David and Jonathan

The sentiment “I am the love that dare not speak its name” comes from the poem “Two Loves” by Alfred Douglas, which debuted in the only issue of the Oxford university magazine The Chameleon in 1894. It appeared alongside other same-sex verse and a notorious love story by John Bloxam titled “The Priest and the Acolyte.”

Oscar Wilde had been prevailed upon to also support The Chameleon and he obligingly furnished the publication with a series of witty “Phrases And Philosophy For Use Of The Young.” Despite these aphorisms being tame compared with the rest of the issue, and constituting only three out of the 60 pages, it suited Wilde’s detractors to associate him with the content of the magazine as a whole.

Whether there was any actual homoerotic alignment among the contributors in private can be debated; what is certain is that it was not an alliance Wilde would have wanted aired in open court.

Unfortunately for Oscar, that is precisely what happened.

The first criminal trial of Oscar Wilde opened at the Old Bailey on April 26, 1895. On the fourth day Wilde took to the stand and was asked in cross-examination by prosecutor Charles Gill, “What is “the love that dare not speak its name?”

Wilde gave a spirited and now famous response¹ that begins:

“The Love that dare not speak its name” in this century is such a great affection of an elder for a younger man as there was between David and Jonathan…

As this specific reference to David and Jonathan is often overlooked, it is worth examining the rationale behind Wilde’s allusion.

The story of David and Jonathan comes from the Bible, specifically the Book of Samuel, which relates the friendship between David, the future king of Israel, and Jonathan, the crown prince. When Jonathan is slain along with his father (King Saul) in a battle against the Philistines, David laments him by saying:

“More wonderful was your love for me than the love of women.”²
[2 Samuel 1:26]

Joel S. Baden of the Yale Divinity School was in no doubt about what this means: “the comparison to the love of women can hardly have a political valence; this is as close to an expression of romantic attachment between two men as we find in the Bible.”³

But how romantic was it? Theological opinion of David and Jonathan’s relationship devolves to a question of interpretation. In the language of modern sexology, this implies weighing our meaning of homosexual against what the Greeks, for instance, understood to be homosocial.

This interview with Tom Crewe leans towards the intellectual mentorship inherent in the latter:

In the Republic, Plato has Socrates say that ‘sexual pleasure mustn’t come into’ relationships between the guardians and the young boys they are educating, ‘if they are to love and be loved in the right way.’ And the institution of paiderastia itself was an exclusively aristocratic and male one, all about initiating noble young men into the highest level of Greek social and political hierarchy.

And thus 21st century scholars conclude that “Greek love is not a prefiguration of modern homosexuality.⁴

But Oscar was a man out of his own time. He appreciated back in the 19th century, what we now more clearly understand as Greek Love, referring to Douglas in a letter read out in court as “Hyacinthus, whom Apollo loved so madly.”

But was he naīve in not realizing that a devout Victorian courtroom faced with the graphic testimony of rent boys from the street and servants from the Savoy Hotel, was no forum for modern gay theory or the platonic ideals of the ancients?

Or,, perhaps, Douglas’s quotation which he was being asked to defend in real time in the witness box, had backed Oscar into a corner and he had no other plausible response to “the love that dark not speak its name”.

Either way, Wilde was to appreciate about his judge and jury a lesson still being learned today.

That men with a philistine (often hostile) indifference to culture and the arts will always be horrified by male camaraderie; just as, in the illustration above, the decapitated Goliath will ever remain aghast beneath the brotherhood of David and Jonathan—although in Goliath’s case his attitude is less surprising because he literally was a Philistine.

© John Cooper, 2025.

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Footnotes:

1. “The Love that dare not speak its name” in this century is such a great affection of an elder for a younger man as there was between David and Jonathan, such as Plato made the very basis of his philosophy, and such as you find in the sonnets of Michelangelo and Shakespeare. It is that deep, spiritual affection that is as pure as it is perfect. It dictates and pervades great works of art like those of Shakespeare and Michelangelo, and those two letters of mine, such as they are. It is in this century misunderstood, so much misunderstood that it may be described as the “Love that dare not speak its name,” and on account of it I am placed where I am now. It is beautiful, it is fine, it is the noblest form of affection. There is nothing unnatural about it. It is intellectual, and it repeatedly exists between an elder and a younger man, when the elder man has intellect, and the younger man has all the joy, hope and glamour of life before him. That it should be so the world does not understand. The world mocks at it and sometimes puts one in the pillory for it.” ↩︎
2. cf. In his civil trial, Edward Carson challenged Wilde on having Basil Hallward say, “Somehow, I never loved a woman”, in the magazine version of “The Picture of Dorian Gray.” ↩︎
3. https://bibleinterp.arizona.edu/articles/2013/12/bad378027 ↩︎
4. Eriobon, Didier. Insult and the Making of the Gay Self, translated by Michael Lucey (Duke University Press, 2004) ↩︎

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