Wild about Wilde.

One hundred years after his spectacular fall from the heights of British society to the depths of prison and exile, Oscar Wilde is news again. Widely acknowledged as one of the 19th century's greatest contributors to literature, Wilde has never fallen into total obscurity. His epigrams are endlessly quoted. His paradoxical parables remain in print, most notably The Picture of Dorian Gray. And his plays provide a lasting monument to his immortality, especially The Importance of Being Earnest, which many consider the most perfect comedy in the English language since the Restoration.

Still, Wilde's work has been overshadowed by the story of his downfall. In a saga worthy of Greek mythology, the celebrated author, a married father of two, fell madly in love with Lord Alfred Douglas, nicknamed Bosie. When Bosie's belligerent father sent Wilde a note calling him a "posing somdomite," the author sued for libel. The suit backfired and left Wilde convicted, imprisoned, broke, and branded with the fate of being the first famous homosexual in history, which wasn't nearly as much fun as it sounds.

Now the life of Oscar Wilde is the subject of three high-profile works of art. Wilde, a British film directed by Brian Gilbert and starring Stephen Fry, opens in New York and Los Angeles on May 1. British playwright David Hare's new play, The Judas Kiss, starring Liam Neeson as Wilde, opens on Broadway April 29. Meanwhile, Moises Kaufman's docudrama Gross Indecency: The Three Trials of Oscar Wilde has been an off-Broadway hit for more than a year. The New York production has spun off successful companies in San Francisco; Los Angeles; Toronto; Boston; London; San Juan, Puerto Rico; Pittsburgh; Seattle; and St. Louis, with more in the works. And in what may be the ultimate measure of media currency, Wilde is all over the World Wide Web. The producers of both Gross Indecency and Wilde have created elaborate Web sites featuring photographs, sound bites, and links to dozens of other Wilde-related Internet resources. You can even find his astrological chart on-line.

Clearly Wilde stirs up intense fascination among artists and audiences, both gay and straight, at the end of the 20th century. Nevertheless, what his story has to say -- what meaning we extract from it -- varies widely, depending on who's speaking and who's listening. As Wilde himself said in his introduction to The Picture of Dorian Gray, "It is the spectator, and not life, that art really mirrors."

"Wilde exhibits one of the hallmarks of a great writer," says Hare, "in that each generation feels the need to reassess him in the light of its own standards and sometimes also to reinvent him for its own purposes." Certainly each generation of gay culture remakes Wilde according to its own interests, aspirations, and self-definitions. Whether we consider ourselves ordinary citizens unjustly denied civil rights or a specially gifted population that exists to bring beauty, creativity, and humor to the masses or a walking, talking rebuke to the status quo, Wilde as a designated martyr and gay icon provides a handy mirror for our shifting conceptions of who we are as a tribe.

Before the gay liberation movement arose, works about Wilde -- such as the 1959 film Oscar Wilde with Robert Morley and 1960's The Trials of Oscar Wilde with Peter Finch -- sought pity and tolerance not only for Wilde but also for his beleaguered gay brothers and sisters. "If you're gay in Britain, Wilde is the shadow that has fallen over the last 100 years," says Julian Mitchell, the gay playwright (Another Country) who wrote the screenplay for Wilde. "One of the effects of the Wilde trial was to make the subject undiscussable for a long time. I'm in my 60s, and when I was young, people still regarded homosexuality with extreme hatred and disgust and wanted all gays to go to jail."

After Stonewall, Wilde was embraced more as a radical figure who gave value to standing in opposition to society. British novelist Neil Bartlett grew up ranking Wilde with other literary "bad boys" such as Joe Orton and Jean Genet. Bartlett, whose dazzling 1988 biography Who Was That Man? A Present for Mr. Oscar Wilde remains the smartest examination of Wilde through contemporary gay male eyes, says he was influenced by seeing Wilde's plays staged at the Glasgow Citizens Theater by Philip Prowse in the mid '80s. "They were not done from the English-costume-drama perspective but as these vicious antiestablishment charades that spit on the grave of society," Bartlett recalls. "They were dark, glamorous and very queer. I can remember sitting in that theater thinking, This is fantastic! Rather than seeing Oscar Wilde in rather nice Victorian costumes being noble, I grew up seeing him as a deranged pervert. I set about becoming one as soon as I could."

Today, 30 years after Stonewall, the tide has turned. Having achieved social visibility and cultural impact, the gay movement struggles for legal recognition -- the right to marry, the right to adopt children, the right to join the military. In this climate Wilde becomes a symbol, first and foremost, of a legal injustice to be corrected. He represents somebody who wants and deserves mainstream acceptance. Novelist Edmund White points out that Wilde serves as a symbol of gay martyrdom. "But the attitude about martyrdom is changing from pity to real anger about how gays of the past were treated," he says. "That represents a shift in the attitude toward Wilde -- and toward ourselves. My boyfriend lives in Yemen, where if you're discovered to be gay, they push you off a cliff. That's going on all over the world. The battle's far from won."

