Outrages: Sex, Censorship, and the Criminalization of Love

by Naomi Wolf

From  New York Times  bestselling author Naomi Wolf,  Outrages  explores the history of state-sponsored censorship and violations of personal freedoms through the inspiring, forgotten history of one writer’s refusal to stay silenced. Newly updated, first North American edition--a paperback original
In 1857, Britain codified a new civil divorce law and passed a severe new obscenity law. An 1861 Act of Parliament streamlined the harsh criminalization of sodomy. These and other laws enshrined modern notions of state censorship and validated state intrusion into people’s private lives. In 1861, John Addington Symonds, a twenty-one-year-old student at Oxford who already knew he loved and was attracted to men, hastily wrote out a seeming renunciation of the long love poem he’d written to another young man. Outrages chronicles the struggle and eventual triumph of Symonds―who would become a poet, biographer, and critic―at a time in British history when even private letters that could be interpreted as homoerotic could be used as evidence in trials leading to harsh sentences under British law. Drawing on the work of a range of scholars of censorship and of LGBTQ+ legal history, Wolf depicts how state censorship, and state prosecution of same-sex sexuality, played out―decades before the infamous trial of Oscar Wilde―shadowing the lives of people who risked in new ways scrutiny by the criminal justice system. She shows how legal persecutions of writers, and of men who loved men affected Symonds and his contemporaries, including Christina and Dante Gabriel Rossetti, Algernon Charles Swinburne, Walter Pater, and the painter Simeon Solomon. All the while, Walt Whitman’s Leaves of Grass was illicitly crossing the Atlantic and finding its way into the hands of readers who reveled in the American poet’s celebration of freedom, democracy, and unfettered love. Inspired by Whitman, and despite terrible dangers he faced in doing so, Symonds kept trying, stubbornly, to find a way to express his message―that love and sex between men were not “morbid” and deviant, but natural and even ennobling. He persisted in various genres his entire life. He wrote a strikingly honest secret memoir―which he embargoed for a generation after his death―enclosing keys to a code that the author had used to embed hidden messages in his published work. He wrote the essay A Problem in Modern Ethics that was secretly shared in his lifetime and would become foundational to our modern understanding of human sexual orientation and of LGBTQ+ legal rights. This essay is now rightfully understood as one of the first gay rights manifestos in the English language. Naomi Wolf’s Outrages is a critically important book, not just for its role in helping to bring to new audiences the story of an oft-forgotten pioneer of LGBTQ+ rights who could not legally fully tell his own story in his lifetime. It is also critically important for what the book has to say about the vital and often courageous roles of publishers, booksellers, and freedom of speech in an era of growing calls for censorship and ever-escalating state violations of privacy. With Outrages , Wolf brings us the inspiring story of one man’s refusal to be silenced, and his belief in a future in which everyone would have the freedom to love and to speak without fear.

Genres: History, Nonfiction, Feminism, LGBT, Sexuality, Queer, Politics

384 pages, Paperback

First published March 12, 2019

About the author

Naomi Wolf is the author of seven books, including the New York Times bestsellers The Beauty Myth, The End of America and Give Me Liberty. She has toured the world speaking to audiences of all walks of life about gender equality, social justice, and, most recently, the defense of liberty in America and internationally. She is the cofounder of the Woodhull Institute for Ethical Leadership, which teaches ethics and empowerment to young women leaders, and is also a cofounder of the American Freedom Campaign, a grass roots democracy movement in the United States whose mission is the defense of the Constitution and the rule of law.

Reviews

[Colleen · Rating 1 out of 5]

A book that passes off such massive mistakes as facts deserves zero stars. What’s an outrage is that no one caught these errors before the book was published. Anything to push an agenda, it seems. Trash.

[Deborah Siddoway · Rating 2 out of 5]

My review focuses predominantly on Naomi Wolf’s book Outrages: Sex, Censorship & the Criminalisation of Love , and its discussion of the Divorce and Matrimonial Causes Act 1857 (“the Divorce Act”), as this is an area that I have particular knowledge of. If nothing else Wolf demonstrates the dangers of writing about the law in isolation from the extant legal framework that existed at the time the legislation was enacted. Her consideration of the Divorce Act is flawed, in addition to the gaping holes and misunderstandings that have already been identified in terms of her understanding of British penal/death sentences.

From the outset, the title of the chapter where she considers the Divorce Act is misleading, with ‘The Invention of Civil Divorce’ suggesting that divorce, as a civil procedure to dissolve a marriage, did not exist prior to the enactment of the Divorce Act. Further, in the opening paragraphs she asserts that before 1857, civil divorce did not exist in Britain, and that ‘obtaining a divorce through the Church of England was the only option available’.

This is simply not the case. Since the 1690s, individual exceptions to the principle of the indissolubility of marriage had been made by Parliament. Importantly, and contrary to Wolf’s assertion, the church had no power to dissolve marriages. The Church could only pronounce for a type of legal separation that did not terminate the marriage. The power to pronounce for a divorce that dissolved the marriage vested solely in Parliament. In short, divorce did exist as a secular or civil procedure prior to the enactment of the Divorce Act.

The enactment of the Divorce Act did not come about in insolation, nor, as Wolf suggests did it come about on account of a ‘social reassessment’ that prioritised the policing of sexual relationships. Indeed, the Divorce Act came into being on account of the overriding imperative of the legislature to seek reform across the whole of the extant legal framework of the early nineteenth century, encompassing reforms across a broad spectrum of life, including reform of the criminal law, and the introduction of a modern system of company law. These reforms of the mid-nineteenth century would culminate in the passing of the Judicature Act 1873. This Act would completely reorganize the chaotic judicial system that had evolved in England.

Wolf has failed to make clear that the word ‘divorce’ had a different meaning in the mid-nineteenth century to what we now understand it to mean. The word divorce, at the time, was not intended to convey the concept of a severing of the matrimonial bond. Instead, it was used to denote a separation. This understanding of the word ‘divorce’ only evolved following the enactment of the Divorce Act.

