🏳️‍🌈🏺2-Gay in History 🏺🏳️‍🌈

May 25th marked 131 years since Oscar Wilde was convicted of "gross indecency" after the first trial ended in a hung jury, but persistent prosecutors got Wilde sentenced to the maximum of two years of hard labor - effectively ending his career and his witty gay spirit.

The day before that, was Pansexual Visibility Day, Oscar was almost certainly not pan, but more than two decades before that Wilde trial, another poet was dragged into court over someone who he loved.

Poet Paul Verlaine was married to a young woman, but fell deeply in love with the teenage genius Arthur Rimbaud. Rimbaud, for his part, went on to have a later relationship with poet Germain Nouveau in London, keep a female companion in Abyssinia, and leave his servant Djami a bequest in his will. These were pan or bi lives before there was a concept.

Rimbaud was a literary prodigy by 17 when he met the decade older poet. Together they went on a whirlwind tear around England and Belgium, abandoning Verlaine's young wife and engaging in rampant sex, drugs, and poetry. On and off like their relationship, both poets wrote furiously, between fights, separations, drugs, and reconciliations. Their collaboration was the first sparks of the symbolism literary movement.

But living fast for two years had consequences and their passion lead to frequent drama between the two cursed poets. In July 1873, after a violent quarrel in Brussels, an unstable and altered Verlaine shot Rimbaud in the wrist. Their fight got Verlaine arrested. He was tried and convicted for the simple assault, because Belgium, operating under the Napoleonic Code, had long since decriminalized homosexuality. The frustrated police couldn't persecute who Verlaine loved, so instead they subjected him to a forced invasive examination to document the sexual nature of the relationship and gave him the maximum sentence of two years hard labor, just like Wilde.

Rimbaud writes A Season in Hell from the romantic fallout and guilt, his first published work. He then travels the world, joins the army and immediately deserts, all the while having relationships with men and women but none as tumultuous or as productive as his love of Verlaine, in fact he never writes again after age 21. He lived in Africa for a decade before illness forced him to return home and lose his leg.

Verlaine reaffirms his Catholic faith once free and attempts to reconcile with his wife, but still champions Rimbaud's work. Failing to reconnect with his still young wife, he moves to England with a former student, Lucien Létinois - whom he loved so completely he bought him a farm and wrote 25 poems mourning him after his early death. Verlaine's addictions brought him to poverty repeatedly, but his peers named him the Prince of Poets and when he died at only 51 he was very well regarded, his verses often being set to music.

Both Verlaine and Rimbaud are considered some of the greatest French poets.

A quick aside: The British legislation in 1885 that later convicted Wilde, also raised the age of sexual consent for girls in that same bill from just 13 to what it remains at 16 in much of Europe. It was still 13 in France and Brussels in Verlaine’s time. They do love policing queer and female bodies.

Happy Pan Visibility Day. We were always here, even when no one labeled it.

All Pride Month, we're following the cases, convictions, and rulings that shaped queer life in America. We'll see you in court.