Is Jacko Our Wilde Man?

Although Michael Jackson's molestation trial is a form of mass entertainment, it is also a social drama. Lurid in the extreme, the trial is not, however, about a violent crime, and it lacks the emotional polarization of other recent sensational trials. There is little hatred for the alleged villain and scant pity for the alleged victim. Few commentators are eager to see Jackson severely punished or his accuser richly rewarded. General interest in the verdict is keen, but most Americans seem ambivalent about Jackson's guilt or innocence.

But accusations of homosexual pedophilia have struck a deep chord of moral outrage. In this and other respects, Jackson's trial has some significant parallels with that of Oscar Wilde in April and May 1895. Wilde too was a celebrity, as a writer and as a performer. His play, "The Importance of Being Earnest," had opened in the West End to rave reviews, and he had made a much-publicized lecture tour in the United States as an effeminate aesthete and an attention-seeking dandy. Like Jackson, Wilde was seemingly brought down by self-destructive acts. When the eccentric Marquis of Queensbury (known as the "mad Marquis"), outraged by Wilde's romantic attentions and lavish gifts to his son, Bosie, accused Wilde of homosexual behavior, Wilde recklessly sued him for libel, swearing to his attorney that the accusations were "absolutely false and groundless." Queensbury's lawyers brought forth as witnesses young working-class men with whom Wilde had had sexual relations, and Wilde's attorney persuaded him to drop the libel charge. Wilde immediately became subject to arrest and was charged with violating a British law criminalizing male homosexuality.

Instead of fleeing to Paris, as friends advised, Wilde took the stand and defended his relationship with Bosie as pure and innocent. The "love that dare not speak its name," he declared, was sexless, "that deep spiritual affection that is as pure as it is perfect.... It is beautiful, it is fine, it is the noblest form of affection. There is nothing unnatural about it."

Some spectators in the Old Bailey courtroom applauded Wilde's eloquence. But the sordid testimony of boy prostitutes who had blackmailed him, and of housekeepers who had changed the sheets in the hotels where they stayed, undermined his high platonic stance. Simply the fact that he had befriended street youths was considered evidence against him. As the prosecutor said in his summation, "He is a man of culture and literary taste, and his associates ought to have been his equals, not the illiterate boys whom you have heard in the witness box."