She also muddies the waters by conflating the campaign for the reform of married women's property rights, with the reform for divorce law. They were different campaigns, and her assertion that there was popular support for divorce law reform, as well as a petition of over 25,000 signatories in favour of divorce law reform is false - the petition was in favour of the reform of married women's property rights.

Unfortunately the errors that pervade the book undermine her overall thesis that 1857 represented a watershed year in terms of policing sexual relationships. Nothing that she advances in this book can be considered to be reliable.

[Frank Lee · Rating 1 out of 5]

This is a poorly researched and already debunked book from Naomi Wolf, an author who is hardly a stranger to clickbait, conspiracy theories and self-serving controversy, e.g.: in October 2014, Wolf aroused controversy, with a series of Facebook posts questioning the authenticity of videos that purported to show beheading of two Americans and two Britons by the Islamic State, implying that they had been staged by the U.S. government and that the victims and their parents were actors. Later, Wolf also charged that the U.S. was dispatching military troops not to assist in treating the Ebola virus epidemic in West Africa, but to carry the disease back home to justify a military takeover of America.

Her latest book claims to examine Britain’s Victorian laws in an attempt to highlight the struggles of the gay community of that era, with a particular focus on the men she claims were sentenced to death by London’s Old Bailey court (London’s main criminal court up until 1913) in the 1850s, despite the last recorded hanging for gay sex in Britain being 1835. Unfortunately, the premise for the book is fundamentally flawed and has been thoroughly debunked by reviewers with expert knowledge of legal history: turns out, Wolf did not understand the meaning of the legal terms used in the documents she was reading for her book.

For example, in a recent BBC interview, a broadcaster (Dr Matthew Sweet, who holds an Oxford Phd/literature and was one of the contributors to the "The Oxford Companion to English Literature") read to Wolf the definition of "death recorded", a 19th-century English legal term. It turns out that "death recorded" means that a convict was pardoned for his crimes rather than given the death sentence. "Death recorded", according to legal documents, was a category (created in 1823) that allowed judges to abstain from pronouncing a sentence of death on any capital convict whom they considered to be a fit subject for pardon.

Wolf was convinced the term meant execution and was getting ready to speak about the "several dozen" similar executions she noted in her book, many of which rely on her completely wrong understanding of the term "death recorded".

[Pamela · Rating 1 out of 5]

Don't waste your time. Sloppy researcher.

[Bob H · Rating 3 out of 5]

This book has come in for some controversy, pre-publication in May 2019 (see, e.g., the New Republic on "Naomi Wolf's Book Blunder") owing to some possible errors in legal history. I'm reviewing this book, as most reviewers would be, in advanced-reading copy, which would have errors that the author and publisher might fix with the first edition. (Example: she refers to the anti-gay-teacher California ballot initiative, Proposition 8 in 1978, which may confuse the actual Prop 6 of that year with the anti-same-sex marriage initiative Prop 8 in 2008).

The book itself is something of a mash-up of social, literary and law history. She points to British legislation in 1857 that did begin several decades of increasingly repressive legislation, though she does try to make 1857 something of a watershed year -- she cites the Sepoy Mutiny in India of that year as some sort of harbinger. What she does show is anti-same-sex laws in the UK that were dangerously over-broad and vague ("indecent conduct" or "obscenity" were a lot easier to allege than the traditional crime of sodomy) -- but also that obscenity laws in the UK, and later, in the US under the influence of Anthony Comstock, that, starting with the postal systems and customs, ban the distribution of any material deemed indecent, be it same-sex poetry or birth control information, or whatever. Ms. Wolf does show how, esp. in the UK, an "indecent" book could cause the publisher's entire inventory to be confiscated and their printers destroyed, or ordinary booksellers sent to prison. However her facts, the reader does come away with the sense that Victorian prudery could have terrible legal consequences for the individual and society.

It's also something of a literary history in that regard. We learn that a famous literary-review screed, "The Fleshly School of Poetry", an attack on the Pre-Raphaelite school, could be not just denunciatory but carry legal danger. We learn how gay poets like John Addington Symonds could risk prosecution just for privately writing and privately circulating, almost in samizdat form, among friends.

Indeed, the book centers on Symington's furtive life, from his days in public school through his sham marriage, through his travels in less-repressive societies like Venice or Naples, and notably his correspondence and friendship with Walt Whitman. We read a lot about the history of Whitman's Leaves of Grass, from its 1855 original edition through its bowdlerized versions over the years, as the UK and US became more harshly censor-ridden. We see an aged Whitman meeting Oscar Wilde, in a new generation of gay (and oppressed) literary figures.

In all, the book is worth a read, if only to get a sense of the times, the repression, and how far society has moved since then.

(Read in advanced-reading copy from Amazon Vine).

[Grady · Rating 5 out of 5]

‘Symonds was an important figure who changed history.’

New York author Naomi Wolf, as a Rhodes scholar, earned her doctorate in English Language and Literature from the University of Oxford and was a research fellow at Barnard College and the University of Oxford. She has been on the faculties of The George Washington University and Stony Brook University: her subject – rhetoric. She is an accomplished and celebrated author of many books - some of her most notable successes include GIVE ME LIBERTY, THE END OF AMERICA, VAGINA, and THE BEAUTY MYTH. She lives in the Hudson River Valley.

