and in cottages ‘public toilets’. 29 Men accused of
soliciting in bars and theatres may merely have been chatting someone up,
and introducing one gay person to another has been construed as procuring.
Section 28 of Local Government Act 1988 explicitly forbids promoting
homosexuality or presenting it as an established family relationship; this
has led to the banning of books, plays, school discussions and gay/lesbian
youth groups. 30 The 1988 Act also mentions spread of disease, apparently a
euphemism for concerns about the spread of HIV/AIDS. Themes of indecency,
corruption, buggery and a phobic threat to the sanctity of family
values – based on a heterosexual family – put queers under a cloud in the eyes
of government agents. Queers are thoughtlessly and wrongfully assumed to be