"SOME are born gay, some achieve gayness and others have gayness thrust upon them," quipped broadcaster John Farrell at the Oscar Wilde Autumn School on Thursday.
Introducing his lecture, "Feasting with Panthers: Oscar Wilde and the Gay Identity", he gave a passionate kiss to his young friend Paul in front of the audience, saying: "Now, we've got that out of the way."
The five day school, which has been taking place in the Strand Hotel, Bray, Co Wicklow, ends today with lectures from Robert Nicholson, Declan Kiberd and Gerry Dukes, who will compare Wilde with Joyce, Synge and Beckett, respectively.
In the 1890s, Wilde's style was aped by "effeminate young men in New York", said Farrell, "and since the 1920s he had been seen as martyr and icon by various gay and lesbian movements".
At the time of Wilde's trial he was seen as a "monster" and "corrupter of youth" by the heterosexual community in England. He was not rehabilitated by the literary establishment until the 1920s, and then only as a declawed tiger, a safe heterosexual notion of gayness".
Instead of remaining a funny Irishman in London society, Wilde became a "revolutionary character who threatened the conventional understanding of class, age and gender".
He did this through his plays and through his friendships with prostitute boys who were "living on the edge". Homosexual activity was widespread among the English upper classes at the time.
But Wilde was "indiscreet". He crossed class boundaries, therefore "he had to be destroyed".
Dr Muriel McCarthy, keeper of Marsh's Library, gave a lecture on Saturday about Mary Travers a young woman who attempted to destroy the reputation of Wilde's parents by spreading scurrilous rumours. She claimed she had been chloroformed and seduced by Sir William Wilde, then a highly respected eye surgeon.
The subsequent notorious libel case in 1864 (which was covered at length in The Irish Times) gave rise to the bawdy Dublin rhyme: An eminent oculist lives in the Square/His skill is unrivalled, his talent is rare,/And if you will listen I'll certainly try/To tell how he opened Miss Travers's eye.
Mary Travers's father, Robert Travers, Professor of Medical Jurisprudence at TCD, was passed over for the job of keeper of Marsh's Library in 1872 because of the scandal his daughter created, Dr McCarthy suggested. For him, the libel case was a "shattering" experience.
Sir William Wilde's unique medical research on Swift was the subject of Bruce Arnold's Saturday lecture. The hotly disputed question of who Swift's father was could be answered by comparing drawings of Swift's skull (contained in Sir William's book on Swift) with descriptions of the exhumed skull of John Temple.
In a riveting lecture, full of adroit investigative comparisons, Arnold concluded that Sir John Temple, Keeper of the Rolls in Ireland, was most likely to have been Swift's father (and not Sir William Temple, Sir John's son, which is sometimes claimed).