For me, 'The Picture of Dorian Gray' is not just a clever supernatural melodrama, but also a profound text, a horrible vision of the power and frailty of human self-delusion. It’s not profound in the way Wilde intended, I don’t think. At that time, in 1890, he believed that beauty was everything. Yet his only novel is more persuasive as a tract asserting that beauty is nothing. The inversion is all the more touching, all the more upsetting, because – had Wilde understood and heeded the insights of his own story – he surely would not have delivered himself up to his own destruction with the reckless hypocrisy that he did.

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It seems wrong, casting Wilde as the author of his own misfortune. He is now seen so religiously as a martyr to homophobia that it’s almost forgotten that it was this gay man himself who started legal action against the Marquess of Queensberry, declaring it libellous to suggest he was a 'sodomite'.

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The pivotal moment in Dorian Gray is when Dorian, having done some charity work out of alarm at the unflattering cast that hedonism has etched on his portrait’s face, visits the attic to see how his good deeds have improved his expression. Instead, he sees an ugly sneer of hypocrisy despoiling his perfection all the more. It’s made me eternally suspicious of the self-righteous, which is not a good thing, on the whole. But it makes me all the more sad for Wilde, who knew how hypocrisy could ravage a man’s self-image, but chose to protect his public image instead.

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My Wilde binge didn’t start and end in that one day. I carried on that summer reading everything he wrote and everything I could find that had been written about him. It was an escape, a relief, an unjust victimhood that could be understood more impartially because it had no personal parallel at all with me.

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At that time I was furious about class discrimination, Thatcherism, the miners’ strike, all that. The fury was made worse by the fact that I’d gone to a posh university, the first in my family, and discovered – oh woe, oh confusion – that privileged people quite often seemed friendly, interesting, generous and likable.

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It was from these people that I first learned properly about feminism, which until then had been something on the telly called “women’s lib”, which my mother said was nonsense. But it seemed weird, taking lessons about oppression from these young women who’d had more opportunities in life than pretty much every male I’d ever known until I fell in with their crowd.

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Wilde, of course, had been a highly privileged man himself, privileged in background, education, intelligence and talent. None of which had stopped him from dying at the age of 46, broken and in exile. I became fascinated by gay rights, a proper fag-hag. Watching homophobia being exposed as a shameful weapon wielded by bullies and cowards has been a joy in my life, not because I think it has any primacy over other prejudices, but because it seemed more easily isolated and therefore more easily legislated against. I think recent history has borne this out. So, when the absolutely necessary railing against the 'dead, white males' gained currency, I thought, 'Up to a point, but … Oscar.'

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