Was it courage or hubris that led Oscar Wilde to take a man to court for calling him homosexual? Perhaps it was his confidence that there was no situation he could not talk himself out of. But on May 25, 1895, Wilde discovered that he was wrong; he was convicted of "committing acts of gross indecency with certain male persons". Of course, it did not help that he had offended sensibilities with The Picture of Dorian Gray — parts of which were read out at his trial. Critics pointed out that "no work of mainstream English-language fiction had come so close to spelling out homosexual desire".

The suggestion of homosexuality is not the only thing that has been deemed 'indecent' in literature over the ages. But what, one may wonder, is indecency? Some may point at Swinburne, Baudelaire and Flaubert's airing of suppressed desires, while others would argue for the racist slurs of Huckleberry Finn or the profanity in Of Mice and Men. One way of elucidating indecency could be to look at the artist's choice of medium, which imposes upon him certain limitations if he is to convey his meaning with precision. When the artist's medium is visual, one can go by the "I know it when I see it" principle. In literature, since the medium is language, decorum is a question of the limitations and capacities of words.

Think of Vladimir Nabokov's Lolita — which, in the age of 'Me too', is once again fighting for the right to exist. Nabokov makes D.H. Lawrence and James Joyce look like a pair of old village bluenoses. In spite of the arduous recourse to the c-word in Lady Chatterley's Lover and the scatological frankness of Ulysses — both books faced high-profile obscenity trials — it is Humbert Humbert who really pushes the envelope. The verboseness of Humbert allows Nabokov to describe an act of frottage without becoming explicitly pornographic. Sample this: "Her legs twitched a little as they lay across my live lap... and every movement she made, every shuffle and ripple, helped me to conceal and improve the secret system of tactile correspondence between beast and beauty..."

Wilde recognized the power that words hold. In Dorian Gray, it is "[w]ords! Mere words!" that touch a "secret chord" in the hero, making him feel like he was "vibrating and throbbing to curious pulses". But in the end, Wilde's words proved to be his undoing. During his trial, on being questioned on the subject of Alfred Douglas's poem about "the Love that dare not speak its name", Wilde was suddenly moved to defend that love instead of denying it. He sealed his fate by announcing that such love "is beautiful, it is fine, it is the noblest form of affection". Wilde died in disgrace three years after his release, at the age of 46. If one goes by the definition "not appropriate or fitting", Wilde's was an indecent end indeed.