Naomi Wolf - Outrages: Sex, Censorship, and the Criminalization of Love

Praise for Outrages

A heartbreaking, eye-opening book Outrages is revelatory in the way it brings together sometimes unbearably painful personal narratives with political and literary history [a] remarkable book.

HARPERS BAZAAR

A remarkable and moving work.

LARRY KRAMER, author of Faggots and The Normal Heart

With precision and sensitivity, Naomi Wolf traces how the state came to police the private sphere; she brings into the light the lives of those whose resistance to this brutality was a beacon for the future. Outrages is a remarkable, revelatory book.

ERICA WAGNER, author of Chief Engineer: The Man Who Built the Brooklyn Bridge

Outrages is a fascinating history book with a cast of characters and an epic sweep that make it read like a novel Charles Dickens could have written, if he had ever written one about queers.

NEW YORK JOURNAL OF BOOKS

In Outrages , Naomi Wolf reveals a largely forgotten history of how science, law, and culture have intersected to suppress and silence sexual expression. As expanding acceptance threatens to erase a history of LGBTQ marginalization and struggleand as we descend into authoritarian rule across so many countriesthis is an important, powerful tale.

SHAHID BUTTAR, marriage equality activist and attorney

[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

[This] remarkable book is a tour de force of research and insight into Symonds life and work and the related evolution of public and state attitudes toward homosexuality. [Wolfs] is an essential contribution not only to queer history but also to studies of nineteenth-century culture. It is not to be missed.

BOOKLIST , starred review

Wolf provides engrossing accounts of Whitman and Symonds, yet her story is even more compelling in its wider portrait of the societies and institutions in America as well as England that served to shape the fears and prejudices that have lingered into our modern age. An absorbing and thoughtfully researched must-read for anyone interested in the history of censorship and issues relating to gay male sexuality.

KIRKUS REVIEWS

This ambitious literary, biographical, and historical treatise from Wolf ( The Beauty Myth ) examines both 19th-century Britains persecution of gay men and the work and life of the relatively obscure gay writer John Addington Symonds (18401893) a fascinating look at this period and these writers.

PUBLISHERS WEEKLY

ALSO BY NAOMI WOLF

The Beauty Myth: How Images of Beauty Are Used against Women

Fire with Fire: The New Female Power and How It Will Change the Twenty-First Century

Promiscuities: The Secret Struggle for Womanhood

Misconceptions: Truth, Lies and the Unexpected on the Journey to Motherhood

The Treehouse: Eccentric Wisdom from My Father on How to Live, Love and See

The End of America: Letter of Warning to a Young Patriot

Give Me Liberty: A Handbook for American Revolutionaries

Vagina: A New Biography

OUTRAGES

Sex, Censorship, and the Criminalization of Love

Naomi Wolf

Chelsea Green Publishing

White River Junction, Vermont

London, UK

Copyright 2020 by Naomi Wolf.

All rights reserved.

No part of this book may be transmitted or reproduced in any form by any means without permission in writing from the publisher.

Front cover image from akg-images of The Sleepers and the One who Watcheth by Simeon Solomon (watercolor, Leamington Spa Art Gallery and Museum).

Copy Editor: Zoe Gullen

Proofreader: Nancy Ringer

Indexer: Shana Milkie

Designer: Melissa Jacobson

Printed in Canada.

First printing September 2020.

10 9 8 7 6 5 4 3 2 120 21 22 23 24

Our Commitment to Green Publishing

Chelsea Green sees publishing as a tool for cultural change and ecological stewardship. We strive to align our book manufacturing practices with our editorial mission and to reduce the impact of our business enterprise in the environment. We print our books and catalogs on chlorine-free recycled paper, using vegetable-based inks whenever possible. This book may cost slightly more because it was printed on paper that contains recycled fiber, and we hope youll agree that its worth it. Outrages was printed on paper supplied by Marquis that is made of recycled materials and other controlled sources.

ISBN 978-1-64502-016-5 (paperback) | ISBN 978-1-64502-017-2 (ebook)

Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data is available upon request.

Library of Congress Control Number: 2020944487

Chelsea Green Publishing

85 North Main Street, Suite 120

White River Junction, Vermont USA

Somerset House

London, UK

www.chelseagreen.com

For Dr. Stefano-Maria Evangelista

My esteemed teacher

Come, I am determined to unbare this broad breast of mineI have long enough stifled and choked; []

I will raise, with it, immortal reverberations

I will give an example to lovers

WALT WHITMAN, Calamus, Leaves of Grass , 1860

Nimporte [no matter]. I will go on writing, because I am sure that I love, in my way, and love finds a voice of some sort.

JOHN ADDINGTON SYMONDS, 1892

Contents

You must apply for a readers card to gain access to the rare manuscripts section of the Morgan Library and Museum in Manhattan, which is called the Sherman Fairchild Reading Room. At the top level of the imposing stone Beaux Arts building on Madison Avenue, the former private home of banker J. Pierpont Morgan, the rare books reading room is hushed.

You place your possessions in a wood-paneled locker and lock it. You make sure you have secured in the locker any object that might possibly create a mark. You wash your hands at a little sink with a steel basin, so you dont inadvertently smear the grime of modern Manhattan onto the precious, perhaps ancient, pages you will soon touch.

The rare manuscripts room has diffuse lamps, and opaque skylights overhead. Its lighting is indirect so that manuscripts will not fade. The dim lighting and the extreme care that the librarians take with every page laid in front of readers create an atmosphere of secular sanctity. That mood is intensified by the fact that readers around you are seated in front of wooden pedestals, which support open books and manuscripts; the deep indentation at the center of each pedestal, in which books are nestled and opened, protects the spines from cracking.

When the librarian brings you a book or manuscript that you have requested, she opens it carefully. She teaches you to lay across the pages a chain of heavy beads, like a necklace, encased in an ivory or a deep red fabric sleeve. This chain keeps the book partly open, while still protecting pages from creasing.

Ms. Maria Molestina, one of the librarians at the Reading Room, and her colleagues are all highly trained in codicology, the study and care of books as physical objects. For books that are too fragile to turn by hand, Ms. Molestina or another librarian will bring you a slip of heavy paper with a sharply angled edge, which you may slide between brittle pages to open them with surgical precision.

I was at the Morgan Library and Museum looking for a young man, now long deada nineteen-year-old student at Balliol College, Oxford. In 1859, John Addington Symonds was deeply in love with a fellow adolescent whom, I knew, he had identified carefully only as W. I was looking for the only handwritten manuscript of the unpublished love letter Symonds had written, which at once celebrated this teenage love and mourned its apparent renunciation.