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Deborah Cole — AFP Feb 18, 2018

Rupert everett

Gay cinema pioneer Rupert Everett said his new biopic about legendary literary dandy Oscar Wilde captures him as a “Christ-like” figure who sacrificed himself for the future global LBGTQ rights movement.

Everett penned, directed and starred in his years-long passion project about the flamboyant 19th-century Irish writer, “The Happy Prince”, screening this week at the Berlin film festival.

The 58-year-old British actor focuses in the film on Wilde’s self-imposed exile after serving two years’ hard labour from 1895 on “gross indecency” charges for sex with men.

Such convictions were only wiped from the British books last year for some 70,000 men who had criminal records simply for being homosexual, Everett notes at the end of the film.

“The gay liberation movement really started with the Oscar Wilde scandal,” Everett told reporters.

Set in Paris, Naples and the north of France, the movie weaves flashbacks from Wilde’s heyday as the toast of London’s theatre scene with his life’s twilight as a vagabond racked by poverty, alcoholism and illness.

– ‘Run towards ruin’ –

Continues …

 

Commentary — Feb 20, 2018

This appears to be yet another attempt to make homosexuality seem somehow “normal” by presenting Wilde as a martyr.
However, as is often the case now the online comments are far more incisive and telling than the article itself. A few of them, edited for spelling etc, are featured below:
“Christ like”?
Jesus suffered and died to save people from their sins. To hear Rupert Everett explain it , Oscar Wilde must have suffered so that sin could be normalized. This is satanic.– Mark M.
I imag(in)e with the focus these folks are taking, there’ll be no mention of Wilde’s deathbed conversion to Catholicism? — torpedo_eight
PEOPLE ARE SOOOO STUPID! Oscar Wilde was no hero. He wasn’t locked up for being gay. He was locked up because he made a false slander accusation that his lovers father had falsely accused him of being gay. It cost his lovers father his estate in legal fees, so to keep from going bankrupt he sued Oscar, with the support of his son—Oscars former gay lover, as it was easily proven Oscar was gay. The guy was a criminal, that did to his own lovers family what no gay person would want their lover to do. How does this make him a “Christ-like, perfect gay?” — john