Oscar Wilde, Banksy, and the Reprise of Reading Gaol

In the midst of on-and-off lockdowns, there is so much uncertainty about when and if we will be able to see our loved-ones. And so, this February, many of us I’m sure, will be gearing up to make this year’s Valentine’s day special. However, it is also important to remember that those struck by Cupid’s arrow have, in their time and ours, been persecuted for expressing their love. That’s why it is so fitting that February is also LGBT history month, in 2022 celebrating ‘politics in art’. It is a time to contemplate the exclusion that many have and continue to go through for expressing queer sexuality or gender identity.

Perhaps the most famous examples of the historical struggle of queer folk is the two years Oscar Wilde spent incarcerated for ‘gross indecency’. Wilde was most dehumanised at his stay in Reading Gaol where he wrote “each man will kill the thing they love” in its eponymous ballad. For Wilde and many others, art has always been an outlet to express personal suffering, and recently, the street-artist Banksy has undertaken preserving the memory of Wilde’s own suffering through art.

The anonymous defacer pledged in December to sell a piece of graffiti that he had painted on the now-derelict gaol. The art is to be sold with the purpose of fundraising for Reading Gaol’s restoration and ultimate redevelopment into an artistic space and ‘LGBT cultural heritage site’. The piece shows a convict escaping from a window, clutching tied together sheets of prose from a typewriter, mimicking bedsheets.

This February I will be thinking about Banksy’s stencil, and how it shows the escapism that art such as Wilde’s can provide. The very special thing about art is its ability to bring beauty and meaning to the darkest moments. As Wilde once wrote, “we are all in the gutter, but some of us are looking at the stars”. That is the great positivity that art can grant us. And so, although we have much to improve upon, places such as Reading Gaol can become portals into the darker gutters of the past, where we can briefly appreciate the stars of beyond today’s twilight.