In commemoration of Pride Month, the Lillian Goldman Law Library invites you to view “The Trials of Oscar Wilde,” a new book display located in the Class of 1964 Reading Room on L3. Inspired by Joseph Bristow’s Oscar Wilde on Trial: The Criminal Proceedings from Arrest to Imprisonment (2022), the latest installment in the Yale Law Library Series in Legal History and Reference published by the Yale University Press, this display highlights books and legal materials that tell the story of Anglo-Irish poet and playwright Oscar Wilde’s 1895 criminal trial on charges of gross indecency for consensual homosexual acts, a crime for which he served two years of hard labor at Reading Gaol.
In addition to Bristow’s Oscar Wilde on Trial, this display includes Michael S. Foldy’s The Trials of Oscar Wilde: Deviance, Morality, and Late-Victorian Society (1997); Linda Stratmann’s The Marquess of Queensberry: Wilde’s Nemesis (2013); Ed Cohen’s Talk on the Wilde Side: Toward a Genealogy of a Discourse on Male Sexualities (1993); and Nicholas Frankel’s Oscar Wilde: The Unrepentant Years (2017); among others. This display also features the Criminal Law Amendment Act 1885, 48 & 49 Vict. c. 69, § 11 (Eng.) (the statute under which Wilde was convicted) and the Policing and Crime Act 2007, c. 3, § 164(3)(c) (U.K.) (the statute that pardoned Wilde more than 116 years after his death). Other titles found in this display, such as David Newhoff’s Who Invented Oscar Wilde?: The Photograph at the Center of Modern American Copyright (2020) and J. Robert Maguire’s Ceremonies of Bravery: Oscar Wilde, Carlos Blacker, and the Dreyfus Affairs (2013), explore Wilde’s role in legal disputes beyond his criminal trial.
While Oscar Wilde's criminal trial may seem far removed from our own time, Pride Month presents an important opportunity to reflect on the fact that the codes of more than a dozen states still contain sodomy laws that criminalize sexual relations between consenting adults, and that these statutes will become enforceable in the event that the United States Supreme Court overrules Lawrence v. Texas, 539 U.S. 558 (2003).