OUTRAGES is both a fascinating treatise and a fine biography of poet/biographer/critic John Addington Symonds (1807 – 1871), whose brave writings are honored as the initial and most significant texts on understanding human sexual orientation and LGBTQ legal rights, a work even more poignant because of the Victorian era in which he lived. When asked why she chose to write her book on homosexuality and Symonds, she stated, ‘I decided to write about Symonds because my thesis adviser at Oxford knew that I was interested in Victorian sexuality. He gave me giant copies of Symonds’ letters and I was captivated when I read them. They start as the letters of a teenager, who was born at a time when laws in Britain criminalized speech and same-sex male intimacy in new ways. It’s this voice of a young man, who is only searching for true love…Throughout his life he only wanted to write the truth about love, but it was getting more and more dangerous as British law was inventing more and more laws on obscenity and free speech…’

Wolf’s immensely sophisticated prose and depth of scholarship make this the eminent volume on LGBTQ rights and the history as time has progressed since Victorian England. Or has it really progressed? The media today reflects the disparity of legal rights, especially in the light of the passing of Ruth Bader Ginsburg and the Senate debates on the possible addition of the opposite thinking Judge Barrett to SCOTUS.

Though scholarly in content, OUTRAGES encourages the reader to embrace the lives and significant efforts of Symonds as well as Oscar Wilde, Walt Whitman and Simeon Solomon, A more sensitive and intelligent survey of the ‘progress’ of LGBTQ legal rights history would be difficult to imagine. This book deserves to be in the curriculum of colleges and universities, law schools, and the libraries of all people concerned with true justice and the crime of censorship! Very highly recommended.

[Caroline Middleton · Rating 4 out of 5]

*3.5

Brilliant scholarship - Wolf has such a beautiful turn of phrase, she could make dry paint interesting - but a bit all over the place with structure and topic. Was hard to follow and pick up again because of this. A biography of J.A. Symonds or an analysis on all the laws that persecuted certain minority groups in 19th century England and America? Still have no idea. 🤷🏼‍♀️

[Sarah Schulman]

This is a really interesting book. Through the lens of the life of Victorian poet John Addington Symmonds, Wolfe takes us back to that moment (previously visited by Tom Stoppard) when the identity of upper class British homosexuals shifted from an encoded fixation on the Greeks, to the burst of light that was Oscar Wilde, bringing us into the modern era of...well...Camp.
But here Wolfe cites the introduction and various revisions of American Walt Whitman's Leaves of Grass, as the catharsis that provoked the elongated and excruciating self re-evaluation despite a punitive state and enormous fear of incarceration and shunning.
But Whitman too was a moving target, and so the connection across the pond was dynamic, productive, frustrating and formative. With censorship and self-censorship as cat and mouse.
If you are interested in the moment before Sexology (which in turn led to the Homophile movement, which in turn became Gay Liberation, which in turn became Gay Rights, which in turn became...) - the time of Wilde's most flagrant oppositional fierceness and before he was broken by imprisonment and brutality- then I recommend this book for you.

[Daniel Goleman · Rating 5 out of 5]

Outrages traces the march toward the criminalization of homosexuality in Britain during the 19th century, using the notebooks and poems of the 19th-century British poet and scholar John A. Symonds, whose writings mirror the growing stigma of romantic love between men during those years. The need to hide such urges among British men contrasts with the brash and openly homoerotic poetry in that same period of the American Walt Whitman as published in later versions of Leaves of Grass – volumes censored in Britain but passed around clandestinely nevertheless. That is, until censorship in the form of America’s Comstock laws took hold, making even Whitman’s work forbidden. This trend of legal aversion toward homosexuality put in prison its most famous victim, Oscar Wilde. And Wolf’s literary detective work reveals Symonds to have been one of the first to oppose the criminalization of homosexuality.
On the other hand, I’m unconvinced by Wolf’s assertion that the rising hostility toward homosexuality during this Victorian era was designed to distract the public from laws allowing heterosexual men to sexually abuse their wives, commit adultery without fear of the law, and victimize young girls. That double-standard prevailed, to be sure – it’s just not clear what the relationship between the two legal stances might be.
The good news: Outrages reads like a gripping novel, quite unlike standard academic renderings of such social history. You would never know this from the slanderous piece that ran in the daily book column of the New York Times, a character attack posing as a book review. For some reason, that reviewer focused not on the book itself, but on the author and her supposed history of getting specifics askew, and the confrontation by a BBC interviewer challenging Wolf on air about whether in fact particular convicted homosexuals were executed. That specific seems largely irrelevant to the overall thesis of Outrages, the social forces at work in criminalizing same-sex love. Besides, the book is based on Wolf’s thoroughly researched doctoral dissertation at the University of Oxford, hardly a slipshod institution.
That Times review perhaps reflects some deep bias of the reviewer. If she had written about Wolf in any other section of that esteemed paper her editor would have insisted that she at least get Wolf’s response, and with a little reporting she might have also learned that historians still dispute the point at issue. And had she written in the Sunday book reviews, the convention would be to note any inaccuracies in a non-fiction book in the greater context of a review of the merits of the book itself.
Naomi Wolf’s book Outrages deserves to be reviewed on its own merits – not through the lens of a bias against the author, nor from an ideological stance at odds with her opposition to criminalizing same-sex love. A book review implicitly implies the reviewer will actually read the book – a step several online reviewers of Outrages seem to have skipped.
So is Naomi Wolf’s Outrages a good read? I’d say so. Full disclosure: Naomi Wolf is a relative of mine. Still, I’m offering an honest assessment of the book.
In short, negative press aside, Outrages gives you provocative insights and a can’t-put-it-down read.

