"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. . . . 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.
Oscar Wilde, Quoted in Hyde, The Trials of Oscar Wilde, p. 201; also quoted in Ellmann, Oscar Wilde, p. 463, and McKenna, The Secret Life of Oscar Wilde, p. 391. The legal scholar Leslie J. Moran has questioned whether this speech, as reported in modern biographical accounts, including purportedly factual accounts of Wilde's trials, is a verbatim record or rather an editorial embellishment. See Moran's "Transcripts and Truth: Writing the Trials of Oscar Wilde," in Oscar Wilde and Modern Culture, ed. Joseph Bristow (Athens, OH: Ohio University Press, 2008), pp. 243ff. From The Picture of Dorian Gray: An Annotated, Uncensored Edition, from the General Introduction.