3-057-538 - Heritage Art/Heritage Images

Portrait of Alfred Douglas, 1914. Lord Alfred Bruce Douglas (1870-1945) was an English poet and journalist, and a lover of Oscar Wilde who he met at Oxford University. Douglas's father, John Douglas, 9th Marquess of Queensberry, abhorred their relationship and set out to humiliate Wilde, publicly accusing him of homosexuality. Wilde sued Queensberry for criminal libel, but some intimate notes were found and Wilde was later imprisoned, and died in 1900. Douglas married a poet, Olive Custance, in 1902. On converting to Catholicism in 1911, Douglas repudiated homosexuality, and in a Catholic magazine, Plain English, expressed openly antisemitic views, but rejected the policies of Nazi Germany. He was jailed for libelling Winston Churchill over claims of World War I misconduct. Douglas wrote several books of verse, some in a homoerotic Uranian genre. The phrase "The love that dare not speak its name" appears in one (Two Loves), though it is widely misattributed to Wilde. From Douglas' "Oscar Wilde and Myself". [London, 1914].