SOURCE: “Ireland Your Ireland,” in Hudson Review, Vol. LI, No. 3, Autumn, 1998, pp. 561-67.

In the following excerpt, Hornby offers a detrimental estimation of The Judas Kiss.

The plays and film about Oscar Wilde that have come out lately all stress his role as gay martyr. Since he got two years in a brutal Victorian prison merely for acts performed with consenting adults, also losing his home, career, income, and contact with his wife and children, Wilde would certainly qualify for that description. Nonetheless, the interesting thing is that Wilde did not think of himself as being homosexual. The best of the many books that have come out on Wilde in this decade, Alan Sinfield’s The Wilde Century, convincingly argues that the very concept of the existence of a special category of human beings with an innate attraction to their own sex was unknown until the 1860s, and...