[gemsbooknook Geramie Kate Barker · Rating 4 out of 5]

‘That law was the Obscene Publications Act and it was a crucial turning point. Why? Because dissent and morality; ‘deviancy’ and ‘normalcy’; unprintable and printable were suddenly lawful concepts in the modern sense. This new law effectively invented modern obscenity. Before 1857 it wasn’t ‘homosexuality’ – a term that didn’t yet exist – that was a crime, but simply the act of sodomy. But in a single stroke, not only was love between men illegal, but anything referring to this love also became obscene, unprintable, unspeakable. And writers, editors and printers became the gatekeepers with a responsibility to uphold the morals of the society – followed by serious criminal penalties if they didn’t. And as the act evolved, joined by other laws against sexual representation and speech, making their way to courts, the authors’ or artists’ intentions were deemed immaterial. What mattered was if the work in question had a ‘tendency . . . to deprave and corrupt those whose minds are open to such immoral influences, and into whose hands a publication of this sort may fall’.’
This book was fascinating.
I am honestly surprised by how much I learnt whilst reading this book. Seeing how the laws changed in regard to homosexuality and why was really quite astonishing.
Not only was this book eye opening, it was completely heartbreaking. I was genuinely moved whilst reading some of the poems and letters that feature throughout this book.
It was hard for me to imagine the rhetoric and damage that was being spread throughout this time period. After reading this book, I was overwhelmed by how easy I found it to understand how these situations came to be.
Whilst we are definitely living in a better time, I isn’t hard to imagine this sort of thing happening again.
I am so glad that I read this book and I truly believe everybody could learn a thing or two from it.
Outrages by Naomi Wolf is a must read for everyone.

Geramie Kate Barker
gemsbooknook.wordpress.com

[Brian O'Shea · Rating 5 out of 5]

I have read the book three times. Full disclosure: I am married to the author. That said, I read all of her books prior to meeting her for a business related matter in 2014. Some time later and after we had ended our professional interaction, I travelled with her to Oxford where she was invited to continue her research as an “extraordinary fellow” of New College (post DPhil, which she earned and received from New College in 2015). Having full access to some of the most amazing collections of books, first hand accounts and journals, even some personal diaries, I had the rare experience of watching someone investigate this period and many of these people’s lives against some documents so sensitive, and ofttimes handwritten by the person being researched, that in the robust “primary sources” section of Outrages, you will see references to “held on at...” meaning Dr Wolf was holding the actual written primary source in a controlled and secure environment. Watching history come alive like this, a history which otherwise would have been forgotten, is the real treasure here for me. I’m a detective and also have a background in fields that depend on research of this nature, but to be able to transform all of that work and all of those revelations into a beautiful and shockingly revealing work is Dr Wolf’s gift. But the most important takeaway is that she treated the subjects of this book with kindness, tender prose, and type of dignity bestowed upon them that I am lucky enough to see and feel every day.

[Deborah · Rating 5 out of 5]

This book really drew me in -the writing was compelling and I became invested in these characters, these historical figures as they attempted to live amidst increasingly oppressive laws.
I learned a lot and had fun learning it.

The flavor of Victorian times was built on the literary and historical detective work that gave details replete throughout the book... it made the world of that time come alive. I was drawn into the lives of gay poets through the central figure of John Addington Symonds, and with him experienced the outrages of Comstock's "Anti-Vice" laws, the effects of which still reverberate and impact us today.

[Kenneth J Payne · Rating 5 out of 5]

The ugly truth of law making and Politics

I noted, before buying this book, the baying and tunnel visioned academics response, so lacking in any perception of the key issues of humanities right to its freedoms, as consenting adults, without the State and the so called intellectual or academic elite believing, or worse, censoring or legally deligitamising that right. The destruction of anyone's life on the too often spurious grounds of morality, often written by these same people to control or achieve a desired outcome of their own prejudiced thinking is the rope always poised around mankind's neck.

[Andy · Rating 2 out of 5]

I don’t care about the info being correct/incorrect. I read for the famous gay poets. Just wish it was told a little more interestingly.

[Douglas Pretsell · Rating 1 out of 5]

Much against my better judgement, I bought Naomi Wolf’s “Outrages”

Easily the worst historical evaluation of the subject I have ever read - riddled with shockingly bad misinterpretations, misattributions and stupid mistakes.

The radio 3 interview has already exposed her total misunderstanding of sentencing in C19th courts that led her to mistakenly claim 12 hangings for sodomy in 1857.

Others have pointed out her central argument about the “invention” of civil divorce was nothing of the sort.

My own area of expertise, led me to spot a few more awful booboos:

1. Wolff apparently does not do citations for extensive quotations from letters. This is exasperating as she makes some pretty bold claims and allegedly has access to unpublished letters. So there is no knowing how accurate her quotations from John Addington Symonds are (some look unlikely).

2. She calls Karl Maria Kertbeny “Kertelby”, repeatedly.

3. She thinks that Symonds was opposed to Karl Heinrich Ulrichs' theories (if she had actually read “Problems in Modern Ethics”, Symonds' book, she would have seen that this was not the case)

4. She claims (without evidence) that Symonds lobbied Ulrichs to get him to mount a campaign to promote “Problems in Modern Ethics”

5. She describes a meeting between Symonds and Havelock Ellis that never took place (they were due to meet in London but the illness that would kill Symonds drove him back to Davos before they could meet)

That is only after dipping in but on the basis of that and the public criticism that has been given this book I can only assume that it is riddled with inaccuracies and poor scholarship.

[Paula · Rating 5 out of 5]

Extraordinary! Despite some controversy from an ill-informed BBC host regarding a legal term that does not seem to exist prior to 1908, this book truly commits to its title..criminalization of love and the a focus on censorship for gay men in the Victorian period. The amazing thing is that not only did the state use penny dreadfuls and daily media to emphasize the power of the prosecution, but the Old Bailey Proceedings, the court's commercial answer to competition to the daily papers, also published sensationalized court events. Whether some men were executed or not, we may never know. But the sheer terror they must have lived in is palpable in these pages. But the message is clear, never give up on love. John Addington Symonds, the books centerpiece, found love in his words to a far away soul mate while embracing love nearby. He never gave up despite media pressures. Naomi Wolf has not only underlined this call to arms of the soul, but she has recently lived (or may still be) living it under the immense pressures of tabloid misreporting and what only can be described as censorship from those who once praised her work. I'm glad she got this book out, as she said in a May 18th Guardian article, we are in the fight for our lives. Currently embargoed in the US, but still available at home in the UK...this is a must read for anyone who has had to live in the shadows only to rise up in the written word through the tenacity and courage of writers like Naomi Wolf. Haunting, inspiring, and life changing...its book you will never put down.

