Who Was That Man?: A Present for Mr. Oscar Wilde

by Neil Bartlett

The author reflects on the links between the homosexual of the 1980s and his counterparts of a century ago--between gay lives today and those of Oscar Wilde, his friends, lovers, and acquaintances

Genres: Nonfiction, History, Queer, Biography, LGBT, Gay, Memoir

256 pages, Paperback

First published August 1, 1989

About the author

Born in 1958, Neil Bartlett has spent twenty-five years at the cutting edge of British gay culture. His ground-breaking study of Oscar Wilde, Who Was That Man? paved the way for a queer re-imagining of history ; his first novel, Ready To Catch Him Should He Fall, was voted Capital Gay Book of The Year; his second, Mr Clive and Mr Page, was nominated for the Whitbread Prize. Both have since been translated into five European languages. Listing him as one of the country's fifty most significant gay cultural figures, the Independent said "Brilliant,beautiful, mischievous; few men can match Bartlett for the breadth of his exploration of gay sensibility".

He also works as a director, and in 2000 was awarded an OBE for services to the theatre. He founded his first theatre company in 1982 and is now an "independent theatre-maker and freelance director", continuing to write novels and work as an activist for gay rights.

Librarian Note: There is more than one author in the GoodReads database with this name. See this thread for more information.

Reviews

[Liam Ostermann · Rating 4 out of 5]

I thought the book was brilliant when I read it during the COVID lockdown but I didn't review it then so I would like to quote what Paul Burston said about it:

"Subtitled ‘A Present for Mr Oscar Wilde’, Neil Bartlett’s first book is both a testament to the legacy of Wilde and an insight into the author’s love-hate relationship with the man he once described as his patron saint.

"Published in 1988, it’s also a portrait of gay life in London a century after Wilde’s fall from grace. The late ’80s was a time of virulent and often violent homophobia, as the gay liberation of the ’70s was overshadowed by a knee-jerk return to ‘traditional family values’, the scaremongering of Section 28 and the threat of AIDS. It was during this time that a gay friend of mine had graffiti daubed on his front door – “GAY – Got AIDS Yet?” He didn’t, not then. But a few years later he was dead.

"Despite all this, Bartlett finds beauty and bravery in the brutal social landscape, cruising the streets where Wilde once walked and reimagining the men who dared to live and love here many years before. He writes about Wilde and Lord Alfred Douglas, but also about cross-dressers Fanny and Stella, and others who challenged the social conventions of the day, risking arrest and imprisonment.

"This is also a book about the present, as experienced by the author at the time. The gift – or ‘present’ – Bartlett offers Mr Oscar Wilde is his own story. He writes movingly about his experience of coming to London and attempting to fit in, as generations of gay men did before him. “I don’t think anybody’s life changes as fast as a gay man’s when he moves to a big city... What I’ve done, I suppose, is to connect my life to other lives, even buildings and streets, that had an existence prior to mine. And now, gradually, I’ve come to understand that I am connected with other men’s lives, men living in London with me. Or with other, dead Londoners. That’s the story.”

"Later he observes, “There is a very specific sense of gay history in which nothing really happens until such time as you identify yourself as a gay man. We are born late. Much of my life didn’t start until I was nineteen.” As it happens, nineteen was the age at which I also publicly identified myself as a gay man for the first time. And yes, it did feel like being born late. That’s the reason, I think, that gay men in their ’20s and ’30s can often seem immature. We’re making up for lost time.

"This is an astonishing book – deeply personal, powerfully political and defiantly queer in its claiming of history."

Pronoun Pins

[t · Rating 5 out of 5]

masterpiece of historical affect! throughout reading i felt as though i was continuing a tradition of touching on the past (london’s molly houses and leather bars alike)

thank you Tass!

[Jamie · Rating 5 out of 5]

Stunning. An historiographic account of the formation of homosexuality in the 19th century, a la Foucault, but in a pseudo-memoir style. The "Evidence" section begins tediously but culminates in an absolutely wonderful account of the shift from invisibility to the "love that dare not speak its name." A love letter to Wilde; a love letter to London; a diaristic tale of becoming one's gay self. I'd write more, but feel I'll do it a disservice.

[Marc Nash · Rating 5 out of 5]

It was 5*s when I read it in the 1980s and it's still 5*s today.

Video review https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=uJ9Vi...

[K.J. Charles · Rating 4 out of 5]

Very good indeeed. Really interesting meditation on gay life and identity with some good history of London's gay scene and the Wilde scandal. Beautifully written, of course.

