ABSTRACT
In his 1897 letter-cum-essay De Profundis, Oscar Wilde wrote with regret about his sex life:
The gods had given me almost everything. But I let myself be lured into long spells of senseless and sensual ease . . . I deliberately went to the depths in the search for new sensation . . . Desire, at the end, was a malady, or a madness, or both. I grew careless of the lives of others. I took pleasure where it pleased me, and passed on. I forgot that every little action of the common day makes or unmakes character, and that therefore what one has done in the secret chamber one has some day to cry aloud on the housetop . . . I allowed pleasure to dominate me. I ended in horrible disgrace. There is only one thing for me now, absolute humility.1
