Author Naomi Wolf has a new book coming out titled "Outrages: Sex, Censorship and the Criminalization of Love". It's about the emergence of homosexuality as a concept and its criminalization in 19th-century England.
...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.
In a BBC interview with Wolf, her host, historian Matthew Sweet, points out two serious problems with her work. First, she assumes "sodomy" refers to homosexuality, but a key example she uses was a child abuser.
Secondly, she assumes the 19th-century legal term "death recorded" (for example) means the convict was executed, when in fact it means the opposite: the sentence of death being merely recorded rather than carried out, because the prisoner was pardoned and freed. A term she thought signaled draconian punishment turns out to demonstrate leniency.
Oops!
Here's the tape. Sweet is polite and professional, and Wolf takes the news well, but it's very painful listening.
