Outrages

📖 The Scoop

The best-selling author of Vagina illuminates a dramatic history - how a single English law in 1857 led to a maelstrom, with reverberations lasting down to our day. 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. This new law effectively invented obscenity. 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. 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, making its way to the 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'. Wolf paints the dramatic ways this played out among a bohemian group of sexual dissidents, including Walt Whitman in America and the homosexual English critic John Addington Symonds - in love with Whitman's homoerotic voice in Leaves of Grass - decades before the infamous 1895 trial of Oscar Wilde. Charles Swinburne, Dante and Christina Rossetti were among the writers whose lives were thrown into jeopardy. She paints both a fascinating story and, crucially, an important way of understanding how we arrived at our ideas of normalcy and deviancy - ideas which are with us to this day. Most powerfully, Wolf recounts how a dying Symonds helped write the book on 'sexual inversion' that created our modern understanding of homosexuality. She convinces that his secret memoir, mined here fully for the first time, stands as the first gay rights manifesto in the west - proving that the literature of love will ultimately triumph over censorship.

Genre: No Category (fancy, right?)