Canada generally claims its artists, even when they leave for greener pastures in other countries. Most of the time, we remember the writers, musicians, and actors who were born here or have deep roots here, even when when they rarely return.
Sometimes we do forget, though. Few here remember the name Robbie Ross, the Canadian journalist, writer, art critic, and gallery curator – and (most famously now to those who do remember him) close friend and lover of Oscar Wilde.
Ross’s legacy is deeply interwoven with Wilde’s, and Wilde’s place in history is very much about how his art and story shaped the early movement for “homophile rights.” And it is very likely that that story and that work would have been completely erased, if it were not for Robbie Ross.
Canadian Beginnings
Robert Baldwin Ross was born into what’s been described as “Canadian royalty,” though it’s likely his famous grandfather Robert Baldwin would have taken issue with that term.
Before John A. MacDonald swept onto the stage, the original architects of Canadian democracy – Robert Baldwin and Louis-Hippolyte Lafontaine – had already laid the groundwork and built the foundations for a democratic government in Canada, but neither lived to see Confederation.
Robbie Ross was born in 1869. His father died before he turned two. Ross’s mother brought her children to England to get a better education, but Ross returned to Canada occasionally throughout his life, where he still had family. He never lost his Canadian accent, and was sometimes referred to as “the Canadian,” in his circles of friends.
Robbie Ross left very written evidence of his life as a gay man, so we do not have anything resembling a coming out story. The elite “public schools” of Britain were notorious for fostering close, intense “Greek friendships” between boys, and schoolmasters – who were very aware of the risk these relationships could become sexual – tried to maintain constant vigilance over the boys to make sure these friendships stayed Platonic.
Ross never went to such schools – he spent most of his sickly childhood and teenage years travelling Europe with family and being homeschooled by tutors. Yet his biographer Johnathan Fryer notes that when he was seventeen, he was accepted to King’s College, Cambridge, whose student body was almost entirely fed by boys from Eton and the other elite boarding schools.
There he became very close friends with Oscar Browning, a famous teacher and tutor – 32 years older than Ross – who was once dismissed for an inappropriate relationship with a male college student.
As Fryer puts it, “something certainly happened somewhere, either at school or on his travels abroad, to make [Ross] not just enthusiastically but contentedly homosexual by his late teens.” While Ross was very careful throughout his life to keep his homosexuality quiet for practical reasons, there is never a sense in any of his writings that he felt any personal angst or shame about his sexuality.
Ross was 16 and Oscar Wilde was 30 the year they both moved into the same neighbourhood, the Chelsea district of London. No one is quite sure how they met. Frank Harris – a friend of both, but a newspaperman with a reputation for sensationalism – once claimed that the two had met in a public washroom. Ross was said to be 17 when they became lovers.
Both Wilde and Ross apparently said at one time that Ross had been Wilde’s first male lover. Wilde is supposed to have told Reggie Turner (one of the many homosexual writers in his circle) that it was “little Robbie” who had “seduced” him, while Ross was supposed to have told his secretary Christopher Millard that he wondered if he were responsible for all that happened to Wilde after because he had been his first – though Ross later denied this when asked.
Whether true or not, it would become a reliable accusation whenever one of Ross’s enemies needed ammunition against him, this claim the teenage Robbie Ross had seduced and “corrupted” the 31-something Oscar Wilde. Wilde was married with two children at the time.
(Frank Harris in his 1916 biography of Wilde, disputes this scenario. He claimed that Oscar Wilde had his first kiss with a boy when he 16 himself, and was widely seen as homosexual at college. Wilde wrote homoerotic poetry and possibly had relationships with men while at Oxford long before he met Ross.)
By the time he was 18, Ross was close enough to the Wilde family that he could move in for three months as a paid lodger, and lived with Oscar, his wife Constance, and their two sons.
However Ross came to figure out his sexuality, it had become so obvious (along with his dangerous interest in Roman Catholicism) that by the time he was 20, his mother sent him to Edinburgh, Scotland, where she believed that the austere and moral Protestantism of Scotland could cure him of both homosexuality and Catholicism.
