The depiction of homosexuality in Dorian Gray

Finished reading Oscar Wilde's (only) novel, The Picture of Dorian Gray (1891), as well as Jeffrey Eugenides's insightful intro to the Modern Library edition and concur w/ JE that it's an entertaining and provocative novel if not a great one (JE first read it as a teenager and it impressed him at the time w/ its decadence and artistic splendor - less so today he notes). What strikes me above all is how much it's a novel about homosexuality (which JE actually hardly mentions, though he talks about it as a novel of gender identity). As is well known, Wilde lived a "double life," married w/ children at the time he wrote the novel, later moved into the Savoy and had a long, committed relationship with another man - and was convicted on a morals charge because of this, imprisoned and assigned to hard labor, survived that amazingly, and in his later years was an advocate for prison reform (I'm not sure whether he was also an advocate for rights of homosexuals - I don't think he was, though; I think he advocated on behalf of all prisoners re treatment and conditions rather than about civil rights). Dorian Gray is infused with veiled references to a homosexual culture: the three main characters are men, who rhapsodize about Gray's beauty and talk with cutting disparity about marriage (one of the men, Lord Henry Wotton, by far the most visible character in the novel and obviously a version of Wilde, is married at the outset, but the marriage breaks up for no explained reason). Wilde includes a lot of writing about Dorian's immorality, his corrupting effect on others, plus Wotton's evil influence on Gray, Wotton's successful attempt to break up Gray's brief engagement to a naive young actress, Gray's "Faustian bargain" to maintain his youthful beauty but at great expense, lots of excursions into clubs and "dens of iniquity" but no there are sexual encounters w/ women throughout; Wilde does everything he can to create an aura of debasement and immorality w/out making any direct reference to homosexual relationships - much like Proust's indirect treatment of the sexuality of his narrator. Why is this? Obviously, given the cultural and legal climate of the time Wilde would never have been able to publish, at least in England, a novel about homosexual relationships (France was ahead of the cultural curve on that). More important, it may have been better to depict the homosexual culture by indirection and omission: Just as homosexuals had to live "in the closet" (along w/ the eponymous portrait, as a matter of fact), literature about homosexuals had to be hidden, coded, and subterranean; Wilde's novel, though it never directly addresses the theme of homosexuality, captures in some way the nature of the culture in Edwardian England: speaking in code, arranging assignations in the dark, disparaging marriage, adopting a pose of indifference, making a fetish of art and decor, disappearing. 

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