About this item
The best-selling author of Vagina, Give Me Liberty, and The End of America illuminates a dramatic buried story of gay history - how a single English law in 1857 led to a maelstrom, with reverberations lasting down to our day Until 1857, the State did not link the idea of "homosexuality" to deviancy. In the same year, the concept of the "obscene" was coined. New York Times best-selling author Naomi Wolf's Outrages is the story, brilliantly told, of why this two-pronged State repression took hold - first in England and spreading quickly to America - and why it was attached so dramatically, for the first time, to homosexual men. 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. Wolf paints the dramatic ways this played out among a bohemian group of sexual dissidents, including Walt Whitman in America and the closeted homosexual English critic John Addington Symonds - in love with Whitman's homoerotic voice in Leaves of Grass - as, decades before the infamous 1895 trial of Oscar Wilde, dire prison terms became the State's penalty for homosexuality. Most powerfully, Wolf recounts how a dying Symonds helped write the book on "sexual inversion" that created our modern understanding of homosexuality. And she convinces that his secret memoir, mined here fully for the first time, stands as the first gay rights manifesto in the west.
About the Author
Dr Naomi Wolf received a D Phil Degree in English Literature from the University of Oxford in 2015. Dr Wolf taught Victorian Studies as a Visiting Professor at SUNY Stony Brook, received a Barnard College Research Fellowship at the Center for Women and Gender, was recipient of a Rothermere American Institute Research Fellowship for her work on John Addington Symonds at the University of Oxford, and taught English Literature at George Washington University as a visiting lecturer. She's lectured widely on the themes in Outrages: Sex, Censorship and the Criminalization of Love, presenting lectures on Symonds and the themes in Outrages at the Ashmolean Museum in Oxford, at Balliol College, Oxford, and to the undergraduates in the English Faculty at the University of Oxford. She lectured about Symonds and Outrages for the first LGBTQ Colloquium at Rhodes House. Dr Wolf was a Rhodes Scholar and a Yale graduate. She's written eight nonfiction bestsellers, about women's issues and civil liberties, and is the CEO of DailyClout.io, a news site and legislative database in which actual US state and Federal legislation is shared digitally and read and explained weekly. She holds an honorary doctorate from Sweet Briar College. She and her family live in New York City.