[Laurie · Rating 2 out of 5]

It wasn’t until well after I read this book that I found out how controversial it is. In gathering her facts, she misread court records. Where she saw the words “Death recorded” she took it to mean that the accused was hanged. In reality, that shorthand meant that the death sentence had been commuted, and the accused allowed to live. She also missed that in those days, ‘sodomy’ did not just apply to anal sex between males, but also applied to child abuse. There were probably no executions for consensual sex- but there *was* hard labor, as Oscar Wilde discovered.

Wolf writes that 1857 was a year when being gay became a crime, or became more of a crime. The laws against homosexuality had been on the books for years. It was the year when the Obscene Publications Act was enacted; it allowed the courts to seize books on the mere suspicion of being obscene- without defining obscenity. The Contagious Diseases Act was put in place in 1864. This act allowed the police to seize any woman force her to submit to a vaginal exam; if they felt she was infected, she was imprisoned. The act also allowed them to examine male anuses; if dilated, the man must be gay. So it was a time of anti-sex legislation.

The author uses the lives of a few gay men to demonstrate what life was like them, and the book does give you a feel for the era.

The book has been withdrawn by the publisher; I have no idea if Wolf will rewrite it, if it will be published as is, or if its publication will be canceled.

[Patrick · Rating 1 out of 5]

Just another lame attempt to keep the gains that modern feminism made from being eaten away by the cycle of time.And she made a huge mistake linking people who were not given the death penalty to a phase she or her editors could not Google.Just another bit of “fake news propaganda “ and it hurts everything positive she did.She believed the legal term “Death Recorded “ meant a death penalty was carried out when in fact it meant the sentence was terminated not the person.So inferences to people being put to death when in fact they were not are not a good basis for outrage.Update the book has pulled by the publisher so I imagine all the factual mistakes will be removed.Preview/reader copies were put out so it will be interesting to see the differences.

[Hils · Rating 3 out of 5]

Even setting aside the fact that the main point of this book has already been disproved this was still not an enjoyable read. The author’s voice is dry and does little to capture the imagination, resulting in me caring very little about Symonds.

[Michelle Kilty · Rating 1 out of 5]

I couldn’t finish. The author takes a swing at an interesting topic and misses. Overall the book just felt lazy. She lost me when she vastly glosses over misinformation on the Internet while making a comparison that just doesn’t stand up. Just all over the place.

[Vicki Davis · Rating 5 out of 5]

Very academic and well-researched in spite of the one inaccuracy pointed out by early readers.

[Adam · Rating 5 out of 5]

Just an incredibly interesting book about the roots of modern day homophobia and the power of literature for social change.

[Al Bità · Rating 5 out of 5]

Wolf’s examination of the establishment and impact of the British Obscene Publications Act of 1857 and its aftermath hones in on the particular sub-section relating to male-to-male sexuality, specifically in relation to writing and publishing works dealing with this subject. Regardless of what one’s own particular response might be on this touchy subject, the book is easy to read, and deals with it in a compassionate and sympathetic manner. In this sense, the book is a welcome contribution for anyone interested in the study of human sexuality in general.

In dealing with this complex and sensitive issue Wolf examines the zeitgeist of late 19th-c England through its impact on a particularly interesting person: the English poet and literary critic John Addington Symonds (1840–93) and his circle of friends and acquaintances. Symonds comes across as a sensitive, considerate, gentle person, who is not only fully aware of his own particular attraction to members of his own sex, but is also completely at ease with his situation. The 1857 Act, however, changes that assurance, and sets in motion a life-long self-conscious unease and discomfort which could have stultified him: but Symonds was not one to be silenced.

Symonds was immensely affected and impressed by the American Walt Whitman (1819–92) and his influential Leaves of Grass and derived much consolation from it throughout his life, but he was also very much aware of the restrictions and precariousness in which the new laws placed him and his fellow artists. These included Algernon Charles Swinburne, the Rossettis (Dante Gabriel, William Michael, and Christina), Walter Pater, Simeon Solomon and Oscar Wilde. Each developed their own survival responses to the problem, with differing results.

Symonds extensive studies and writings on his pet subject were carefully crafted to avoid accusations of law-breaking, but there is no suggestion that he was backing down: his more or less unexpurgated writings were “secreted” for a later time, and are now appreciated as providing the basis for our modern understanding of the acceptance and lauding of male homosexuality.

This is not to say that the imposition of the obscenity laws did not negatively affect the personal lives of those predisposed to appreciate their role in human studies. Nasty by-products (such as deception, hypocrisy, blackmail, physical violence and even murder) were perpetrated with the acceptance and/or imposition of these British laws and promulgated throughout the Empire’s many colonies. It is an issue which still bedevils humanity globally.

Wolf’s book provides all of us with the opportunity to share effortlessly in unashamedly embracing tolerance and understanding in this regard.

[R.J. Gilmour · Rating 4 out of 5]

Wolf's book looks at the life of queer pioneer John Addington Symonds. Using materials from Symonds' that she discovered in archives she places him and his work in a broader historical and social context. She shows how he was connected to some of the leading poets and thinkers of his time.

