So I guess this is a gender studies blog now.

There is a secret door in my room. My table pushes up against it, a black iron square. Not until last week did I think it could be a door. To my great excitement, I found it opened up into a long dark spiderwebbed shaft – a stove for heating in the old days? I want to fill it full of secrets.

I am becoming very interested in secrecy. For more on this, I turn to The Portrait of Dorian Gray.

I recently read Wilde’s novel for the first time, and I wonder at my wasted years of not referencing it in every gender studies class I ever took. Wilde himself embodies a now-stock figure of the homosexual, both in his charisma and in the infamous sodomy trial. The latter, in its Foucaultian flexing of power, not only involved a Starr-report-esque salivation over Wilde’s private life, but helped give a name to “the love that dare not speak its name.”

The novel also creates this figure of the homosexual. We find our dissipated, kind-of-gay-ish society dandies with their rapier one-liners (“Nothing makes one so vain as being told one is a sinner”). Dorian himself is adored by (/probably/definitely sleeps with) both sexes, not least by the man who paints his portrait with such obsessive love.

As for the closet – oh my God, hello, death shroud drawn over his portrait’s decay. As if prefiguring the link between homosexuality and disease, which would provide endless fodder for homophobic HIV/AIDS news coverage (and for my undergraduate thesis), the ever-more-disgusting portrait evokes a heady mixture of decadent sexuality, secrecy, and death. Sorry, I know that was all one sentence.

So far, this is all pretty obvious. What’s really getting me is, Dorian not only represents the homosexual, but Narcissus. Moreover, a Narcissus whose self-love is fueled by, and projected onto, books.

As he reads of a young Frenchman’s sensual adventures, Dorian begins his descent into sin: “There were in it metaphors as monstrous as orchids and as subtle in colour. […] It was a poisonous book.”

Sounds good to me! And then there’s this:

“There were times when it appeared to Dorian Gray that the whole of history was merely the record of his own life, not as he had lived it in act and circumstance, but as his imagination had created it for him, as it had been in his brain and in his passions. He felt that he had known them all, those strange terrible figures that had passed across the stage of the world and made sin so marvelous and evil so full of subtlety. It seemed to him that in some mysterious way their lives had been his own.”

So do we love literature because we love ourselves, and long to see our reflections in books? Does literature spur on self-love as we identify with characters and their desires, and take on their desires as our own? To disastrous results, Anna Karenina and Madame Bovary both saw themselves as characters in romance novels. The men involved in their adulteries, their reality, hardly matter – what matters is the dream of oneself.

Compared to these heterosexual fantasies, the sexuality implied in Dorian Gray is far more aberrant. But it’s not useful to ask whether literary characters are really “gay.” A more interesting question, I think, is this: In literature and our consumption of it, how do the respective channels of desire and identification (already hard to differentiate in “real” life!) intermingle and merge? Why is this also so often a secretive, deliciously dangerous, even deadly process? Or: How is reading like and not like whacking off?

I could go on. For now I won’t (you’re welcome). I’ll just direct you to Todd Hayne’s glitterlicious film Velvet Goldmine, which I now realize is constantly referencing and winking at Wilde. Toward the climax(!), Christian Bale masturbates to a picture of a glam rock star (“Maxwell Demon” / basically Ziggy Stardust) who he’s been lusting after and trying to emulate. As he masturbates, he simulates Maxwell Demon’s position, spread out on his side like an odalisque.

It’s a solitary pleasure, secret, confused – and when we read, not unlike our own.