No More Kisses for Oscar Wilde’s Tomb

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“On her blog, ‘A Love Letter From London,’ an architectural historian named Lisa Marie, who blogs under the name Miss Marie, wrote that ‘the continued devotion of Oscar Wilde’s fans more than 100 years after his death, represented by those lipstick marks, enhanced the impact of Epstein’s bold, modern memorial, making it an even more fitting monument to a great decadent and aesthete.’…A half dozen or so readers replied, all agreeing. ‘A drooled and kissed over tomb is as much history as the man who’s resting there,’ wrote a blogger who calls herself Superheidi.”

—From the New York Times, “Walling Off Oscar Wilde’s Tomb From Admirers’ Kisses” in response to the decision by Oscar Wilde’s family to cleanse his Parisian tomb of lipstick kisses and build a 7ft. glass wall to protect the tomb from admirers and their lipstick “defacement” and “erosion.”

 

LaToya Jordan is a native Brooklynite whose poetry has appeared in MiPOesias, Mobius: The Journal of Social Change, The November 3rd Club, The Splinter Generation, qarrtsiluni, and other journals. She has an MFA in Creative Writing from Antioch University Los Angeles and mentors a budding young writer with the organization Girls Write Now. She is inspired by crime dramas and often peruses the web in search of true-life macabre stories for her poetry. Her friends are afraid. She blogs about her writing life at www.latoyalikestowrite.com. More from this author →