In his quest for freedom and equality for men who love men, Symonds had help from an unlikely source. Leaves of Grass-a volume of poems published in 1855 by the American poet Walt Whitman-would be the catalyst of a lifetime for Symonds. This collection, in an utterly original voice, robustly celebrates the self and it euphoric relationship to the natural world and to other men and women. It sent transformational ripples through Boston and American self cultures. It would affect groups of London bohemians, Boston Transcendentalists, artists, writers, feminists, socialists, utopians, reformers, and revolutionaries, who would intern create new ways of seeing human sexuality, social equality, and love itself, and who would use that vision intern to build new institutions. 19

At the end of his life [Symonds], he collaborated on the sexological treatise Sexual Inversion, which would introduce the concept of homosexuality as an identity on a natural spectrum of sexual identities, as we understand it today. 20

Indeed, Katz's conclusions, accepted now by many queer studies historians but little known outside of that discipline, are worth quoting: “intense ‘love’ relations between men were approved of in the nineteenth century […] these stories [to follow in his book] revealed gender non-conformity being newly linked with erotic deviance […] These tales show how the early nineteenth century’s narrow construction of ‘sodomy’ was challenged at century's end buy a broad, new sexual crime, sometimes called ‘Gross indecency.’ That law, and others like it, first made oral-genital contact a crime […]” 41-42

In the nineteenth century, however, while surely people who felt this way constituted the same part of the population, sex acts between men and between women were not understood in terms of a particular “sexual identity.” Only later, with the rise of sexology, with the concept of sexual identity come to be defined and eventually accepted. 43-44

The Whitman scholar Dr. David Reynolds points out that “showing passion and affection [between men] was a more common part of the daily experience than it is today.” Katz Notes that in America and Britain, romantic love between men was viewed with admiration; while it was not assumed to include eroticism, at the same time, these intimacies did unfold in a context that permitted many kinds of eroticism… “From our present standpoint,” writes Katz, “we can see that these intimate friendships often laugh evidence of extremely intense, complex desires, including, sometimes, what we today recognize as erotic feelings and acts. Evidence survives of a surprising variety of physical and sometimes sensual modes of relating among male friends in the nineteenth century.” What these men lacked, he points out, is the language that we have today: his evidence of stories of male-male Love “show us men struggling for affirmative words to name and characterize those intimacies.” 44-45

Before sexology, there was desire, there was love, there were of course couples; all of these lacked the language that we use today. 46

But during the enlightenment, French philosophers felt that although they strongly disapproved of sodomy, the state had no right to intrude on private decisions about sexuality. A 1791 law completely decriminalized homosexual relations in private between two consenting male adult adults. A legal code continuing this tradition was introduced in France by Napoleon Bonaparte in 1804 and it was so successful that it was widely copied throughout Europe. The Napoleonic code created a haven in France for generations of British men who loved men. 46-47

Lord Campbell declared that pornography was more toxic than “prussic acid, strychnine or arsenic.” 68

This phrasing would haunt five generations of British writers. Legal culpability now shifted away from the actual content created by the author to the far more nebulous issue of the intentions of the author and distributor. Lord Campbell had criminalized the interior of the author's mind in the act of literary imagination…
The Obscene Publications Act of 1857 was a watershed piece of legislation. The bill gave magistrates powers to confiscate material deemed obscene, but it failed, just as opposing peers had feared, actually clearly to define “obscenity.” Decision decisions as to what cross the line were left to the cool or the fervid imaginations of magistrates. Because of this legislation, the professions of writer, editor, Publisher, and book seller had become tangibly more dangerous by the time John Addington Symonds came to professional maturity. 68

The contagion metaphor dissented to us in many forms.
Surely this reflexive use of it dates back to the Victorian period, when the notion of “social infection” was invented to explain how “filth” affects everyone.
The reflex of using a “social contagion” trope is prevalent in the way that modern commentators, religious activists, and men and women on the street express homophobia. Its legacy is also often apparent when censorship is being justified. 76

The streamlining of British laws under Henry VIII led to a 1533 statute, the Buggery Act, criminalizing “sodomy” as a state concern rather than solely as the purview of the church. It spelled out the “detestable and abominable Vice of Buggery committed with mankind or beast,” and it was punishable by execution. After 1533, British men convicted of sodomy were hanged. 91

As the human rights lawyer Baroness Helena Kennedy points out, when police forces are created, they need crimes to prosecute because the new municipal expenditure must be accounted for. 95

Whitman also returned to the manuscript of Leaves of Grass, which had been through two additions-in 1855 and 1856…107

To this version [1860] Whitman added two provocative sets of versus: one was the “Calamus” cycle of poems, also called the “Live Oak” cycle; it portrays romantic and physical love between men. (A calamus plant, or Acorus calamus, is a water plant with a distinctly phallic shape.) 108

The year after the “Calamus” cycle was published, a new anti-sodomy law was passed in Britain: the Offences Against the Person Act of 1861 consolidated all sodomy law into one modern, unified statute. This streamlined statute Took the chaos of existing common law-which could mean leniency toward defenders, as we saw, if jury and judges had discretion-and made a uniform. Lest there be magistrates not sufficiently bothered by the crime of sodomy between men, this law took away any judicial discretion in sentencing related to it. This new act define sodomy as a nationwide civil offence and assigned hard labour for no less than 10 years and for as long as a lifetime for the act. 119

By writing a poem to read to prostitutes, Christina Rosetti was not addressing a subculture, but rather tackling a major issues central to many women's daily lives. Historians confirm that Victorian prostitution wasn't segregated as it is today; it wasn't a discreet subculture that most of society never encountered. Rather, it was a porous realm that lower income Young women continually and casually entered and left. Many young women working as milliners, factory girls, shop girls, and servants often had to, or chose to, make arrangements to trade sex for money in order to supplement their extremely low wages. Many female agriculture workers would enter prostitution for a few years in order to save up money for a small business or to prepare economically for marriage. 136-137

The Contagious Diseases Acts allowed any undercover policeman to arrest any woman in Britain if she looked too sexually experienced, acted to flirtatiously, seemed too flashily dressed, was too drunk, was out too late-or was simply having too much fun in mail company. 142-143

