Lord Alfred Douglas

Lord Alfred Bruce Douglas (22 October 1870 – 20 March 1945) was a British poet and journalist best known as the lover of Oscar Wilde. While studying at Oxford, he edited an undergraduate journal, The Spirit Lamp, which carried a homoerotic subtext, and met Wilde, with whom he started a close but stormy relationship. Douglas’s father, the Marquess of Queensberry, disapproved strongly of the affair, and set out to humiliate Wilde, publicly accusing him of homosexuality. Wilde sued him for criminal libel, but some of his intimate notes were discovered, and he was duly jailed. On his release, he briefly lived with Douglas in Naples, but they were separated by the time Wilde died in 1900. Douglas married Olive Custance in 1902, and they produced a son Raymond. Converting to Roman Catholicism in 1911, he openly repudiated Wilde’s homosexuality, and in a High-Catholic magazine, Plain English, he expressed views that were openly anti-semitic, though he rejected the extreme policies of Nazi Germany. He was also jailed for libelling Winston Churchill over claims of wartime misconduct. Douglas wrote several books of verse, some of it classified in the homoerotic Uranian genre. The phrase "The love that dare not speak its name" came from one of Douglas’s poems, though it is widely misattributed to Wilde.