Oscar Wilde at Magdalen College - a strange oversight

Magdelen's Wilde is the title of a small exhibition about the life of Oscar Wilde being held in the Old Library of Magdalen College Oxford. It displays photographs, drawings, letters, notebooks and many documents chronicling Wilde's life at Magdalen and his career thereafter.
But while the exhibition goes into great detail about some aspects of his life, even displaying his death certificate - just in case we thought he was still alive - there is one rather curious oversight. It says nothing about the fact that he was a paedophile.

That Wilde was a paedophile is abundantly evident even from his writings, and the evidence has been published and widely available for a long time. Rupert Croft-Cooke, in Feasting with Panthers: A New Consideration of Some Late Victorian Writers, (n.p., 1967 p.138) called Wilde "the very type and symbol of the pederast" and tells us much about "his promiscuity with boulevard boys". The same facts are admitted in Rupert Croft-Cooke's The Unrecorded Life of Oscar Wilde (NY David Mackay 1972) which adds stable-boys, hotel page-boys and many more to the list.
The Secret Life of Oscar Wilde by Neil McKenna (Random House 2011 p. 437-442 ISBN:9781446456828, 144645682X) gives all the details of how Oscar Wilde, Bosie and André Gide shared boys as young as thirteen in Algiers in 1895. Two of them were called Mohammed and Ali. These boys were procured and paid for as part of the sex-tourism business. Several customers would be allowed to make use of them on one night. Gide recorded all the details in his diaries and letters.

Even the rather flattering biography by Richard Ellman admits that Wilde and his friends passed around schoolboys as if they were sharing an ashtray and frequented teenage male prostitutes, trying to excuse it by saying "they were already prostitutes". (Ellman 389-91). Oh, I see. And the children were already children.

The first thing Wilde did when let out of prison (where he need never had gone had he not instigated the litigation by bringing a false libel action) was to go to Naples, where he was observed with Bosie "competing for Neapolitan boys".(The Trials of Oscar Wilde: Deviance, Morality, and Late-Victorian Society, by Michael S. Foldy, 1997, 28-29.)

Magdalen College advertises the exhibition calling Wilde one of their most "illustrious" alumni.

Would anyone describe Jimmy Savile as "illustrious"? Or Gary Glitter?

I can add one more historical fact to what is known about Oscar Wilde. Colonel Ferdinand St John, whose Memoirs are preserved in the archives of Lydiard House, Wiltshire, was a pupil at Magdalen College School in the 1870s while Oscar Wilde was a postgraduate student at the College. He was born in 1861. He recalls that the choirboys who sang in the chapel all had a dislike of Wilde and called him "It". Such a collective aversion among schoolboys aged 8-13 for a man in his twenties is most unusual, and suggests that he was taking an unwelcome interest in them.

The lack of honesty in this exhibition shows how low Oxford University has fallen. Oxford now even has a professor of "Gay Studies", which is synonymous with poor scholarship, sloppy thinking, mindless flag-waving, and fake science. Like this exhibition, Gay Studies promulgates a narrative of victimhood that is used to legitimize the relentless bullying of other people.

I'm sure this exhibition would appeal to Crispin Blunt, the Conservative MP who emitted an enraged rant when his friend, the Conservative MP Imran Ahmad Khan was convicted of sexually assaulting an underage boy...and was arrested on a similar charge last year. It might also appeal to former Labour MP Ivor Caplin who was caught in a paedophile sting in Brighton a few weeks ago. There are far too many of the same sort to fit into the Old Library on one day.

But I'd better wind up this review, in case the police, or the University Equality, Diversity and Inclusion squad turns up on my doorstep accusing me of being "untoward about paedophiles".