Oscar Wilde and the Green Carnation

DID YOU KNOW?

The green carnation Trevor carries was associated with Oscar Wilde, symbolizing "the love that dare not speak its name."

Quoting from an article on Oscar Wilde as a figure of gay activism:

...[I]t is Wilde, more than any other historical, literary or artistic figure, who has become the standard-bearer of gay activism. Though he never wrote a single line which was openly supportive of homosexuality - though he lived a life of deceit to his wife, family and friends - though he was so upset by the mere suggestion that he posed as a homosexual, that he prosecuted Queensberry for a libel which nobody else ever read until Wilde himself chose to place it in the public domain - though, through his counsel, he characterised homosexual intimacy as "the gravest of all offences" - though, by his own sworn testimony, he vehemently (and falsely) denied both the inclinations and the acts for which he is now promoted as a champion - despite all of this, he has been canonised as patron saint in the gay Martyrology. Why ? Maybe because, at his first indecency trial, the prosecutor Charles Gill - lacking either the finesse of his leader (Carson) at the libel trial, or the aggression of his leader (Lockwood) at the second indecency trial - offered Wilde the opportunity to say something meaningful, rather than something witty, flippant or shallow. Gill's seemingly innocuous question - "What is 'the love that dare not speak its name'?" - produced this remarkable ex tempore response, possibly the profoundest thing Oscar Wilde ever uttered, and certainly the most sincere remark that passed his lips throughout three successive trials:

'The Love that dare not speak its name' in this century is such a great affection of an elder for a younger man as there was between David and Jonathan, such as Plato made the very basis of his philosophy, and such as you find in the sonnets of Michelangelo and Shakespeare. It is that deep, spiritual affection that is as pure as it is perfect. It dictates and pervades great works of art like those of Shakespeare and Michelangelo, and those two letters of mine, such as they are. It is in this century misunderstood, so much misunderstood that it may be described as the Love that dare not speak its name, and on account of it I am placed where I am now. It is beautiful, it is fine, it is the noblest form of affection. There is nothing unnatural about it. It is intellectual, and it repeatedly exists between an elder and a younger man, when the elder man has intellect, and the younger man has all the joy, hope and glamour of life before him. That it should be so, the world does not understand. The world mocks at it and sometimes puts one in the pillory for it.

A little sincerity is a dangerous thing, and a great deal of it is absolutely fatal.