Oscar Wilde’s go to to San Francisco despatched town right into a bitter, clamoring frenzy

San Francisco is now a city passionately divided on many issues, from naming schools to whether or not the Ferris wheel in Golden Gate Park should keep spinning. In 1882, the arrival of a 28-year-old Irish dandy was the main cause of furore in the city.

More than a century before gay marriage was legalized in the city, Oscar Wilde visited lavender pants and sealskin cuffs and wowed the city with his biting wit and ivory cane, though many tried to tear him down from the moment his Italian brogues kicked off the ferry.

The year-long tour of America – supposedly a lecture tour on aesthetics and interior design – got off to a memorable start when he told New York customs agents that he had “nothing to explain but his genius.” This Kanye-type selfishness was a gift to newspaper people and arguably gave birth to the concept of modern celebrity.

The Irish poet and playwright has been described as the most sardonic joke in the history of the English language. And when Wilde made it from New York to Chicago, Detroit, Minnesota, and eventually California, the San Franciscans prepared for the arrival of the one-man show.

Oscar Wilde in New York City, 1882.

Thousands gathered at Platt’s Hall (now destroyed) on Montgomery Street to hear Wilde’s thoughts on the artistic world, though most of them just wanted to take a look at the flamboyant poet.

Everyone in San Francisco apparently had an opinion, as the San Francisco Chronicle noted: “The city is divided into two camps, those who thought Wilde was a committed speaker and an original thinker, and those who thought he was the most pretentious fraud. ever committed to a groaning audience. “

During his stay in the city, Wilde stayed at the Palace Hotel, the largest hotel in California at the time. At night he drank everyone under the table (absinthe is his drink of choice) at the Bohemian Club – the secret brotherhood also known for ceremonial owl sacrifices and endless conspiracy theories. “I have never seen so many well-dressed, well-fed, business-like-looking Bohemians in my life,” he later wrote of society.

Between lectures, he took the ferry from San Francisco to Oakland and back, and was met by thundering crowds everywhere who worshiped women and bitter newspaper people.

Most of the criticism against Wilde came from reporters and their barely hidden homophobia.

As writer Bill Lipsky wrote in the San Francisco Bay Times, ancient American archetypes gave way to a more urban “tender ideal” of masculinity in the age of the strong peasant and the sturdy pioneer. But Wilde’s aesthetic values ​​- a love of art, beauty, taste, and pleasure – were still a little too much for American men and promoted a “dreaded femininity”.

In a whirlwind of scathing comments, reporters excelled in mocking him gleefully. Stories from this period show that educated men viewed his new style with disdain while women adored him. The City of San Francisco Museum writes that long tight pants, tall stiff collars, and full mustaches were commonplace in San Francisco by the 1880s, and Wilde’s radical short breeches, long silk stockings, and shoulder-length haircut were apparently an affront to American society.

While sexuality could not be discussed in inches in the 1880s, reporters intentionally chose their words to convey that Wilde was “unmanly” and “unnatural”. A Newark newspaper described his eyebrows as “the type desired by women,” while the New York Times described him as a “mom’s boy” with “affected femininity.”

Even the twist of one of the greatest speakers in the English language has been ridiculed in the press. Reporters were appalled by wild expressions such as “too absolute”, “just too too” and “do you long?”

This cartoon, published during his visit to the San Francisco Wasp, needs some explanation but is not flattering to the Irish poet.

“The Modern Messiah,” The San Francisco Wasp, March 31, 1882.

The San Francisco Wasp

The devastating work of art, which was published in the now defunct satirical weekly magazine during his visit, is titled “The Modern Messiah” and features many well-known members of the SF Society who attended his first lecture in town.

The sunflowers are the symbol of Wilde’s aesthetic movement. The sack of money alludes to the $ 5,000 fee he received for his American tour, and the padlock depicts the theater manager, Charles E. Locke, who is in charge of booking the poet’s lectures in town.

Amid this gruesome flurry of slander, Wilde may have protested his own famous words: “There is only one thing in the world worse than being talked about and it’s not talked about.”

On April 8, 1882, Wilde left San Francisco after a two-week visit and would never return. After Wilde’s life had seen great success and recognition over the next ten years for the publication of his masterpieces “The Picture of Dorian Gray” and “The Importance of Seriousness”, Wilde’s life would take many cruel turns and end in imprisonment and poverty.

In 1895, he was sentenced to two years in Reading Prison for gross indecency towards men, a story that made a front-page cover in San Francisco.

He would never live freely in England again and spent his final years in poverty in France before dying of meningitis at the age of 46.
Oscar Wilde’s visit to San Francisco – a city he described as “the most beautiful setting in a city except Naples” – shaped the author.

As he later wrote in “The Picture of Dorian Gray”, “It’s a strange thing, but anyone who disappears is supposed to be seen in San Francisco. It has to be a delightful city with all the attractions of the next world.”

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