Douglas Messerli | Hidden Pictures [Introduction]

hidden pictures

by Douglas Messerli

 

Over the years, one of the most popular of LGBTQ fictions was perhaps the hardest one to actually pin down as representing the gay experience. There is no question that Oscar Wilde’s renowned fiction about a handsome, apparently bisexual man, whose beauty attracts both sexes represents the kind of closeted condition of the homosexual in disapproving societies. But to actually pin Dorian Gray to gay sexual activity is difficult unless you more fully examine his relationships with the painter Basil Hallward, the influences upon his character of Lord Henry Wotton, and, in particular, his former relationship with Alan Campbell over whom Dorian evidently holds some sort of power of blackmail, presumably their own sexual relationship including a letter. But all of these subtleties were surely difficult to express in the short silent versions which were highly popular in the second decade of the 20th century.

       The subject was filmed in Denmark, the US, Russia, Germany, and Hungary, but all of these versions are lost and we have only sparse listings and commentary on them. In a sense they have all become “hidden” versions the The Picture just as surely as Dorian’s own locked-away portrait