(She failed at both, and like many of the homosexual writers and artists in England at the period, Ross soon converted to Catholicism.)
She arranged for him to work for a newspaper there. Ross came home sick, and feuded with his boss, who despised Wilde. The paper gave a terrible review to Wilde’s short story “A Portrait of Mr. W.H.” This was an essay disguised as a work of fiction, which presented a theory about the identity of Shakespeare’s male lover in the Sonnets. Wilde had consulted with Robbie so frequently while writing it that he said that “the story is half yours.”
(Wilde had bestowed on Ross a Shakespearean descriptor: “puckish,” as in Puck the trickster fairy from a Midsummer Night’s Dream, because because of his playful personality and sense of humour, and because he thought the short, thin Canadian looked fairy-like. The adjective followed Ross throughout his life, and was used by others.)
After he came home, Ross remained an almost constant companion to Wilde. This close companionship became complicated, though, after Wilde met his “Bosie.”
Lord Alfred Douglas and The Trial
When “Bosie” – the name Lord Alfred Douglas then went by – came into Oscar Wilde’s life, the writer’s feelings for Robbie Ross seemed to cool. He avoided introducing the pair for two years.
Wilde and Douglas were by no means an exclusive couple. Wilde’s and Douglas’s multiple lovers – frequently male prostitutes they sought together or apart – have been well-documented. Yet in the years leading up to the trial, Ross certainly looked more and more excluded.
He was still useful, though. Ross would spend a large portion of his life fixing the problems created by the lovers. The most obvious of these at first was money. The noble Lord Douglas demanded the finest restaurants and hotel rooms, and gifts, along with all of Wilde’s attention, which meant that Wilde found it hard to write.
(Wilde once estimated he spent £5000 entertaining Lord Douglas, or 1.4 million in 2024 Canadian dollars, most of which had to begged or borrowed in spite of the success of his books and plays.)
When Wilde took his “Bosie” to French-colonized Algiers on holiday – a notorious destination for sex tourism and hashish use – they not only left Ross behind, Ross found himself giving money to help out Wilde’s increasingly neglected wife and sons.
(Wilde had all but disappeared from their lives, and had left them without anything to live off of while he was vacationing.)
As difficult and complicated a person as Lord Douglas was – demanding, spoiled, and given to frequent tantrums – even worse for everyone who knew him was his father, John Sholto Douglas, the Marquess of Queensbury. A violent, abusive man who had largely alienated Victorian high society, Queensbury’s only other significant contribution to history was establishing the core rules for boxing as a sport.
Learning that his son had a sexual relationship with Oscar Wilde was not something that the brutal man took lightly. Queensbury left a calling card – a kind of public message that could be seen by anyone – at Wilde’s high society Abermarle Club, addressed “For Oscar Wilde, posing somdomite [sic].”
(Queensbury was as poor at spelling as he was at parenting.)
Wilde only saw the message ten days later, by which time other club-goers would have read it. Ross, always practical, begged Wilde to ignore the obvious provocation, but Douglas (who wanted revenge on his father) urged Wilde to sue Queensbury for libel.
Then as now, truth was the best legal defence against libel charges, and it turned out to be very easy to prove that Oscar Wilde had slept with men.
It was a bad look, too, when Wilde and Douglas ran off to Monte Carlo for a final vacation at the casinos when they should have been preparing for a court case, leaving Ross to explain to Wilde’s neglected wife what was happening and where her husband was.
Wilde lost the libel case, and a warrant was issued for his arrest. Britain had passed a law less than a decade before against “gross indecency” which not only criminalized all sexual acts between men, but effectively outlawed even romantic gestures between them.
Ross urged Wilde to flee to France, which had no extradition treaty with Britain and where homosexuality was legal. Wilde refused. The courts even delayed the warrant to give him the chance to flee, but Wilde decided to stay and fight.
Ross returned to Wilde’s home to warn his family of the political and legal storm that was coming, but they had already fled. He broke into Wilde’s office to steal his manuscripts and journals, knowing that they could easily be used as evidence.