[theodore · Rating 4 out of 5]

this was so interesting. i'd totally recommend if you're into the gay history of 19th-century london and/or oscar wilde. if ur new to wilde and looking for a specific biography on him maybe check out something else (neil mckenna, matthew sturgis) since this is more general gay london, but for me it was just what i was looking for.

[C. B. · Rating 3 out of 5]

I greatly admire the passion and emotion of this book, as it tells a quite intimate story of how personal history can be to a person; how looking into the past can help us to ruminate on our identities today. This said, the book fell slightly flat for me, perhaps because it hits so close to home. I have my own peculiar love affair with old queer London, and this book doesn't quite hit the same note that I do. This doesn't detract from my love for Bartlett's project here.

[Joanna · Rating 5 out of 5]

Excellent book. A very personal meditation from a gay Londoner writing in the 1980s on Oscar Wilde and various Victorian Uranians. The author never pretends to be an objective historian or biographer, only insists that he is an obsessive fan who has spent considerable time loving/hating someone he can only know through images and text. As a result I don't think I have ever read anything about lives lived 100+ years ago that felt so immediately relevant. Constructed out of bits of history, 80s history included, and quotes from trials and poetry and letters, fragmented but it glitters. He really must have wanted Oscar to be proud of his prose.

[Adrienne · Rating 5 out of 5]

'Who was that man?' is the meditation of a gay Londoner in the 1980's searching for himself and the gay world of the 1890's that Oscar Wilde lived in (or visited, really). It's non-fiction but written in much the same style as 'The House on Brooke St'. Bartlett weaves his own experiences and those of Wilde, of rent boys and drag queens together with quotes from books, plays and newspaper articles, police reports together with descriptions, musings and dialogue. A dense dreamlike maze of a book full of glittering prose.

[James Whitmore · Rating 4 out of 5]

"We are born late," Neil Bartlett writes of gay men (though it resonates with queers more generally) in this bracingly original cultural analysis. Gays are born when they come out, a process that often involves a move to the city. Perhaps it's better described as a coming into: "I started to talk to other people for the first time, to go to places that already had a style, a history," Bartlett writes of arriving in London in 1981 in his early 20s. Like many even today, Bartlett assumed gay history began in the 1970s in the US following the Stonewall Uprising. But he intuited a history that was all around him, not exactly hidden, but sitting unnoticed in plain sight alongside the streets he walked. Read more on my blog

[Natasha C · Rating 4 out of 5]

For me, the better part of the book started halfway through as Bartlett looks at the details of the trial of Oscar Wilde and the way he wrote afterwards. It was concrete enough that I was interested in all that he uncovered. The first half of the book throws around unexplained references a little too loosely for me. Overall, though, I love the concept of this book and how history can inform us of ourselves in the most personal of ways.

[Oscar Mauricio]

cccccccc

[Taylor · Rating 5 out of 5]

i don't usually catalogue my grad school books here but this book was heartbreaking/heartwarming/heartexploding

[Alex · Rating 4 out of 5]

Fascinating history of gay life in London, really interesting format

[Bee]

gave me some new Oscar Wilde insights and also insights into what I guess we would now refer to as gay London in the 1890s and 1980s. very interesting with regards to form and structure

[Tass · Rating 5 out of 5]

moved me so deeply i emailed the author.

[strawberryluna · Rating 2 out of 5]

I really wanted to like this book, however I definitely thought it would be about the historical setting of Oscar Wilde's world, rather than the author's own *very* dated sense of self in 1980's London. I just couldn't muster up the gumption to care about his postcard collection, or how he viewed the subtexts of his own relationships, somehow. Occasionally moments of fascination would bubble up and make me hungry for more...

Sadly, at the end I believe that the book that I want to read concerning Oscar Wilde's double life, his loves, the society that at once embraced and rejected the notion of being gay, the Victorian paranoia/naiveté regarding sex and the sexes, Wilde's trial, downfall and post-trial life might not actually exist at all.

[Karen Wellsbury · Rating 4 out of 5]

Bartlett's Skin Lane has a very personal connection for me, and when I found a copy of WWTM in a second hand bookshop a few months ago I grabbed it. In my teens I was obsessed with Oscar Wilde (and coincidently The Smiths ), and read as much as I could about him. So WWTM was like a double whammy.

This is a beautifully written combination of recent and Wildean gay history wrapped up in personal experience. Bartlett came to London in the early 80's and for me the descriptions of that time were more fascinating, as it seems quite alien now and also perhaps because most of the Wilde stuff I was already aware of.

[Brent · Rating 4 out of 5]

I just re-read this book, remembering how much I enjoyed it when I first read in twenty years ago. It is still an extraordinary book.