The bestselling author of The Beauty Myth, Vagina and The End of
America chronicles the struggles and eventual triumph of John
Addington Symonds, a Victorian-era poet, biographer, and critic who
penned what became a foundational text on our modern understanding
of human sexual orientation and LGBTQ+ legal rights. In Outrages,
Naomi Wolf chronicles the struggles and eventual triumph of John
Addington Symonds, a Victorian-era poet, biographer, and critic who
penned what became a foundational text on our modern understanding
of human sexual orientation and LGBTQ+ legal rights, despite
writing at a time when anything interpreted as homoerotic could be
used as evidence in trials leading to harsh sentences under British
law. Wolf's book is extremely relevant today for what it has to say
about the vital importance of freedom of speech and the courageous
roles of publishers and booksellers in an era of growing calls for
censorship and ever-escalating state violations of privacy. At a
time when the American Library Association, the Guardian, and other
observers document national and global efforts from censoring
LGBTQ+ voices in libraries to using anti-trans and homophobic
sentiments cynically to win elections, the story of how such
hateful efforts evolved from the past, to reach down to us now, is
more important than ever. 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 ever-changing,
targeted 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, 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, 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 wrote a
strikingly honest secret memoir written in code to embed hidden
messages-which he embargoed for a generation after his death - and
wrote the essay A Problem in Modern Ethics that was secretly shared
in his lifetime and is now rightfully understood as one of the
first gay rights manifestos in the English language. Equal parts
insightful historical critique and page-turning literary detective
story, Wolf's Outrages is above all an uplifting testament to the
triumph of romantic love.
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