The British Government sells the Reading jail where Oscar Wilde served a sentence for his relationship with Alfred Douglas
GAYLES.TV.- If it exists in the United Kingdom a place of worship comparable to Stone wall that place is the Reading jail. In her Oscar Wilde He served almost all of his two-year sentence of forced labor for the crime of "Gravity of indecency". That euphemism conceals the fact of maintaining relations with the young man Lord Alfred Douglas quite publicly and scandalously, which led Alfred's father to file a complaint against Wilde.
The fact that the prison had become a place of pilgrimage for the LGTBI collective raised the possibility of turning it into an art center to honor the legacy of the English writer. Joseph Galliano, CEO and co-founder of Queer britain, name with which the national museum LGBTQ + is known declares: “It is a very significant space. We are losing heritage and cultural spaces that will never recover. And we lose them in the name of commercial redevelopment ”.
And from next Thursday, the prison that gave its name to the famous “Ballad of the jail of Reading” Oscar Wilde himself wrote shortly after completing his sentence, will be put up for sale by the British Government.
Those responsible for the Ministry of Justice have informed in a statement that "We will always look for the best result for the taxpayer." In fact, Reading would be the last prison sold by the State that seeks to convert its assets into liquidity to strengthen its budgets. The intention of the Ministry is to invest the money resulting from the sale in the improvement of the penitentiary system.
In any case, an excellent opportunity is lost to save a space that could have preserved the memory not only of Oscar Wilde, but also of the thousands of people who suffered persecution and condemnation between their bars because of their sexual orientation. Or as Alfred Douglas himself says at the end of his poem "Two loves": "I am the Love that does not dare to pronounce his name ”. Because if you said it, if you lived it, if you made it public you could end up like Wilde in prison.
Source: euronews.com, bbc.com
Photography: Morley von Sternberg,
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