I knew that I had come face to face with some one whose mere personality…would absorb my whole nature…” (13) Basil tells Harry. A curious sensation of terror came over me. “When our eyes met, I felt that I was growing pale. Basil tells Harry the story of how he met Dorian, and it feels like it could be the start of a romance starring Leonardo DiCaprio. Basil never actually says “I’m in love with Dorian Gray,” but that doesn’t mean Wilde is shy about the nature of Basil and Dorian’s relationship. The first time we see homosexuality in the book is when Basil Howard, the painter, confesses to his friend Harry that the recent inspiration in his art is due to Basil’s relationship with a man named Dorian Gray. According to Professor Alexander Grinstein in his essay on Wilde’s demise, Wilde’s lawyers initially believed “that the only evidence against Wilde were some passages in The Portrait of Dorian Gray.” This seems to prove that, as Wilde says in Dorian Gray “It is not who is revealed by the painter it is rather the painter who, on the colored canvas, reveals himself.” It would seem that in Dorian Gray Oscar Wilde reveals his own experiences as a gay man. Many fans of LGBT literature will already know that Oscar Wilde was gay, and that he went to prison for two years after the Marquess of Queensbury (the father of Wilde’s lover) proved his claim that Wilde was gay was not criminal libel, but rather stating a fact. To put it more simply, Dorian Gray is different than Monsieur Venus because Dorian Gray is an inside job it was written by a gay author, for a gay audience. (I say same-sex instead of homosexual as it is hard to tell whether some characters may be gay or bisexual.) This is important because it may mean that Dorian Gray is a better indicator of how 19th century society viewed homosexuality than Monsieur Venus was of how 19th century society viewed transgender identities. Instead, Dorian Gray is just a book with same-sex romances throughout. The Picture of Dorian Gray, a novel by Oscar Wilde, is different. The story itself debates whether or not these characters had a chance of being happy. The whole book was a discussion of gender identity and what it means to be transgender: the characters wondered about and discussed the possibility that they might be a gender other than the one assigned to them at birth, and whether they could really become their true gender. With the last book I read, Monsieur Venus, looking for LGBT themes was easy.
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