What connects Wilde to 1998 is not just his contested legal status as a gay man but also the fact that in the theater of law, his story provided plenty of fodder for gossip lovers. It's no coincidence that Gross Indecency should be a box-office smash at a time when the American public is absolutely fixated on celebrity trials, which may be the most popular theater form of the 1990s. These nonfiction soap operas provide a respectable excuse for dishing the dirt, and -- with all due respect to O.J. Simpson -- Wilde's was the original celebrity trial. To dispute Wilde's claim that Bosie's father, the Marquess of Queensberry, libeled him by suggesting he was queer, Wilde's prosecutors quite literally aired his dirty laundry. A turning point in his first trial was the testimony of a housekeeper at the Savoy Hotel who said that she had found fecal stains on Wilde's bedsheets. Any Englishman with memories of boarding-school buggery knew what that meant. The public paid no less attention to such details then than we did to recent rumors of Monica Lewinsky's semen-stained dress.

Like all works about Wilde, Gross Indecency has its own agenda. The play paints Wilde as scapegoat, a victim, and a martyr. It captures the outrageousness of the author's being given the maximum sentence of two years in prison doing hard labor as punishment for loving men. At the same time, the play very effectively allows straight people in the audience to flatter themselves by identifying with Wilde rather than with the crowds who cheered when he was brought down.

Similarly, the movie Wilde bends over backward to give the audience a cuddly version of its hero. Nominally based on Richard Ellmann's comprehensive 1987 biography, Wilde creates its own fiction out of the facts of Wilde's life by focusing sentimentally on family values. The movie opens with Wilde's courtship of and marriage to Constance Lloyd. It conveniently skips over his days at Oxford University when the budding aesthete went around coining campy witticisms such as, "Every day I find it harder and harder to live up to my blue china." Provocatively the film suggests that Wilde (played by Stephen Fry; see below) forged ahead with the trials out of an attempt to supply Bosie with the love he didn't get from his abusive father. And it lingers on scenes of Wilde's neglected children while Fry's melancholy voice-over reads a story called "The Selfish Giant."

Marc Samuelson, who produced Wilde with his brother, Peter (both are heterosexual, as is director Brian Gilbert), takes pride in the fact that their film assumes a different view of Wilde. "Politically we've come past the time when the entire story would have been about his definition as a gay man. Now we're able to create a more rounded portrait of the man," Samuelson says. "What I'm really interested in is the side of him not as well-known as his wit. The caricatures portray him as this rather distant, queeny, epithet-quoting brain box. This was a man who actually had an inherent kindness, an understanding of life that was compelling and makes the tragedy of what was done to him more appalling and moving."

In a program note for The Judas Kiss, Hare writes, "Nothing is more deadly than those works about Wilde in which the playwright prances around spouting the epigrams which are already known to the audience." His own play purposely steers clear of the wen-worn phrases Wilde is known for. Hare's winning strategy includes, in addition to convincing screen hunk Neeson to impersonate the dowdy poet, zeroing in on two small but significant scenes that represent the mysterious ambiguity at the heart of Wilde's character. The first act focuses on Wilde's refusal to do what everyone wanted him to do: flee the country to avoid prosecution. The second act shows him doing the one thing that everyone wanted him not to do: reunite with Bosie after getting out of prison.

Hare believes that Wilde's persecution exposed the hypocrisy of society and that that's what makes him a contemporary subject today. "The modern media are full of people rushing to personal judgments about other people's behavior in a way that disgusts me," he says. What interested Hare about Wilde on a human level was that "he was a man who knew that his love was unequal, that he was not loved in the way that he loved, but nonetheless he knowingly persisted in that love. "

Hare has no investment in protecting Wilde's status as hero or gay icon. "In my play," he says, "the ultimate tragedy is that Wilde is destroyed as an artist." Like many of Hare's plays, The Judas Kiss portrays an independent thinker made vulnerable to unsavory political choices. Himself a political artist who's had to question whether theater constitutes direct action or contemplative passivity, Hare grants Wilde a complexity that's both admirable and infuriating. Without judging him the playwright suggests that for writers, no less than for AIDS activists, silence equals death.

While the recent rash of plays and films has thrust Wilde into the limelight again, not every aficionado is overjoyed about it. Social commentator Fran Lebowitz, who holds few things sacred -- but reveres Wilde -- expresses contempt for prevailing attitudes toward Wilde. "Most people don't know his work," she says. "They know only Ids life. It's easier to be interested in the life, which they try to force into a contemporary shape. All they know is that he went to jail for being a fag and he died. It's this ersatz democracy we live with. People think, He was arrested; I could be arrested. Therefore, I'm like Oscar Wilde. Wrong! He's a genius; they're not."

Bartlett's objection is that recent works about Wilde present a "sanitized" image of the man. "I hear him described as this archetypal humanist hero, one of the great individuals of history but just the same as all other individuals. Really?" he asks. "This was one monstrously talented loudmouth vicious queen who cut through London society from pretty close to the top to pretty close to the bottom. People make of him the hero they're looking for. I can't bear that."

This multitude of interpretations only reinforces the fact that Wilde is an endlessly fascinating puzzle that will never be definitively solved. As Bartlett acknowledges, "It's a measure of Wilde's importance that he doesn't mean one thing or even a small group of things. He strikes a different chord in different people for different reasons."