McKenna, Neil

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McKenna, Neil

PERSONAL: Born in Manchester, England; partner of Robert Jones. Education: Attended University of Stirling and University of Essex.

ADDRESSES: Home—North London, Englandc. Agent—Andrew Lownie Literary Agency, 17 Sutherland St., London SW1V 4JU, England.

CAREER: Journalist, writer, and activist. Worked as a gay rights and AIDS activist; former editor of Pink Paper.

WRITINGS:

On the Margins: Men Who Have Sex with Men and HIV in the Developing World, Panos (London, England), 1996.

The Secret Life of Oscar Wilde, Century (London, England), 2003, Basic Books (New York, NY), 2005.

Has written articles for numerous periodicals in Great Britain, including London Independent, Independent on Sunday, Observer, Guardian, and New Statesman. Has also written for Channel 4 Television.

SIDELIGHTS: Neil McKenna adds to the extensive scholarship on noted nineteenth-century Irish writer Oscar Wilde with his book The Secret Life of Oscar Wilde. In his book, McKenna focuses explicitly on Wilde's homosexuality and the effect it had on his life, politics, and writings, as well as on those around him, especially Wilde's wife, Constance. "Using as his premise the idea that Wilde's gayness was a vital part of his life, McKenna has done incredible research to sketch out for us the world in which he lived," noted Michael Bronski in Guide magazine. In detailing Wilde's numerous homosexual liaisons, McKenna describes Wilde's confrontations with blackmailers as well as the police, who would often raid establishments catering to homosexuals. Eventually, as McKenna describes, Wilde met and fell in love with Lord Alfred Douglas. This relationship eventually led to Wilde's downfall as the constant attacks of Douglas's father led the celebrity author to file a libel suit. The suit—and Wilde's subsequent incarceration—disgraced Wilde in the eyes of a public far from ready to accept his public homosexuality.

McKenna argues that Wilde's homosexuality made him a political activist who sought to take statutes against homosexuality out of the law books of England. In a review in Library Journal, Henry L. Carrigan, Jr., noted that "this majestic study offers a glimpse into the complex sexual mores of the Victorian world," while a Publishers Weekly contributor called the book "the most exciting and important Wilde scholarship to be published in decades." Jad Adams, writing in the London Guardian, called The Secret Life of Oscar Wilde "a bold book," and Guide contributor Bronski commented: "This is a biographical reinvention of which Wilde would have been proud."

McKenna told CA: "My experiences as a gay man and a gay journalist and writer in the deeply homophobic and conservative Britain of the 1970s, 1980s, and early 1990s have informed my approach to writing history and biography. When I started writing gay history in the mid-1980s, I experienced, as did many other gay British writers, a wall of silence and a wall of prejudice. I found it hard to get my work published in the mainstream media and for many years my work was almost exclusively published by the gay press. There was, I felt, a kind of cordon sanitaire around the publication of gay history, especially gay history that talked frankly about gay sex.

"This cordon sanitaire still operates today in the UK. Rather to my surprise, my work has been acclaimed in the United States. Though widely praised in the UK, The Secret Life of Oscar Wilde nevertheless drew some criticism that the book was too sexually explicit. My response is uncompromisingly simple and invokes Voltaire's dictum that the one duty we owe to history is to tell the truth."