THE TRIALS OF OSCAR WILDE for acts of “gross indecency” not only confirmed him as “the sexual deviant for the late nineteenth century” but also made him “the paradigmatic example for an emerging public definition of a new ‘type’ of male sexual actor: ‘the homosexual’” (Cohen 1–2). Given that De Profundis is the only major prose work that Wilde wrote on the other side of the scandals prompted by his 1895 trials,1 it is surprising that this text has received little serious consideration from scholars in gay male studies. To be sure, Wilde’s nonfiction prose and critical dialogues generally have not received the critical attention they deserve. But the neglect of De Profundis by gay male scholarship specifically is probably due less to the text’s marginal generic status than to the feeling that De Profundis betrays the iconoclastic image of Wilde dear to the hearts of twentieth-century gay men. In his letter to Lord Alfred Douglas, Wilde seems so — one almost hesitates to say it — sincere. Indeed, for critics such as Jonathan Dollimore, Wilde’s semblance of sincerity signifies a capitulation to the middle-class morality he otherwise resisted. De Profundis thus comes to mark a decisive break in Wilde’s oeuvre and to signal the end of his self-fashioning activities (95–98). However, the view that De Profundis represents Wilde’s sincere contrition does not originate with gay male studies but was, in fact, a popular response to the text upon its initial publication in 1905.