Oscar Wilde, predator

Trinity College, Dublin

"although Wilde has long been acclaimed as a gay martyr and hero, he needs to be treated with care.
"we should be cautious about adopting a new double standard, and judging more leniently a writer who bought the bodies of penniless young boys in late-nineteenth-century Algiers or Naples than we would a businessman who buys the bodies of penniless young girls in early-twenty-first-century Bangkok or Manila. . . .
"One London reviewer of [Matthew] Surgis's book [Oscar:  a life] said that 'if these and all the others had been young women rather than young men, Wilde would today be seen not as an icon, but as a predator.'  But shouldn't we see him as a predator anyway?  We may be dismayed by Wilde's sufferings in prison, but a hundred years later he would likely have received a longer sentence. . . .
"the law to which [the Labouchere amendment] was appended, the 1885 Criminal Law Amendment Act, was in its main purpose wholly commendable. . . .  the act was intended to suppress that evil [(child prostitution in London)].  Wouldn't most of us admire that, and the aim of protecting young girls—or boys—then or now?
"however gaudy and extraordinary [Wilde's] life was, we honor him more by remembering not the man but his work. . . ."

     Geoffrey Wheatcroft, "'Feasting with panthers,'" The New York review of books 66, no. 5 (March 21, 2019), 41 (40-41).  If I understand him aright, Wheatcroft is implying that when, "At his first trial as a defendant, Wilde gave an impassioned spontaneous speech . . . about 'the "Love that dare not speak its name,"' he was surreptitiously enlisting the love of Jonathan for David in support of the love of men for—not men but—boys.