Historians have accused Naomi Wolf of confusing evidence of sexual crimes against children and animals with the persecution of gay men in the Victorian era, in her controversial book Outrages.
Outrages tells of the life of author John Addington Symonds and how gay men in the 19th century would have feared long prison sentences and hard labor for ‘unnatural transgressions’. The book first got into trouble when it was published as a hardcover in 2019, when Wolf, the author of The Beauty Myth, was confronted by the historian Dr Matthew Sweet during a BBC radio broadcast. Sweet pointed out that she had misunderstood the term ‘recorded death’ in historical reports. Wolf believed it meant an execution, claiming to have found ‘several dozen executions’ of gay men after the last recorded execution for sodomy in 1835. However, the term reflects a crime punishable by death, which converted is a common occurrence after a custodial sentence. The book was then pulled and pulped in the US and corrected in the UK by Wolf’s publisher, Virago.
Now Sweet and the historian, dr. Fern Riddell, responded to the corrected paperback edition and accused Wolf of citing cases of men convicted of assaulting children and animals as examples of a wider prosecution of gay men in similar relationships.
In a scathing article in the Telegraph (£), Sweet pointed to Wolf’s portrayal of John Spencer, a man she described as ‘being tried three times, accused of having sex with three different men’. According to Sweet’s article, Spencer was a schoolteacher who, according to contemporary newspaper reports and Old Bailey reports from 1860, was accused of sexually assaulting a group of schoolchildren and being convicted on one count.
‘The names of these boys do not appear in Outrages: Sex, Censorship, and the Criminalization of Love. But John Spencer is present – presented to the reader as a victim of the Victorian state. A man whose love has been criminalized, ‘writes Sweet.
Write on Twitter, Riddell said she ‘has never been so angry about a book in my entire career.’
‘One of the most moving and saddest pieces of this story is the first-hand testimony of these boys. “We find it difficult enough to understand the bravery of someone who faces their abuser in court today, imagine that this is being done in the midst of the Victorian era,” she writes. ‘And their testimony is not hidden; it does not sit on a dusty bookshelf in an archive, it is digitized. Because it was reported in the newspapers. ”
Wolf also cites the case of 14-year-old Thomas Silver, ” charged ‘with an’ unnatural offense ”, as an example of teenagers “more often convicted” of attempted sodomy. Both Sweet and Riddell pointed out that Silver was charged with “immorally assaulting” a six-year-old boy in 1859. In the book, Wolf claims that Symonds “would have read about what happened to teens like Thomas Silver when the message about their intimacy with other boys came out.”
Stephen Alexander and William Tibble, quoted by Wolf as teenagers charged with attempted sodomy, was recorded assaulting animals, Riddell said, just like three other cases in the book, according to court reports. Wolf cites these examples as part of a repression in the building and writes: “That year, more teenage boys than ever before were sent to the dark and cruel prison in Old Bailey alone.”
Riddell commented: “In reality, they were NOT teenage boys convicted of gay relationships. They both assaulted animals. And AGAIN, do you know how easy I found it? Within minutes on a publicly accessible archive. ”
Sweet told Wolf that several of the cases involved sexual assaults on children or animals during the 2019 Radio 3 interview. “The second edition removed references to executions after 1835, but still represents these matters and many others as consensus,” he said Monday.
Riddell said Wolf “deliberately ignored” evidence to portray pedophiles as consensual gay men, and that publisher Virago ‘[ed] every case ”before you press the paperback.
In a statement to the Guardian, Wolf said her book had been “reviewed and reviewed” by leading scholars in the field, and that “it is clear that I represented the position accurately”.
“My claim that a gay man in Britain in the 19th century would be subject to, and undoubtedly fearful of, persecution under sodomy laws, and that sodomy laws include the consent of adults, child abuse, sexual assault and even bestiality, is correct and not a misrepresentation of any kind, ”Wolf said.
In a later statement, she adds: ‘Dr Matthew Sweet and I are actually trying to prove different points. Dr Sweet believes that it is important to show that there were child victims, and it is natural and there were, but I wanted to show how there is a climate of fear and that there is no distinction in the law between consent and violent male-male sex. The difference is a matter of emphasis. ”
She acknowledged that Sweet was correct about Spencer and William Mepham, another man mentioned in Outrages who was prosecuted for sexually assaulting a child, but said such information would be ‘found in the reports of the time. of which Symonds probably would not have. be aware of. ”
Outrages was inspired by Wolf’s PhD dissertation in 2015 at the University of Oxford, which states that a “statement of clarification” for her dissertation has been submitted, revised and approved and that it will eventually be available in the Bodleian Library.
In a statement, Virago said he was “pleased that Naomi Wolf has had her book reviewed by scientists of the period.”