Oscar Wilde was sentenced to two years of hard labour inside a brutal Victorian prison, and was kept very isolated for his first year there. Ross visited him when he was allowed. When Queensbury tried to further ruin Wilde’s life by getting him declared bankrupt, Ross – only 26 – was saddled with the task of trying to fix Wilde’s finances.
He called in every personal favour to pay Wilde’s debts, and managed to get £2000 paid of the most urgent debts. It was not enough, and Wilde emerged under a mountain of debt and limits to his freedom that bankruptcy imposed.
Douglas, meanwhile, complained jealously while Wilde was in prison that his lover seemed to want Ross’s company more than his.
The Wilde who emerged from prison is traditionally said to have been a broken man, barely able to write, shunned by society, and hiding in France – Ross sometimes agreed with this description, sometimes said it was exaggerated. Either way, Ross took care of him when he could, and tried to keep him away from Douglas, believing Wilde would return to his old ways if they met again.
Once when Ross had to leave France to take care of matters in England, Wilde drifted back into Douglas’s orbit, and returned to the heavy drinking and chaotic spending. They argued constantly, and split for awhile, but kept drifting back into each other’s orbits.
Wilde begged Ross to come back to him, and Ross did again and again, occasionally rescuing him (as when Wilde was broke in Italy and unable to leave). Wilde travelled Europe, partly on money Ross was sending to him plus whatever he could con or cajole out of old friends and acquaintances. Whenever he had money, he tried to recover something of the extravagant social life he had lost by spending every franc and lira on fancy hotels, fine dining, and men.
Returning to Paris, Wilde had become sick as a delayed result of an injury he suffered in prison. He urged Ross to come see him. Ross in turn asked Douglas to come and see his former boyfriend before he died. Wilde’s “Bosie” declined to show up at his deathbed, but sent am insultingly small cheque.
Wilde died a little more than a month later with Robbie at his side. He was only 46. He had made Ross his literary executor – the person in charge of all his writings – though with the public scandal, none of it had any value. No one would publish an Oscar Wilde story or stage any of his plays.
Life After Wilde
After Oscar Wilde’s death, Robbie Ross worked to salvage his friend’s literary legacy. He encouraged the plays to be performed (this happened first in France and in Germany, the latter the recent birthplace of the homosexual rights movement).
He also published a letter to Lord Alfred Douglas that Wilde had written in prison (with dangerous details removed), he encouraged the republishing of his works, and he gathered everything he could of Oscar Wilde’s writings into a massive twelve-volume collection.
While some moralists still insisted that Wilde’s memory be buried, gradually most of British society – and that of Canada and the US – warmed to the disgraced writer once more. Ross paid off the last of Wilde’s debts, and arranged the royalties of the new success to go to his sons.
While he said he had never profited off the estate, there was one object he did seem to have kept though (or perhaps it was a gift): a ring in the shape of an Egyptian scarab that was frequently mentioned as being on Wilde’s finger, including at his trial. Particularly later in life, an identical ring is often mentioned in descriptions of Ross and visible in at least one picture, but no biographer I’ve found of either man has confirmed it was the same ring.
(A friend of Ross’s – the horror writer Hugh Walpole – bought it years after Ross’s death, and insisted it was Wilde’s ring.)
When he was not busy with salvaging Wilde’s work, Robbie Ross wrote for a magazine called the Academy, and for other magazines – mostly art and literary criticism – and published short stories, including his most famous story, “A Case at the Museum.” This was a tale of an antiquarian who murders a man who was blackmailing him, mummifies the blackmailer, and hides the corpse in plain site in a mummy case at a museum. Lost poems of Sappho (the ancient poet who gave us the word “lesbian”) are also involved.
(Undoubtedly, writing about the murder of a blackmailer was cathartic, after all the blackmail threats Oscar Wilde and Robbie Ross had had to deal with.)
He also bought shares in a small gallery, and became an art dealer, an art buyer for another gallery in South Africa, and a government art appraiser. He helped make the careers of a number of artists, including Aubrey Beardsley.
He found love again. Frederick Stanley Smith was a clerk and an actor. Three years into their relationship, they moved in together. It was tantamount to a public declaration of love, and it sent Ross’s family into a panic.
