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Book

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Outrages : sex, censorship, and the criminalization of love

Call Number

  • 306.766 W854 (CEN)

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Publication Information

Boston : Houghton Mifflin Harcourt, 2019.

Physical Description

xviii, 377 pages : illustrations ; 24 cm

Summary

Until 1857, the State did not link the idea of "homosexuality" to deviancy. In the same year, the concept of the "obscene" was coined. New York Times best-selling author Naomi Wolf's Outrages is the story of why this two-pronged State repression took hold--first in England and spreading quickly to America--and why it was attached so dramatically, for the first time, to homosexual men. Before 1857 it wasn't "homosexuality" 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 became obscene, unprintable, unspeakable. Wolf paints the dramatic ways this played out among a bohemian group of sexual dissidents, including Walt Whitman in America and the closeted homosexual English critic John Addington Symonds--in love with Whitman's homoerotic voice in Leaves of Grass--as, decades before the infamous 1895 trial of Oscar Wilde, dire prison terms became the State's penalty for homosexuality. Most powerfully, Wolf recounts how a dying Symonds helped write the book on "sexual inversion" that created our modern understanding of homosexuality. And she convinces that his secret memoir, mined here fully for the first time, stands as the first gay rights manifesto in the west.

Contents

  • "In memoriam arcadie"
  • "A gentle angel enter'd"
  • 1855 : leaves of grass
  • Inventing the modern crime of obscenity
  • The war against "filth"
  • Civil divorce and the invention of sodomy as a crime against the state
  • Formative scandals
  • Calamus : "paths untrodden"
  • Symonds' second scandal
  • "Goblin market" : attraction and aversion
  • The state seizes the female body
  • Love and literature driven underground
  • "I will go with him I love"
  • Regina v. Hicklin : "to deprave and corrupt"
  • Dangerous poems
  • The anus and the state
  • Criminalizing "effeminacy" : the arrests of Fanny and Stella
  • "My constant companion"
  • Comstock : censorship crosses the Atlantic
  • Counter-campaigns and resistance
  • The arrests of Simeon Solomon
  • Annie Besant and Charles Bradlaugh
  • "The Greek spirit"
  • "Were I as free" : the secret sodomy poems
  • Braveries
  • Pilgrimage to Camden
  • The Labouchere Amendment : "gross indecency"
  • Prophets of modernity
  • "The life-long love of comrades"
  • "A problem in modern ethics"
  • "As written by himself"
  • Epilogue : afterlives.

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