Author's Note

If academic intellectuals have a besetting vice it's abstraction. It's so easy to lose awareness of people's concrete situations in studying their rhetoric or the structures of their situations. I don't know if Rita Felski has incorporated a down-to-earth knowledge of gay lives in the late 1890s into her book, but I do know about being gay in the 1950s and 1960s (I was there) and it seemed to me that she didn't. Where does the money come from? Who gets it? What do they have to do to get it? What happens if they don't do it? Questions like these tend to slip silently out of many academic theories. Some years ago I read a poem by Oscar Wilde, a flamboyant exoticerotic affair written when he was an undergraduate of nineteen. It seemed to me rather overblown in its purple and sensuous imagery – until I realized that he was writing about his own kind of sexuality and suddenly I could see the conflict in the poem itself between wanting to say it straight out and knowing that he couldn't. Saying it could put you in jail. You could be stuck in a mental hospital. Your career could be ruined, your family could desert you, your job could disappear. In Wilde's time these were not possibilities but dead certain. In fact, they happened. It's things like this that most academics tend to leave out of their theorizing when the people in question are not like them. And that is a very, very bad thing for everyone.

To the Editors:

In “The Counterdiscourse of the Feminine in Three Texts by Wilde, Huysmans, and Sacher-Masoch” (PMLA, 106 [1991]: 1094–105), Rita Felski doesn't emphasize the writers' conscious motives for the fin-desiècle “cult of art and artifice” (p. 1094) she otherwise treats so well. Of course, her forthcoming book may do just this, but I think her article scants the extent to which the writers involved knew what they were doing.

First – and I don't think this can be emphasized too much – careers and lives could easily be smashed by any openness at all [about homosexuality], and everyone knew it.