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manly man, able to hold my own with other people.”)
    In addition, Bosie was himself sued for libel on three occasions: once by Wilde’s friend Robert Ross, once by his father-in-law, Colonel Custance, and once—amazingly enough—by Winston Churchill, whom Bosie had accused publicly and repeatedly of entering into a Jewish-led conspiracy to lower the value of government stock. Churchill had no choice but to bring an action against Bosie, who lost and was jailed for six months at Wormwood Scrubs. (While in prison, as Wilde had written
De Profundis
, he wrote
In Excelsis
, a sonnet sequence containing anti-Semitic slurs of a more than usually repellent aspect.)
    The case against the
Evening News
Bosie actually won, which is probably why he crows about it in his autobiography—yet what is curious is the moment when he chooses to crow about it. The reference comes just after Bosie’s seduction by Gerald Armstrong’s cousin. Like his rendering of the episode with Wellington, the account he gives here is brief—only a few paragraphs—and seems to be offered in order to challenge “the accusation which has been made against me of being what is called abnormal and degenerate from a sexual point of view. (By the way, the last time this accusation of being ‘degenerate’ was made against me was by
The Evening News
in 1921, and it cost that enterprising journal £1000 in damages to me and a good many more thousands in costs.)”
    Now that is an alarming parenthetical—alarming because its import seems to be, in essence, “Don’t fuck with me”: a warning even to the reader himself, who has presumably put down money to purchase Bosie’s book, that he would do well to avoid offending its author.
    It is the only instance I can think of, either in literature or that species of writing that purports to be literature, in which a writer has overtly threatened his reader.
    As for the details: what is striking to me about Bosie’s account is the degree to which it undercuts his putative intention, which is to establish once and for all his heterosexual vitality. Thus when Gerald decides he has had enough and knocks at his cousin’s bedroom door “demanding restitution of his ravished ewe-lamb,” the “ewe-lamb, reduced to tears and dressed in one of the lady’s much-beribboned nightgowns,” is delivered to his keeper “to the accompaniment of loud barks from the lady’s pet dog.” Hardly theparagon of boyish swagger, that description. Also, no explanation is given of why Gerald has come to think of Bosie in the first place as
his
“ravished ewe-lamb.”
    No, the transvestite frills in which the episode is dressed make it difficult to take seriously Bosie’s pouting claim that had well enough been left alone, “my lady love would at any rate have kept me away from baser promiscuities”—presumably those committed in the company of Wilde. Indeed, one has to ask why, if Bosie’s intention here is to prove his manliness, he chose to include the episode in his autobiography in the first place.
    The only surprise was that in the end, Gerald did find it in himself to challenge Bosie; to wrest him from his cousin; to drag him from that hotel on the Côte d’Azur.
    Courage. Perhaps it is not so surprising after all that timid Gerald grew up to be a war correspondent.
On the Edge of the Abyss
    Where does it come from, this story? I’m still not certain. Probably it began with a newspaper article, something glimpsed three or four years back on the West Coast. According to this article, a San Francisco psychiatrist was noticing a dangerous trend among very young gay men: in essence, they were starting to abandon those very rules of “safer sex” that their elders had struggled so hard to instill and publicize. And this just at a moment when those rules were finally becoming second nature (and when as a