ARTS SPECIAL
from GLORY HOLE to GORY HOLE

To many people, Will Self is infamously known for taking drugs on John Major’s plane on the 1997 General Election campaign trail. But he has also become a prolific writer of novels and an outrageous commentator on everything from politics to literature and art. His latest novel Dorian is a grim, yet fascinating, re-working of Oscar Wilde’s Picture of Dorian Gray. His book is not merely a tale of posh, Chelsea, druggy faggots getting Aids from “a conga line of buggery,” but, like Wilde’s classic of a 100 years ago, is a savage and dark satire of our times.
As Self explains: “I realised that there was a close affinity between the decadent times that Wilde was writing about and the 1980s when Aids was becoming rife.
“Wilde’s book was the first openly gay novel published in England and was considered very shocking in its day. It was called ‘morally putrefying’ and even

Wilde’s closest friends put pressure on him to tone it down.
“Many saw the whole image of the portrait which ages while the young man stays beautiful and entire as a metaphor for Wilde’s own anxieties about syphilis. But new evidence from forensic pathology has come to light that seems to suggest that he actually didn’t have syphilis.
“When Oscar Wilde and his friends attended the premier of ‘Lady Windermere’s

Fan’ they wore green carnations and walked hand-in-hand. It was Oscar himself who provided a lightning rod for repression at the end of the 19th century just as Aids did at the end of the 20th century. Many gay people at that time felt Wilde went too far and he was cruising for a bruising, so to

speak.”
In your book, Diana Princess of Wales is called ‘the Royal Broodmare’ fag hag’ and