Our correspondent discusses his campaign to have a Dublin landmark named after one of the city’s greatest sons – and the virulent hypocrisy that ensued

In January, Dublin City Council unanimously approved the motion “As a gesture to all of those who suffered as a result of clerical abuse, this council agrees to change the name of Archbishop Ryan Park, Merrion Square, and that this be done by inviting Dubliners to submit their ideas on an appropriate name for the park”.

I started the campaign to rename the park after Oscar Wilde, at http://url.ie/4qfr, (which has thousands of members now) and it’s received a fair bit of media attention. The idea was not mine, it’s been suggested before, by Rory O’Neill and others, but Ryan’s fall from grace gives Dubliners a window of opportunity for it to happen. But the idea has met with fierce opposition from some Catholic quarters.

Colum Kenny wrote in the Sunday Independent about the proposal: “(it) seems strange... calling it after someone who frequented London rent boys and secured youngsters for sex in North Africa (whatever Wilde’s undoubted literary merits) is not the best option.”

“We can’t name city park after Wilde who ‘hunted young boys’ for sex” screamed the headline in the Evening Herald: “Writer’s activities no different to church abuse says professor”. The professor in question, Joseph S. O’Leary, a Maynooth graduate who now writes and blogs on literature and theology, and teaches in a university in Tokyo, was reportedly “amazed” at the suggestion to name the park after the writer. “Ryan is accused of lacking vigilance in preventing the very behaviour that Wilde and Gide indulged in without scruple”, he said. “How does this make Ryan a villain and Wilde a hero?”

I suggested online that, at the heart of the objections to honouring Wilde, there seems to be a reluctance to observe the crucial distinction between consensual and non-consensual sex, and that, however much sex one has, it does not make one an abuser. In response, O’Leary wrote to me saying that, according to my logic, my disapproval of Archbishop Ryan should lead to the removal of Wilde’s statue from the park as well. “In both cases the good that the men did is overshadowed by the evil of which they are accused.” After indicating to him that I would rather not engage in private discussions on the matter, that I’d favour open debate, he then sent me the most astonishing message:

“Busy archbishops may have trouble keeping track of deviants in their clergy and handling complaints from people like Andrew Madden (whose statements in The Irish Times today suggest that he must have been very difficult to satisfy) but dizzy queens obsessed with and addicted to the most louche and lawless forms of sexual behaviour (thinking that they were liberators in advance of their time) are sure to find themselves in a far deeper quagmire than any archbishop.” He also noted that Wilde and Bosie were never prepared to “justify” that phase of their existence, so “they cannot be held up as NAMBLA-style martyrs of free love either”. He ended his message with an entreaty to “take warning from the from the experience of the Dublin clergy; any appearance of collusion with “paedophile” offenses is now exposed to grimmest media and police scrutiny!”

The value judgments in this correspondence from Professor O’Leary need to be deconstructed and understood. Not because I’d lose sleep if the park was eventually named after someone else, but because these attitudes are still widely prevalent in Irish society and are judgmental and destructive. I’ll deal with each one in reverse order:
His final warning to me is redundant. I have already paid the price for an “appearance of collusion with ‘paedophile offenses’” when I heavily criticized the film Fairytale of Kathmandu and the way it portrayed Cathal Ó Searcaigh as a child abuser. The vitriol aimed at me personally was quite disturbing, so I cannot imagine what he has had to endure. I know the nature of the attacks, and I know also that they are misguided.

There is no necessity to put “paedophile” in quotation marks. Generally, paedophilia is understood to refer to sexual attraction to prepubescent children, and there are no quotation marks necessary to apply that label to the priests who abused the children in their care. It is a crime and should remain so; indeed I believe that a convicted paedophile who has received treatment in prison, and then goes on to re-offend on his release, should be permanently deprived of his freedom. It is that bad a crime. The damage done can be devastating and long-lasting. At the root of the trauma of child sex abuse is a deep sense of loss of trust and safety in the world, and a lingering sense of impotence, the result of someone in authority having taken advantage of them. There are also the complex and often nightmarish effects of early sexualization on an adult survivor. But a particularly odious element to clerical abuse is the way in which the child is pickled in a toxic shame, because of the way Judeo-Christian religion works using internalized guilt as a method of mind-control. It can take a long time for a survivor of child sex abuse to shake off the belief that they are wicked to the core. When a child’s faith in goodness and god is destroyed, and when the institutions and society that allowed this psychological and spiritual carnage to take place turn a blind eye, it is quite remarkable how some survivors grow up to be such wonderful rounded people. And quite understandable if they find themselves full of rage and continue to suffer for their whole lives.

