Liking men was not Queer in Europe in the days of Oscar Wilde

For 14 years, from his student days at Oxford until the trials in 1895, Wilde camped it up outrageously, first as an effeminate aesthete, then as an effeminate dandy. Yet he was regarded by society, the press and the public, as rather wicked; by no means as a pariah. It was only in late 1894, only a few months before the trials, that serious rumours about his private life and habits became persistent.

-- The Wilde Way of Setting Up Camp
The Irish Times, November 21, 2000
Alan Sinfield

The writer goes on to explain that in those days, effeminacy was just not associated with a sexual desire for males. Of course, they associated effeminacy with third sex, that is transgendered males who sought receptive sex from men, but it was just as well associated with 'heterosexuality'.

It is clear that this association between effeminacy and a 'desire for men' has been carefully and artifically socally engineered by the forces of Heterosexualization in order to discourage men from indulging in it.