GLR September-October 2025

BTW

return any borrowed books after the arrest, is it safe to assume that any outstanding fines for late books were forgiven? Those Best Laid Plans “Nobody represents anything,” pro nounced Nan Goldin in these pages many years ago; everyone is an individual. In that spirit, kudos to Vivian Jenna Wilson

Paradise Regained Of all the indignities suffered by Oscar Wilde after his 1895 arrest—the public humiliation, the two years of hard labor in Reading Gaol, exile in France after his re lease—we haven’t talked about the heartache of losing his li brary card. It turns out his reading card for the British Museum Reading Room was revoked when his legal troubles erupted. Thus it is heartening to know that the British Library has rein stated his library card after 130 years. In a ceremony that only the Brits could pull off without looking hokey, the reinstated pass was presented to Wilde’s grandson, Merlin Holland, a Wilde scholar and biographer. Describing the symbolic restitu tion as “a lovely gesture of forgiveness” by which his grandfa ther would have been touched, he hastened to add that Oscar would probably not have accepted the blanket pardon enacted in 2017 for the 50,000 to 100,000 men convicted of “gross in decency” over many decades: “Oscar didn’t think there was anything wrong in same-sex love,” so there was nothing to par don! One final question: given that Wilde was in no position to

on her debut performance at L.A.’s “Save Her” fundraiser in June, where @Vivllainous crushed it with her dramatic dancing and song. But the fact that Vivian is the progeny of Elon Musk makes it impossible not to read a little something into it. We won’t rehash Elon’s politics, but matters of paternity are more inter esting. The best guess is that he has fourteen children, most or all of whom were conceived artificially to ensure that they’d be male. This army of sons appears to be part of his ultimate mission (world domi nation?), so the arrival of Vivian as a trans woman could carry any number of lessons. Vivian’s per

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