LORD ALFRED DOUGLAS
(Lord Alfred Bruce Douglas)
Lord Alfred Bruce Douglas was a British poet and journalist, best known as the lover of Oscar Wilde. While studying at Oxford, he edited an undergraduate journal, The Spirit Lamp, which carried a homoerotic subtext, and met Wilde, with whom he started a close but stormy relationship. Douglas' father, the Marquess of Queensberry, disapproved strongly of the affair and set out to humiliate Wilde, publicly accusing him of homosexuality. Wilde sued him for criminal libel, but some of his intimate notes were discovered and he was subsequently imprisoned. On his release, Wilde briefly lived with Douglas in Naples, but they had separated by the time Wilde died in 1900. Douglas married Olive Custance in 1902. They had a son, Raymond. Converting to Roman Catholicism in 1911, he repudiated Wilde's homosexuality and in a High-Catholic magazine, Plain English, expressed views that were openly anti-Semitic, though he rejected the policies of Nazi Germany. He was also jailed for libelling Winston Churchill over claims of World War I misconduct. Douglas wrote several books of verse, some classified in the homoerotic Uranian genre. The phrase "The love that dare not speak its name" came from one of them (Two Loves), though it is widely misattributed to Wilde.