With the four Contagious Diseases Acts, the secular modern state got into the business of separating “bad” Women from “good” ones. And these acts joined censorship law and sodomy law and giving the modern state tools to subjugate its potentially unruly citizens.
The philosopher Michel Foucault points out, in The History of Sexuality, volume 1: An Introduction, that the modern bourgeois capitalist state invented proliferating discourses about sexuality as a way to control and manage citizens. The way that the Contagious Diseases Acts joined the Obscene Publications Act and the Offences Against the Person Act to create this role for the modern state offers a perfect set of illustration supporting Foucault’s insight. 145

In doing what he felt was his part to address where he could the human wreckage of the Civil War, Whitman was gathering evidence of the redemptive power of love between men, what he would later call “adhesiveness.” 149

But this socially sanctioned “cure” of marriage, for what was “wrong” with Symonds, proved, of course, to be no cure at all. Marriage, and even fatherhood, did not solve the problem that Symonds called “the wolfe”-his powerful homer erotic desires. He felt compelled to sneak out to visit the public baths, two gaze surreptitiously at naked men. 159

The question that determined whether a crime had been committed was no longer “Is the tax disturbing the king's peace?” (pre-1857) or “Did the author intend for this to be obscene?” (1857-68). Rather, it was “Could an innocent person open to corruption experience any part of this as obscene, no matter what else is in it or what the author intended?” 168

This use of Greek as code and tactic was not now unusual: educated homosexual men had started to translate certain phrases in their letters into Greek. The sentences could make it through the mail and into a private home with reasonable safety; the may who might tidy up a desk generally locked a classical education. 187

In sodomy trials, the state had begun to seek out testimony from a new breed of medical men. They claim to be able to determine, by means of intrusive examinations, whether a man had been anally penetrated in an act of sodomy. Their field of study was called “venereology.”
There is a modern meeting for this term; it refers to the field concerned with treatment of venereal diseases. In 1870, though, the field included the study of venereal diseases but also a lucrative and socially influential sideline. Its practitioners worked with criminologists, the police, and the courts to confirm who was a virgin, who was a prostitute, who had been raped and who had anal sex. 193-194

In other words, on the basis of an imaginary taxonomy, by 1870, British men could be brutally examined and sent to prison. 194

Like the equally mythological witch’s marks that characterized earlier hunts targeting women, in the anti-catamite hysteria of the 1860s and 1870s, fantastical beliefs about men's bodies and how they “revealed” guilt were used to incriminate men.

[Scott] Long uses the term “moral panic” to describe a crucial innovation of modern statecraft: whipping up fears of “degeneracy” as a way to control populations. That dynamic is critical and understanding how legal homophobia was codified in Victorian Britain at a time when the state sought to consolidate its control. The form of homophobia produced in this crucible still endures.
Here is another legacy of the period. The Victorians focussed medically on the passive recipient of sodomy as being the more visibly guilty party. And the passive recipient of an act of sodomy is often seen, according to the modern homophobic Point of view, as "more guilty” than the active partner. 197-198

As you recall, before 1827, court descriptions of thought of me were a matter of fact. You weren't supposed to commit sodomy, but it wasn't usually described as “unnatural.” 201

“Unnatural” is a vexing term to introduce into the law-it gives power to the entity charge with the defining the “unnatural.” For what is indeed the “unnatural,” and how can this a nebulous term be defined? And once a man who loves a man is defined as “unnatural,” how can he possibly rebut such a damning yet unclear charge? 202

The masses rather liked these transgressive men. Huge crowds and immense press interest in the men who insisted on being dressed as women after their trial continued without pause. Once again, the state forced the men to dress in men's clothing, this time that when they appeared again before the magistrate. 207

“Effeminacy” has the starting point of a crime had now been brought into a British courtroom. But what is “effeminacy?” The famous trial explicitly linked effeminacy and sodomy.
In his memoirs, Symonds struggled to refute this assumed link between sodomy and “effeminacy.” Refuting Ulrichs, and his theory that some “Urnings” possessed feminine souls and masculine bodies, Symonds wrote, “I do not recognize anything was justifies the theory of a female soul. Morally and intellectually, in character and taste and habits, I am more masculine than many men I know who adore women. I have no feminine feelings for males who rouse my desires. The anomaly of my position is that I admire the physical beauty of men more than women, derive more pleasure from their contact and society, and Amster to sexual sensations exclusively by persons of the male sex.” This clearly expresses his attitude toward masculinity and male-male desire. 209

Simeon Solomon, a gifted painter, was a close friend of Symonds end of the literary and art critic Walter Pater, who was based at Brasenose College in Oxford. Symonds and Pater we're friends as well. Solomon was charming, magnetic, and privileged. The scion of a wealthy Jewish merchant family based in London, he was also a sought after member of the Pre-Raphaelite circle. Solomon's early exhibits, in the 1860s, in prestigious London galleries and exhibition halls had been praised by Pater and celebrated by other cultural gatekeepers as well. By the early 1870s, his star was ascendent. 215

Symonds had titled his work awkwardly: A Problem in Greek Ethics: Being an Inquiry into the Phenomenon of Sexual Inversion, Addressed Especially to Medical Psychologists and Jurists. He had turned the handwritten draft into a 48 page pamphlet, which he privately printed. 225

In the 1870s, a powerful alliance was forged in America among abolitionists, public health reformers, temperance reformers, and certain feminist advocates for women to become what the historian David J. Pivar calls “the social purity alliance.” 231

Anthony Comstock, a US postal inspector, was an ardent Christian active in the Young Men's Christian Association. In 1873, Comstock founded the New York Society for the suppression of vice. Later that year, moving quickly, he successfully lobbied Congress to pass what became known as the Comstock law, which criminalized male transport of any “obscene, lewd, and/or lascivious” Materials. The nominal target of this law was material related to abortion. But it soon swept up material related to contraception, and then to sexuality in general. 232-233

