Outrages Sex, Censorship and the Criminalisation of Love

'Sobering and timely' Peter Parker, The Literary Review

The bestselling author explores the history of state-sponsored censorship and violations of personal freedoms through the inspiring, forgotten history of one writer's refusal to stay silenced. Outrages brings us the story of the English poet and memoirist John Addington Symonds, and shows how a law created in the mid-1800s led to reverberations lasting to our day.

The Obscene Publication Act of 1857 effectively defined dissent and morality, deviancy and normalcy and if writers, editors, printers and booksellers did not uphold the conventional morals of society they faced serious repercussions.

Wolf depicts the ways this censorship played out, decades before the infamous trial of Oscar Wilde, among a bohemian group of 'sexual dissidents', including Swinburne, Dante and Christina Rossetti - and Walt Whitman in America - and in particular, John Addington Symonds, who fell in love with Whitman's homoerotic voice in Leaves of Grass.

Outrages shines a brilliant light on Symonds' secret memoir and the essay of his that is understood to be one of the first gay rights manifestos in the west. John Addington Symonds believed, hoped and wrote about a future freedom to love, speak and write without fear.

'[A] long-overdue literary investigation into censorship and the life of a tormented trailblazer, a prescient father of the modern gay rights movement' Oprah Magazine

'Remarkable and moving' Larry Kramer, author of Faggots and The Normal Heart

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.