Originally Published March 14, 2022

Would you agree that Oscar Wilde would win an Oscar for living a wild life if he lived today? Even if you wouldn’t, we would agree that it’s right to do a wordplay for a playwright. He is arguably the most famous dramatist, poet, and author in the modern English-speaking world. Known for his opulent fashion and adoration for tulips, lilac, sunflowers, and lilies, he is not that different from your sassy gay friend—except that he was as famous as The Bank of England in his heyday. “Somehow or other I'll be famous,” Wilde said, “and if not famous, I'll be notorious.”

His outlandish aesthetic taste and distinctive personality later gained fruition for his career to ramp up giving lectures in England and the United States about aesthetics and the value of style. Prominent poets such as Longfellow, Doyle, and Whitman were acquainted with him. On a side note, Wilde was once a lover of Florence Balcombe who turned out to be the wife of Bram Stoker—the author of Dracula.

Aside from being fluent in English, German, French and having a working knowledge of Italian and Greek, Wilde had double first in the classical course and the highest mark in an exam at Oxford University. He also won a Berkeley Gold Medal for Greek and a Newdigate Prize in 1878. The Prince of Wales jokingly said, “I do not know Mr. Wilde: and not to know Mr. Wilde is not to be known.” No wonder why in the 1920s, Europeans looked up to him more than any English writer besides Shakespeare.

With a belief that women rule society, he was also the editor of the magazine called Women's World. In the Victorian Era, Homosexuality was illegal. A scandalous feud with the man who developed the rules of modern boxing, Marquess of Queensberry—led him to a 2-year sentence in hard labor. That’s 6 hours a day walking on a heavy treadmill. This was not the first time Wilde felt that all great ideas are dangerous and that all artists must pay when they tell the truth. He was laughed at and spat at with his works being altered for indecency before publication.

In 2017, the Government of the United Kingdom pleaded that it is hugely important that we pardon people convicted of historical sexual offenses who would be innocent of crime today. 117 years after his death, Oscar was proven not guilty. This is one of the reasons why we should unapologetically defy society. Despite his beguiling courage as a lion, he was still persecuted even if he hurt no one. In his final days, he confessed, “I have passed through every mood of suffering” and added, “I have lost the mainspring of life and art. I have pleasures and passions but the joy of life is gone.”

He might’ve died at the young age of 46, but his fight that started by exposing Victorian hypocrisies was never downtrodden. The truth is rarely pure and simple but facts shouldn't get in the way of a story. In the last decade of his life, Wilde wrote and published nearly all of his major work. He also wrote one of his most famous works whilst in prison using the pseudonym C. 3. 3.—the name of his cell.

Pioneering Individualism, Oscar believed that if you love yourself, at least, you have a lifelong fan. The greatest authors of the 20th century ruminate to his multidimensionality turning his works into 120-year plays. In the 1970s, he was recognized as a hero of the gay rights movement. His life was commemorated on a stained-glass window at Poets' Corner in Westminster Abbey in 1995. In 2014, he was one of the inaugural honorees in the Rainbow Honor Walk in San Francisco's Castro neighborhood noting LGBTQ people who have "made significant contributions in their fields". Moreover, his catalog is still in use in the National Museum of Ireland.

Wilde reverberates the pinnacle of creativity that may appear immoral, but no. It is only honest. He believed in beauty for beauty's sake. An ethos opposite of a one-trick pony. A needle in a haystack, a zeitgeist of tomorrow. Today, you can still stay in his cherubic death room by booking it at the L'Hotel in Paris.

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