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 chronicles the life of writer John Addington Symonds and how gay men in the 19th century would have feared long prison sentences and forced labor for “unnatural crimes”. The book had problems for the first time when it was published in hardcover in 2019, when Wolf, the author of The Beauty Myth, was confronted during a BBC radio broadcast by historian Dr. Matthew Sweet. Sweet pointed out that she had misunderstood the term “registered death” in historical records. Wolf had believed it meant an execution and claimed that he had found “several dozen executions” of gays after the last recorded sodomy execution in 1835. However, the term reflects a crime punishable by death that was commuted to a prison sentence. , a common occurrence. The book was later removed and peeled in the United States and corrected in the United Kingdom by Wolf’s publisher, Virago.
Now Sweet and historian Dr. Fern Riddell responded to the corrected edition, accusing Wolf of citing cases of men found guilty of sexually assaulting children and animals as examples of wider persecution of gays in consensual relationships.
In an exciting article in the Telegraph (£), Sweet pointed to Wolf’s depiction of John Spencer, a man she describes as “tried three times, accused of sex with three different men”. Sweet’s article says that Spencer was a school principal accused of sexually assaulting a group of schoolchildren and found guilty on one of the charges, according to contemporary newspaper reports and 1860 Old Bailey records.
“The names of these boys do not appear in Outrage: Sex, Censorship and Criminalization of Love. But John Spencer is there – offered to the reader as a victim of the Victorian state. A man whose love has been criminalized, ”writes Sweet.
Writing on Twitter, Riddell said that “I have never been so angry with a book in my entire career.”
“One of the most moving and moving parts of this story is the first-hand testimony of these boys. We find it difficult to understand the bravery of someone who faces their attacker in court today, IMAGINE doing it in the middle of the Victorian era, ”she writes. “And their testimony is not hidden, it is not sitting on a dusty file cabinet somewhere, it is digitized. Because it was reported in the newspapers ”.
Wolf also cites the case of Thomas Silver, 14, “‘indicted’ for an ‘unnatural offense'”, as an example of teenagers being “more often convicted” for attempted sodomy. Sweet and Riddell pointed out that Silver he was accused of “indecently assaulting” a six-year-old boy in 1859. In the book, Wolf claims that Symonds “would have read about what happened to teenagers like Thomas Silver when the word got out about his intimacy with other boys.”
Stephen Alexander and William Tibble, cited by Wolf as teenagers accused of attempted sodomy, were recorded as having assaulted animals, Riddell said, as well as three other cases in the book, according to court records. Wolf cites these examples as part of a construction operation, writing: “That year, more teenagers than ever were sent, alone, to the dark and brutal prison in Old Bailey.”
Riddell commented: “In reality, they were NOT teenagers convicted of consensual homosexual relationships. Both attacked animals. AND AGAIN, do you know how easily I found this? In minutes, in a publicly accessible archive. “
Sweet informed Wolf that several of the cases involved sexual assault on children or animals during the interview with Radio 3 in 2019. “The second edition removed references to executions after 1835, but it still represented these cases and many others as consensual,” he said in Monday.
Riddell said Wolf had “consciously ignored” the evidence to portray pedophiles as consensual gays, and that publisher Virago should “check[ed] each case ”before printing the brochure.
In a statement to the Guardian, Wolf said that his book had been reviewed and verified “by leading scholars in the field”, and that “it is clear that I have accurately represented the position”.
“My claim that a 19th century homosexual man in Britain would be subject to, and undoubtedly afraid of, prosecution under sodomy laws, and that sodomy laws included consenting adult acts, child abuse, sexual assault and even bestiality, is correct and not a misrepresentation of any kind, ”said Wolf.
In a later statement, she added: “Dr. Matthew Sweet and I are really trying to prove different points. Dr. Sweet thinks it is important to show that there were child victims and of course there were and there were, but I wanted to show that there was a climate of fear and that there was no distinction in the law between consent and violent male sex. The difference is a matter of emphasis. “
She acknowledged that Sweet was correct about Spencer and William Mepham, another man named in Outrages who was prosecuted for sexual assault of a child, but said such information would have been “found in the records of the time when Symonds himself probably would not have been aware . ”
Outrages was inspired by Wolf’s doctoral thesis in 2015 at Oxford University, which said that a “statement of clarification” for his thesis was submitted, reviewed and approved, and “will be available for consultation at the Bodleian Library in due course”.
In a statement, Virago said it “is pleased that Naomi Wolf has her book checked by scholars at the time.”