For sale: UK jail that held Oscar Wilde for gay sex


Reuters | London | Updated: 03-10-2019 21:14 IST | Created: 03-10-2019 20:17 IST
For sale: UK jail that held Oscar Wilde for gay sex
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Reading Prison - a forbidding Victorian jail turned LGBT landmark - is for sale, Britain said on Thursday, offloading a deserted site best known for housing playwright Oscar Wilde for the "gross indecency" of gay sex.

Campaigners had hoped to turn the austere brick prison, which lies just west of London, into an arts center to preserve a site of gay pilgrimage and honor Wilde's literary legacy. "It's a hugely significant space," said Joseph Galliano, CEO and co-founder of Queer Britain, the national LGBTQ+ museum.

"We are losing heritage and cultural spaces to commercial redevelopment which will never be recovered." Reading jail housed the Irish poet and author - whose homoerotic writing shocked Victorian Britain - for most of the two-year sentence he served for gross indecency.

During the sensational trial he was questioned over his relationship with Lord Alfred Douglas, a poet who penned the immortal line: "I am the love that dare not speak its name". The prison closed in 2014 but has since hosted arts events, including a reading of his work by actors and musicians such as Patti Smith and Rupert Everett.

The prison became a magnet for Britain's LGBT community, just as New York's Stonewall Inn draws crowds commemorating its key role in the U.S. fight for gay rights. HISTORY FOR SALE

It is the latest prison to be sold by the government as it seeks to turn state assets into money to bolster its budget. Britain's Justice Ministry said it would invest money from the sale back in the prison system and would consider all bids.

"We will always seek the best outcome for the taxpayer," the ministry said in a statement. Paul Johnson, Professor of Sociology at the University of York, said that Britain had a bad record of marking its historic persecution of gay people and that the prison was important to many people around the world.

"It does crystallise what hundreds of thousands of people suffered, it isn't just about one person - its about what so many people suffered over time," he said. In July, Britain announced plans to honour Alan Turing, a code breaker who helped the Allies win World War Two but who committed suicide after being convicted in 1952 for gay sex.

VICTORIAN VALUES Wilde was imprisoned in 1895, months after his play 'The Importance of Being Earnest' was first performed in London, and his case threw a spotlight on Britain's draconian laws on homosexuality.

He wrote 'The Ballad of Reading Gaol', inspired by the hanging of an inmate, a poem that made it one of the most famous prisons in the world, according to the Oscar Wilde Society. "In Reading gaol by Reading town, There is a pit of shame, And in it lies a wretched man, Eaten by teeth of flame," the poem reads.

England and Wales repealed anti-homosexuality legislation more than 70 years later, in 1967. (Editing by Lyndsay Griffiths. Please credit the Thomson Reuters Foundation, the charitable arm of Thomson Reuters, that covers humanitarian news, women's and LGBT+ rights, human trafficking, property rights, and climate change. Visit http://news.trust.org)

Also Read: UPDATE 5-EU warns Britain heading for a no-deal Brexit

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