![]() ![]() In Dublin, the group will visit the Gate Theater, which was co-founded in 1928 by actor and impresario Micheál Mac Liammóir and his partner, the actor Hilton Edwards. ![]() The group will also visit the Linley Sambourne house, which wasn’t somewhere Wilde actually lived, as Lear says, but it “speaks so much” to the late 19th-century period, decoratively. I loved Orton, and when I was coming out in London at age 16, I alighted on his amazing, graphic Diaries, and made a quiet, appreciative pilgrimage to gaze up at the apartment. ![]() I make a personal plea to Lear for the group to visit 25 Noel Road in Islington, where a circular, green commemorative plaque outside of a top-floor apartment marks the home, between 1960 and his violent death there in 1967, of the playwright Joe Orton. The group will also visit Britain's only full-time lesbian and gay bookshop, the brilliant Gay's The Word, where they should be firmly encouraged to buy as much as possible. Well-known British gay writers, with rich knowledge of gay history, like Neil Bartlett and Wilde biographer Neil McKenna, will give talks. In London, the group will do walking tours of the variously sexy, scandalous, and literary neighborhoods of Soho and Bloomsbury. In Oxford, Lear will relate stories from the lives of figures like W.H. Not everything on the group’s itinerary will be Wilde-related. There, Magdalen’s librarian will show the group around, before an Oxford academic holds forth on the history of homosexuality in the late 19th century. Indeed, he says, it’s because of his own personal relationships and negotiations that some of the places, like Wilde’s rooms at Magdalen College, Oxford, will be open to the group. “The tours come with my knowledge, and it’s not so easy on the ground to find and locate all these places.” “No, you couldn’t do these things by yourself,” Lear responds firmly. Surely you could visit these places independently outside of the auspices of a group, I say to Lear. But Lear insists his longer, more detailed journeys are more thorough, experience-rich, and luxurious. There are already gay history-based walking tours of cities, like in Paris, London, and New York. “We will make the effort to find things, and we will take you to see them, in comfort and style,” Lear promises. Lear and his local guides “on the ground” know both the well-known and hidden gay histories of their locales. Yet still gay desires and cultures existed, persisted, and endured. The power and point of Lear’s new company is that, today, many may not know of gay lives and histories long before homosexuality was legalized, long before gay men and women were so evident in popular culture, or their desires visible in the public realm. But I also know how to organize a tour: what’s essential, what works well, and what can go wrong, and how to do things nicely.” “I am a classicist, I have taught the history of sexuality at universities. Setting up the company “came to me as a lightning bolt last summer,” Lear tells me. The inaugural group of travelers will visit the home where Wilde grew up in Ireland, the hotel in London, the Cadogan, where the playwright was arrested on April 6, 1895, “for committing acts of gross indecency with other male persons,” his tobacconist where an unpaid bill of Wilde’s is still stuck to the wall, and then the Parisian cemetery, Père Lachaise, where his lipstick kiss-covered grave stands. Initial enquiries have come from older travelers, though Lear expects it to be popular with fortysomethings and singles looking to meet others, as well as couples. The hotels sound upscale-boutique, rather than mega-glam behemoths. He says the price covers everything, including internal flights, breakfast, and one meal a day, though it excludes the long-haul return flights from your home base. ![]() The nine-day tour costs $8,500 per person, with a single-person supplement of $1,800. The first tour this October will take its group-no more than 20-strong-from Dublin to London and then Paris. The professor’s specialty is the representation of homosexuality in ancient Greek art and literature, he says, but his interest in gay history extends to other key periods, such as fin-de-siècle England, Renaissance Italy, and medieval Japan. Now he has set up a travel company, specializing in tours devoted to gay history, the first of which will-to borrow his company’s name-focus on the life of Oscar Wilde. ![]()
0 Comments
Leave a Reply. |