(Ross had lived on and off again with another gay writer, More Adey, for half his adult life, yet no one seemed to notice or comment on it. Adey was always very careful to avoid any scrutiny about his private life and no one imagined they were lovers.)
Ross’s family even held a family meeting, then sent his nephew to him to stage a sort of intervention. Ross angrily refused his family’s demands, and he and Smith moved in together. They were together ten years.
At the same time, Lord Alfred Douglas was becoming a thorn in Ross’s side.
Ross had published a letter Wilde had sent to his former boyfriend under the title De Profundis. Wilde had instructed him to send it Douglas, but to also to have printed as a book after he died. Ross had obeyed, though he knew it would have to be heavily edited before any publisher would touch it.
Douglas had not bothered to read his copy of the letter, and had probably destroyed it. He had not been interested at all in the publishing, guessing that it was worthless.
Yet when Ross put out De Profundis, it turned out to be a massive financial success. Ross had put the money to Wilde’s debts and supporting his sons, but Lord Douglas began to feel cheated, and believed Ross was personally making a lot of money off of it.
Lord Douglas became stranger and more difficult as time went on, though Ross tried to keep the friendship up. He helped Douglas elope with a woman, and attended their wedding.
When The Academy magazine was bought, Ross even convinced the new owners to make Lord Douglas the editor. Yet, Douglas had turned into a man of loud opinions, most of them bigoted, and had had one of Ross’s articles rewritten to be much more vicious and express opinions he would never have had, without his warning or consent.
Ross left, and found himself an arts editor position at another magazine.
Douglas grew worse, though. Along with a muckraking journalist named Thomas Crosland (a moral crusader and patriot with a mistress and massive gambling debts), “Bosie” seemed to have decided it was his mission in life to to destroy Ross.
Douglas’s hatred of Ross had begun in jealousy and a paranoid fear over blackmail, but grew into a public moral crusade. Lord Douglas had reinvented himself. Now claiming he had not ever had sex with Oscar Wilde nor any of his other (many and well-documented) male lovers, the man who had coined the phrase “the love that dares not speak its name” had become a kind of inquisitor, determined to ferret out all of Britain’s other homosexuals, with Robbie Ross at the top of the list.
Ross – remembering what had happened to Wilde – did not rise to the provocation when Lord Douglas began routinely accusing him of “sodomy, socialism, and anarchism” in his magazine. When Ross helped out with a biography of Wilde (one that never mentioned Lord Douglas by name), Lord Douglas sued the author for libel, hoping to force Ross to the stand. That failed, and the case was lost.
Douglas accosted Ross at a fancy party with the prime minister’s in-laws, calling him a “a bugger and a blackmailer.” Douglas began encouraging the police to follow Ross and look into his relationship with Freddie Smith.
Though bankrupt himself, Douglas borrowed money from his family to pay private detectives to follow Ross and the other homosexual poets and writers that Ross had been friends with since Oscar Wilde’s day.
(Ross confronted a detective who admitted it all, fed up that Douglas was not paying him.)
Douglas then tried to pay off a medical student to claim that Ross had sexually assaulted him. The student was so upset that he went to Ross to warn him. Ross tried to pay off Ross’s new secretary (a gay Oscar Wilde scholar named Christopher Millard) to steal letters between Ross and Freddie Smith to use as evidence. Millard refused.
Robbie Ross had powerful friends, including in the British prime minister’s family. They had the Lord Chancellor (the man in charge of the courts and the police) put a stop to the police harassment for awhile, but Douglas found other ways to get revenge. One day, Ross came back from a brief trip to Scotland to find out Lord Douglas had moved into his building and was interrogating the doorman about his activities.
Ross had been extremely discreet. Aside from having moved in with his lover, and having refused to denounce Oscar Wilde’s crime, he had been very careful to avoid any public hint about his sexuality. He used code in letters (in a letter to his secretary Millard, he called homosexuals “purple people”), and in at least one case he burnt a letter from a gay painter who lived with his lover, because the contents were too dangerous for them both if found.
So he had made certain there was no evidence for Douglas to steal.
