I'll be having a normal day and then I think about how when Oscar Wilde was being jeered at by crowds and led out in chains after being sentenced to prison, Robbie Ross fought through the crowds and raised his hat to him to honour him and give him back his dignity. And later Oscar wrote about it: "Men have gone to heaven for smaller things than that."
Robbie was also a lifelong Catholic and while he fought against homophobia all his life, lived as an openly gay Victorian man, and provided a safe space for queer men in his house during the Great War, he never quite got over his internalised religious homophobia towards himself. And back then the Catholic church had not widely accepted the idea that resurrection was possible after cremation.
But. After he died, Robbie asked for his body to be cremated, and kept in a small compartment that he had commissioned while getting Oscar Wilde's tomb made at Pere Lachaise cemetery in Paris. Maybe he didn't think he deserved resurrection. Maybe he didn't want to take up place in death just as he had tried not to in life. Maybe he was willing to give up heaven to be buried next to Wilde, even after Oscar's constant demands and betrayals, and Alfred Douglas's persecution of him, had taken a toll on his mind and body and led him to an early grave. We'll never know exactly why.
His wish wasn't even honoured till more than 30 years after his death, when a plaque was being installed to honour Oscar at the tomb.
And most people who go to Oscar Wilde's tomb don't even know that his little urn is buried inside, along with Wilde's body, under the quote from the The Ballad of Reading Gaol (which Robbie helped Oscar write and edit):
And alien tears will fill for him
Pity’s long broken urn,
For his mourners will be outcast men,
And outcasts always mourn.
Anyway. I'm normal. Ahahaha. Can I persuade y'all to go and vote for this adorable little kitten to be named after Robbie: Link to the Tumblr poll here
