Lord Alfred Douglas

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Lord Alfred Bruce Douglas (22 October 1870 – 20 March 1945), also known as Bosie Douglas, was an English poet and journalist, and a lover of Oscar Wilde. At the University of Oxford, he edited an undergraduate journal, The Spirit Lamp, that carried a homoerotic subtext, and met Wilde, starting a close but stormy relationship. Douglas's father, John Douglas, 9th Marquess of Queensberry, abhorred it and set out to humiliate Wilde, publicly accusing him of homosexuality. Wilde sued him for criminal libel, but Queensberry produced witnesses who attested to the truth of his claim, and Wilde was later imprisoned. On his release, he briefly lived with Douglas, but they had separated by the time Wilde died in 1900. Douglas married the bisexual poet Olive Custance in 1902 and had a son, Raymond. Douglas wrote several books of verse, some in a homoerotic Uranian genre. The phrase "The love that dare not speak its name" appears in one (Two Loves) published in 1894, and is often misattributed to Wilde...

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