Outrages

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....
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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.