Outrages: Sex, Censorship, and the Criminalization of Love

by Naomi Wolf

Overview

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.

Product Details

ISBN-13:	9781645020172
Publisher:	Chelsea Green Publishing
Publication date:	10/09/2020
Sold by:	Barnes & Noble
Format:	eBook
Pages:	384
File size:	19 MB
Note:	This product may take a few minutes to download.

About the Author

Naomi Wolf ’s most recent books include the New York Times bestsellers Vagina, The End of America, and Give Me Liberty, in addition to the landmark bestseller The Beauty Myth. A former Rhodes Scholar, she completed a doctorate in English language and literature from the University of Oxford in 2015, was a research fellow at Barnard College and the University of Oxford, and taught rhetoric at the George Washington University and Victorian studies at Stony Brook University. Wolf lives in the Hudson River Valley.

Table of Contents

Introduction xi

I A Gentle Angel

1 "In Memoriam Arcadie" 3

2 "A Gentle Angel Enter'd" 11

3 1855: Leaves of Grass 25

II 1857: Outrages

4 Inventing the Modern Crime of Obscenity 33

5 The War against "Filth" 41

6 Sodomy as Part of the 1857 Reform of Divorce Law 47

III The State Regulates Desire

7 Formative Scandals 67

8 Calamus: "Paths Untrodden" 72

9 Symonds's Second Scandal 84

10 "Goblin Market": Attraction and Aversion 87

11 The State Seizes the Female Body 99

IV Love and Literature Driven Underground

12 "I Will Go with Him I Love" 107

13 Regina v. Hicklin: "To Deprave and Corrupt" 123

14 Dangerous Poems 137

V The Laboratory of Empire

15 Six Signs: "The Anus and the State" 147

16 Criminalizing "Effeminacy": The Arrests of Fanny and Stella 155

17 "My Constant Companions" 167

18 Comstock: Censorship Crosses the Atlantic 175

VI Countercampaigns and Resistance

19 The Arrests of Simeon Solomon 185

20 Annie Besant and Charles Bradlaugh 194

21 "The Greek Spirit" 199

22 "Were I as Free": The Secret Sodomy Poems 202

VII The Next Generation: Symonds, Whitman, and Wilde

23 "Love at First Sight" 213

24 Pilgrimage to Camden 218

25 The Labouchere Amendment: "Gross Indecency" 232

26 Prophets of Modernity 239

27 "The Life-Long Love of Comrades" 242

28 A Problem in Modern Ethics 247

VIII The Memoirs

29 "As Written by Himself" 263

30 "All Goes Onward and Outward, Nothing Collapses" 278

Epilogue 285

Acknowledgments 288

Timeline 293

Photo Credits 295

Notes 296

Selected Bibliography 327

Index 349

Editorial Reviews

A heartbreaking, eye-opening book . . . Outrages is revelatory in the way it brings together sometimes unbearably painful personal narratives with political and literary history…[a] remarkable book.”—Harper’s Bazaar

“A remarkable and moving work.”—Larry Kramer, author of Faggots and The Normal Heart

“With precision and sensitivity, Naomi Wolf traces how the state came to police the private sphere; she brings into the light the lives of those whose resistance to this brutality was a beacon for the future. Outrages is a remarkable, revelatory book.”—Erica Wagner, author of Chief Engineer: The Man Who Built the Brooklyn Bridge

“Outrages is a fascinating history book with a cast of characters and an epic sweep that make it read like a novel Charles Dickens could have written, if he had ever written one about queers.”—New York Journal of Books

“In Outrages, Naomi Wolf reveals a largely forgotten history of how science, law, and culture have intersected to suppress and silence sexual expression. As expanding acceptance threatens to erase a history of LGBTQ marginalization and struggle—and as we descend into authoritarian rule across so many countries—this is an important, powerful tale.”—Shahid Buttar, marriage equality activist and attorney

“[A] long-overdue literary investigation into censorship and the life of a tormented trailblazer, a prescient father of the modern gay rights movement.”—Oprah Magazine

“[This] remarkable book is a tour de force of research and insight into Symonds’ life and work and the related evolution of public and state attitudes toward homosexuality. [Wolf’s] is an essential contribution not only to queer history but also to studies of nineteenth-century culture. It is not to be missed.”—Booklist, starred review

“Wolf provides engrossing accounts of Whitman and Symonds, yet her story is even more compelling in its wider portrait of the societies and institutions in America as well as England that served to shape the fears and prejudices that have lingered into our modern age. An absorbing and thoughtfully researched must-read for anyone interested in the history of censorship and issues relating to gay male sexuality.”—Kirkus Reviews

“This ambitious literary, biographical, and historical treatise from Wolf (The Beauty Myth) examines both 19th-century Britain’s persecution of gay men and the work and life of the relatively obscure gay writer John Addington Symonds (1840–1893) . . . a fascinating look at this period and these writers.”—Publishers Weekly

From the Publisher