Andre and Oscar

By Jonathan Fryer

An emotional friendship between two men unwelcome in society.

Beloved writers Oscar Wilde and Andre Gide met in Paris in 1891. They became part of what W. H. Auden called the ‘Homintern’, an international network of gay men and their companions. Through diaries and letters, Jonathan Fryer looks at the two men’s lives through the eyes of their mothers, their wives and their boyfriends. 

The two men would meet frequently throughout the world until Wilde’s death in 1900. By this point, their tables had turned. Wilde was poor, disgraced and ostracised because of his sexuality whereas Gide had launched a career that would make him the most famous French writer of his generation and win him the Nobel Prize. 

Andre and Oscar is not just a literary history, but the story of a society that would seek to destroy its greatest writers.