Gross Indecency: The Three Trials of Oscar Wilde is a 1997 play written by Moisés Kaufman. It deals with Oscar Wilde's three trials on the matter of his relationship with Lord Alfred Douglas, which led to charges of "committing acts of gross indecency with other male persons". (The first trial was a civil suit brought against Douglas's father by Wilde himself; the second and third were on the criminal charges against Wilde, with the second reaching no verdict and the third resulting in a conviction and sentence to hard labour.) The play uses real quotes and transcripts of the three trials.
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Famous quotes containing the words oscar wilde, gross, trials and/or wilde:
“Public Opinion ... an attempt to organise the ignorance of the community, and to elevate it to the dignity of physical force.”
—Oscar Wilde (1854–1900)
“There are moods in which one feels the impulse to enter a tacit protest against too gross an appetite for pure aesthetics in this starving and sinning world. One turns half away, musingly, from certain beautiful useless things.”
—Henry James (1843–1916)
“Why, since man and woman were created for each other, had He made their desires so dissimilar? Why should one class of women be able to dwell in luxurious seclusion from the trials of life, while another class performed their loathsome tasks? Surely His wisdom had not decreed that one set of women should live in degradation and in the end should perish that others might live in security, preserve their frappeed chastity, and in the end be saved.”
—Madeleine [Blair], U.S. prostitute and “madam.” Madeleine, ch. 10 (1919)
“Questions are never indiscreet. Answers sometimes are.”
—Oscar Wilde (1854–1900)