Lacking material proof, Lord Douglas and Crosland decided to manufacture some. When Christopher Millard’s lover Charlie Garratt was arrested, Douglas and Crosland promised to help Garratt with his legal issues and pay off his mother if they would sign a document stating that Ross had had had sex with Garratt. They threatened and even briefly kidnapped Garratt, and told his sister that Robbie Ross had kidnapped him and put him in a dress. Garratt escaped, and son and daughter both refused to sign.
Afraid and exhausted, Ross finally had them brought to court for conspiracy. In spite of the overwhelming evidence against Lord Douglas and Crosland, the judge and jury seemed to think that the trial was about Oscar Wilde’s sexuality, and Ross’s, and decided against Ross.
Lord Douglas and Crosland immediately sued for “malicious prosecution.” This time they had a competent judge, who ruled in Ross’s favour. After multiple bankruptcies each, neither Lord Douglas nor Crosland could afford to appeal, but Lord Douglas would keep slandering Ross in the press, and would keep sending the police after him for the rest of Ross’s life.
The War
A generation of young men went to the trenches in France, and most of the families Ross was close to lost sons. The two sons of Oscar Wilde – whom he had helped look after and provide for – both went to the front line. One came back, the other did not.
Ross was an avowed pacifist, a position that did not make him friends. He became the target of another Lord Douglas’s allies, a politician and conspiracy theorist named Noel Pemberton Billing who claimed that the Germans had a “black book” of 47,000 homosexual double agents in powerful positions plotting “the propagation of evils which all decent citizens thought had perished in Sodom and Lesbos.” The purpose of these “evils” was to defeat Britain from within.
Billing was sued for libel by the actress Maud Allen and producer Jack Grein, who were putting on Wilde’s play Salome. Billing turned it into a show trial with plenty of absurd stunts and cheap appeals to patriotism. Robbie Ross never testified, but he was named by Lord Douglas in the witness box as a “sodomite,” and presumably a co-conspirator. Though Billing’s absurd theories were completely detached from reality, the judge, the jury, and the public sided with him.
The ongoing hate campaign from Douglas, Billing, and their friends meant Ross endured continued police harassment, and even searches of his home.
It was not all evil. Ross moved into a large apartment on Half-Moon Street, a little north of Buckingham Palace, and decorated it with Pre-Raphaelite paintings, Chinese prints, and old books. The house became a haven for (mostly homosexual) artists and writers, including older ones who had been friends with Oscar Wilde (like More Adey), but also for a generation of young, gay writers who began to cluster around him.
Two in particular he became close to, a pair of poets who had been sent to the front lines of the war, and who would visit him whenever they came back on furlough or medical leave: Siegfried Sassoon and Wilfred Owen. Ross used his literary connections to help them make names for themselves, and publish their anti-war poetry.
(Wilfred Owen is still widely read today, and his poem “Dulce et Decorum est” is in anthologies and student textbooks across the English-speaking world. He died on the front lines one week before the war ended.)
Noel Coward, Scott Moncrieff, and Osbert Sitwell – three other young gay writers who would go on to fame – also frequented the apartment on Half-Moon Street.
Ross’s life became easier. As the war drew to a close, people became less interested in what Douglas had to say, and a few years after Ross’s death, Oscar Wilde’s “Bosie” finally wound up in jail for slandering Winston Churchill, who turned out to be a bigger fish than he was.
Near the war’s end, Ross received a public gala honouring him, where his large circle of friends praised him and donated money to an arts scholarship in his name. He also began working a job as an art buyer for an Australian museum, and was appointed to a position on the board of trustees of Britain’s national art gallery, the Tate.
He died in bed of a heart attack, a month before the war’s end, at the still-young age of 49. Siegfried Sassoon said it was “the only time [Robbie’s] heart failed him.”
Ross was cremated, and his ashes placed beside Oscar Wilde in his tomb at Père-Lachaise cemetery in Paris – a tomb Ross had had commissioned, and which had been built specially with a place for his urn. He had set aside his money in a trust fund to support some of his poorer friends, particularly More Adey.
