Oscar Wilde Prefigured

Book excerpt: That there is a queeras opposed to merely homosexualhistory before Oscar Wilde will come as news to many in the sexuality studies field. Oscar Wilde Prefigured. It turns out that there is indeed a history of queerness, and that is originated in the early 18th century, coming to a head, as it were, by the end of the 19th. Dominic Janes draws on lots of new historical material, especially parodies and stereotypes in caricatures of sodomy and effeminacy. Front and center, then, are the 18th-century macaronies and mollies and men of feeling, the Regency dandies, and Victorian aesthetes. Visual display become a powerful historical tableau, generating a long history of queerness/homosexuality via caricatures of allegedly effeminate types. Images of effeminacy became a cultural field in which same-sex desire could be expressed. Wilde, then, was not the starting-point of public gay figures, but the endpoint. Wilde, in turn, is the pivot for connecting the Georgian figures to 20th-century stereotypes of camp (think Liberace), using images drawn from theater, fashion, and popular press to reveal new dimensions of identity politics and queer culture."