'The Love that Dare not Speak it's Name'

Lord Alfred Douglas wrote ‘Two Loves’[1] in eighteen- ninety two as a love letter to his partner, and fellow poet, Oscar Wilde. The final line of his poem refers to ‘The love that dare not speak its name’ (74), a phrase which later became recognised as a euphemism for homosexuality. This line illustrates the repression that Douglas and Wilde encountered, echoing the fact that within a sexually repressive Victorian society, homosexual love was viewed as shameful, and was punishable at the time by incarceration, as Wilde later experienced, after being publicly outed by Douglas's Father. Outraged at the company his son chose to keep, he penned the following letter to express his contempt:

Secondly, I come to the more painful part of this letter—your intimacy with this man Wilde. It must either cease or I will disown you and stop all money supplies. I am not going to try and analyze this intimacy, and I make no charge; but to my mind to pose as a thing is as bad as to be it. With my own eyes I saw you both in the most loathsome and disgusting relationship as expressed by your manner and expression. Never in my experience have I ever seen such a sight as that in your horrible features. No wonder people are talking as they are. Also I now hear on good authority, but this may be false, that his wife is petitioning to divorce him for sodomy and other crimes. Is this true, or do you not know of it? If I thought the actual thing was true, and it became public property, I should be quite justified in shooting him at sight. These Christian English cowards and men, as they call themselves, want waking up.

Your disgusted so-called father,
Queensbury [2]

In a highly conservative Victorian era, Douglas had to use highly ambigious yet implicity language in order to convey his emotions. The poem uses personification to categorise love in two ways- firstly, the heterosexual love between and male and female ‘I am true love, I fill//the hearts of boy and girl with mutual flame’ (72). The latter type of love which Douglas refers to is more cryptic, with it being referred to as ‘Shame’ (68). Douglas illustrates the latter type of love as forlorn ‘sad and sweet’ (53) ‘he sighed with many sighs’ (55), using sibilance, which creates a sense of secrecy, reflecting the way in which homosexual lovers were forced to lead double lives, hiding their feelings for each other in the public realm.
Many of Wilde's works also contained homosexual themes, particularly in The Picture of Dorian Gray, in which he laments the injustice of a heteronormative society 'your soul grows sick with longing for the things it has forbidden to itself, with desire for what its monstrous laws have made monstrous and unlawful'. Whilst Wilder doesn't explicitly refer to homosexuality in this quotation, yet it is clear what forbidden desires Wilde is referring to, not only forbidden to the soul, but made unlawful by a nineteenth century government.