Legacy
Robbie Ross did write fiction (his short stories are collected in a book called Masques and Phases), but he is mostly famous for supporting other creators. Countless writers, poets, and artists – including Oscar Wilde – would probably be unknown now, if it were not for the work of this quiet Canadian.
For our purposes – in a history of sexual and gender minorities in Canada – he might seem an odd choice of subject, given how little time he spent in this country where he had such deep roots. Yet Oscar Wilde would become a touchstone of what would soon be called “homophile movement” in Canada – a rallying point in the way that the Stonewall Riots would become for later generations.
When Robbie Ross took over Oscar Wilde’s literary legacy, Wilde had been essentially erased from history, and forgotten. No major biographer of either man had any doubt that Ross was responsible for him not only being remembered, but for him becoming a part of the literary canon – studied, read, and performed right to the present day.
There is another aspect of his story that makes it fit with this project, however. 619,000 Canadians would be shipped over to Britain, then to France, for the war. World War I left a profound mark on Canada’s history, a traumatic moment that shaped what the country would become.
It also transformed life in ways for those “homophiles” that has never been fully appreciated and rarely even discussed. The war helped produce those corners of the cities that are ours, and the communities that live in them. These corners that were modelled on the communities they found in France and Britain, and at which Robbie Ross was often at the centre.
First, however, we’ll detour to “Toronto the Good,” and have look at what Canada’s largest city looked like through a queer eye before the war.
Sources: My primary and best sources for Robbie Ross’s life are the two major modern biographies of his: Maureen Borland’s Wilde’s Devoted Friend: a life of Robert Ross 1869-1918 and Jonathan Fryer’s almost identically named Robbie Ross: Wilde’s Devoted Friend. Fryer’s book has a different name in Britain. Borland’s book is extremely well-researched, while Fryer’s book is not always as well-sourced and makes some odd unsupported assertions, seeming to veer toward the sensational. Both have issues when it comes to sexuality. For instance, Borland brings up the Freudian nonsense to explain Ross’s sexuality (absent father) and talks about his homosexuality frequently in very negative terms. Fryer hypersexualizes his life and the lives of other gay men around him. Both seem utterly convinced that Oscar Wilde was completely heterosexual until Ross converted him, which is at odds both with a modern understanding of sexuality and with a growing body of evidence about Wilde’s earlier relationships, not to mention occasional statements from Wilde himself. Lastly, both have the odd tic of referring to adult men as “boys” when it comes to homosexual relationships – an old trick for making homosexual men seem more predatory, and deeply unworthy of a biographer.
Frank Harris’s Oscar Wilde: His Life and Confessions is much more sensational, but written by a man who knew Ross and Wilde, and who was writing while Ross was still alive (with input from him). A few additional details were taken from Richard Ellmann’s Pulitzer-prize winning biography Oscar Wilde. The detail about the ring’s fate after Ross’s death was taken from this excellently researched blog post: https://eafitzsimons.wordpress.com/2017/10/03/oscar-wilde-and-the-mystery-of-the-scarab-ring/ by Eleanor Fitzsimons. For the legacy of Robbie Ross’s famous ancestor Robert Baldwin, I leaned on historian John Ralston Saul’s writings, particularly Reflections of a Siamese Twin. Like his grandson, Robert Baldwin has been slowly vanishing from Canadian history. I’ve read countless short biographical entries for Wilde over the years that do not mention Robbie Ross – the more recent the blurb, the more likely he is to disappear. Biopics, sadly not usable as history, tend to be kinder to him. The best – and the one that conforms most to his portrayal in historical biography – is probably in the 1997 film Wilde staring Stephen Fry in the title role, and Michael Sheen as Robbie Ross (Sheen is best known as of this writing for playing a very queer angel in an adaptation of Neil Gaiman’s Good Omens).
I have leaned far less on primary sources for this one than I usually, as my subject rarely spent time in Canada. Given the apparent biases in his biographers, I would certainly have liked to have had direct access to his letters. His stories, collected in Masques and Phases, are available through Project Gutenberg.
The second photo is courtesy of Wikipedia, where it is listed as public domain. My limited understanding of copyright law suggests that the first image public domain as well, but if I am wrong let me know and I will take it down.
The Drummer's Revenge 