With US censorship activities coming to a peak, Whitman, like his British friends, Felt he had to construct a literary bonfire. He piled upon it masses of his personal letters and manuscripts. We will never be able to read the poems and essays by Whitman that were consumed in this conflagration of 1874. 233-234

In 1873, Simeon Solomon was arrested in a public urinal near the thoroughfare of Oxford Street, London, and was accused by the municipal police of having sought to solicit an act of sodomy. He was find 100 pounds; but he was not at the time sentenced to prison. Word of the scandal, though, tore through the same polite society that was the source of his exhibits end of his patronage.
In 1874, Simeon Solomon was arrested again. This time, the event took place in Paris. He was caught in a public urinal with a male prostitute named Henri Lefranc. The artist was charged with outrage public a la pudeur (outrage to the public decency, or modesty). Though consensual sex between men in private was legal in France, Solomon had broken the law by soliciting sex in a public setting.
He was convicted and served three months in a Paris jail.
When he returned to Britain, his career did not recover it's former luster. Few patrons sought him out, but within the small circle of those who shared his sense of beauty and his orientation, he became a cult figure. Symonds, Pater, and others who felt themselves to be in alignment with him quietly began to collect and privately to display his work.
At the Morgan library, Ms. Molestina produced a copy of the first volume of Symonds’s Studies of the Greek Poets. It wasn't just any copy; it had been the personal property of the undergraduate Oscar Wilde. When Wilde first health this book at age 24, he was older than most of his peers. He had graduated from Trinity college Dublin, and was at Magdalen College on a scholarship.
This was one of the very first text to transmit homosexual history from an older generation to a younger one. Thirteen years after Symonds, as a student himself, had relinquished his own love, Symonds crafted these volumes validating the love of men for one another, which would be assigned to a new court of students who might find that such “lives” resonated with them. 240-241

By reading “Phaedra’s,” as we saw, thousands of British school boys first encountered the idea that there had been a civilization in which men loved men. Pater also in voted Michelangelo-known by Symonds’s circle to have been homosexual-and Michelangelo's painting of still another platonic character, Charades. Charmides was often invoked, by men in Symonds’s world, to signify homo erotic desire. 249-250

It seems clear to me that the climate of censorship, the related trials and convictions, and the wording of Hicklin all influence the formation of Aestheticism. When an entire nation judiciary has become obsessed with art as a cause of specific moral effect in real life- and when proof of that cause and effect can send an artist to prison-it seems inevitable that a philosophy would arise created by artist and writers, entirely to decouple art from life, making the claim that art has no responsibility for morals whatsoever. 281-282

Wild sailed for the New World from Liverpool in 1881 and stayed through 1882. 282

The Philadelphia [Press] reporter asked Wilde about influences upon him: “what poet do you most admire in American literature?” Wilde replied directly: "I think that Walt Whitman and Emerson have given the world more than anyone else […] I ad

[Annarella · Rating 2 out of 5]

I read about the historical error in this book but those aren't the reason I gave it two stars.
I can say I learned something new but the preaching tone and the style of writing grated on my nerves.
It was like reading something written by a preacher who is trying to convince you that her thesis is correct and all the rest is wrong.
Many thanks to the publisher and Edelweiss for this ARC, all opinions are mine.

[Swastik Mahapatra · Rating 3 out of 5]

The book has a historical approach to understand the origins of love and sex ,but it fails to depict a clear view on depth of cencorship undertaken during the Victorian phase ,over all the facts and history are mesmerising and gives an over view about today's culture .

[Ally]

Ugh, I so wanted to finish this but all the unnecessary/excessive poetry excerpts really made it drag 😑 Also it was all over the place like a bucket of water.

[Hal K · Rating 2 out of 5]

Somehow got to page 82 before I caved in and decided to look up what other people made of this strange book I’d been trying to grapple with since picking it up for the neat orange on white cover. Here’s some Things I let go before page 82:

One too many references to online databases - where were the primary sources. Was this researched solely in lockdown ? Is the author maybe not a historian and more of an English lit scholar?

citing search hits for key words in a database is laughably lazy scholarship. It might work for a marketing campaign but come on ! there wasn’t even an attempt to talk about how the language of today differs and how certain words maybe carry different meanings.

Poetry analysis seemed really surface level and plonked in without a great deal of connection to previous chapters/points.

Repetition of concluding points. There’s a bit where she mentions symmonds would have read about people being locked away and then she does so again in more or less the same way half a page down.

Lots of weird formatting. for instance, quotes from court records that seemed lazily copy and pasted with huge capitalisation ie ‘GUILTY VERDICT’

Really bizarre chapter conclusion that, after a deep analysis of Victorian era policing of homosexuality started rambling about Twitter and the modern era. Felt very out of place and just totally unconnected to the previous 30 pages. An intern could have told her that.

It’s a shame because there are moments I was quite captivated and interested to learn about this period, but it was just all so lazyy.

And then I saw all the actual scholarly issues with the work on here.

[Maggie McVey · Rating 1 out of 5]

So, so disappointed. I had no idea about the controversy behind this and the author before picking it up in the bookstore a few months back. I planned on saving it and reading for Pride month. Once I researched a little, I was “outrage”d.

Those who insist that the contents of the book should be separated from the background of the author have to consider that we do not live in a vacuum. Try as they might, writers are never fully objective, and I am of the opinion that you cannot separate “art” from the “artist”. Therefore I can’t in good conscience recommend this book, as I had hoped to.

[Grace Matherne · Rating 3 out of 5]

I am not sure if this publication had erased the errors of the first since I know the author had missed some context of British historical law. However, I took this edition with a grain of salt and found that the story was interesting. There were tangents and lots of excised portions of quotes. But I did enjoy hearing about the life of someone I had never heard of before and their struggle and journey of acceptance in difficult circumstances. I found the discussion of censorship interesting as well. I will definitely be reading more on the subject.