Wilde was not a paedophile. As to the ages of the young men he had sex with, it seems that most would have been over our current age of consent, while some were younger, and at least a few were fourteen. In a recent UK poll, nearly a quarter of all fourteen-year-olds have had a sexual experience, and one in three 15-year-olds is sexually active. (http://url.ie/4qip) I cannot imagine that it was any different in Victorian times, especially considering that the lads that Wilde found attractive tended to be working class, and independent, either holding down a job or in search of one. Wilde flattered, cajoled, persuaded, dazzled, bribed and paid his many young “panthers” for sex. But he did this in an era when all same-sex activity was condemned and criminal, and the notion of there being an age of consent for it was nonsensical. The power Wilde exercised was financial, social, sexual and charismatic. He held no other power over them; he was not charged with their care or pretending to be something he was not. However, as he found out to his cost, the young men he had sex with could turn the tables and blackmail him, and exploit the power they had over him.

Modern laws relating to the age of sexual majority are designed, naturally and sensibly enough, to protect children. I have written in this column, three years ago now, how, when an Irish 14-year-old went looking for sex on gaydar in 2006, I was disgusted with the older men who agreed to have sex with him, and praised the men who turned up to meet him and then sent him packing, when they could see for themselves how young he was. Despite media coverage at the time, there was no paedophile ring, because there is a big difference between men who seek pleasure in the company of sexually active young men, and those who seek to despoil bodies and souls that are not ready for such an experience. It is a fine line, I know, because each person matures at a different age. But here’s a question: should a quarter of all fourteen year olds face a criminal conviction, because they have had sex?

I would be very interested to know how the young Irishman in the gaydar scandal, now aged 18, is faring, and what he makes of his experiences. Around the time of the scandal, a number of young men told me of their own sexual experiences when they were younger. Some were delighted with the sex they had when fourteen or fifteen; some were sad that it had happened so young. Most were philosophical. But not one of them ever expressed anything remotely like the suffering that has now become all-too-familiar of those who were abused by paedophiles. It’s a very different phenomenon.

If Wilde and Bosie were alive today, they would, perhaps, be civil partners. They loved each other that much. But they would also be cruising together and having lots of sex, together or separately, with lots of men. They would, no doubt, attract the same tabloid attention that George Michael and his lover do. I imagine that two crucial things would be different, however, between the Victorian era and ours. (Homo)sexuality has changed so much in just a century. They probably wouldn’t have to pay their lovers, and they would probably stick to the law, because they wouldn’t need to break it.

If a modern Wilde had sex with a fourteen-year-old now, I’d be disgusted, because we now have the rights that he never had, to live a life without shame or self-hatred or the threat of the ruination that, sadly, he had to endure over a hundred years ago.

We have no way of truly knowing how Wilde treated his lovers in intimate circumstances, but rather than make them feel cheap or dirty, he seems to have put them on pedestals, and showered them with gifts. There is no evidence that Wilde ever brutalised any of his lovers, or went against their will, or shamed them, or abused their trust. We can never truly know whether the motivation for youths blackmailing him came from their hurt feelings, or if it was an inevitable result of Wilde being rich and having sex with people who needed to survive and pay the rent. But Wilde worshipped them - or, to be perhaps more accurately, Wilde worshipped cock. Bosie was a rakish “top” whose hunt for passive youths certainly led him to test the ethical boundaries of any caring human being. I suspect I’d have disliked him intensely. But Wilde was sexually versatile (in modern terms, we take that to read: “bottom”) and therefore his sexual pleasure derived not from subjugation or possession of a youth’s body, but of inviting young, virile and testosterone-charged men to subjugate or possess him.

The emotional repercussions of a promiscuous lifestyle are still as complex as they were then, but at least now it is out of the reach of a cruel and unjust law.

Mentioning NAMBLA in any discussion about Wilde muddies the waters disgracefully. The North American Man/Boy Love Association is a society that props up the wicked delusion held by recidivist paedophiles that children, when they seek affection from an adult, are “asking for it”. In my eyes, these views are on a par with those expressed in the pro-anorexia websites, where young anorexics are told how to get as thin as possible. Disinformation rules, horrifying destruction is revered or, at best, ignored, with a malevolent self-serving sophistry that is sick and disturbing.