If on the one hand a ‘postal survey’ seems like the most archaic, manifestly absurd endgame to decades of queer activism, there is also something fitting about the fact that we have ended up here. Goodbye now my dear darling beautiful Maurice I send you all my love and millions of kisses all over your beautiful body. Bosie’s phrase ‘boy-wife,’ which glistens with a kind of clumsy literalism, recurs at the end of the letter, where he writes: ‘I feel that I want to cry. It is a reminder that, hidden away in the epistolary archives of our past, there has always been a language, however playful and improvised, for describing the pleasures of queer matrimony. ![]() Maurice Schwabe letter, via State Library of New South Wales Bosie’s letter, now housed at the State Library of New South Wales, is a strange and gorgeous artefact to read in the midst of Australia’s ‘postal survey’ on same-sex marriage. ![]() Schwabe, another of the young men in Oscar Wilde’s London set, had been exiled to Australia, sent here by his family in the hope of keeping him away from scandal. I really love you far more than any other boy in the world, & shall always be your loving boy-wife, or your ‘little bitch’ if you prefer it. My darling pretty boy, I do love you so much & miss you every minute as long as you were in England I didn’t mind so much not being with you, but now that you have gone right away, I miss you all day & all night. In March 1893, Lord Alfred ‘Bosie’ Douglas, most famous today as the lover of Oscar Wilde, composed a letter to his friend Maurice Schwabe in Sydney:
0 Comments
Leave a Reply. |
AuthorWrite something about yourself. No need to be fancy, just an overview. ArchivesCategories |