Vaccine passport naomi wolf archive#

“My claim that a homosexual man in the 19th century in Britain would be subject to, and no doubt fearful of, prosecution under sodomy laws, and that sodomy laws included consenting adult acts, child abuse, sexual assault and even bestiality, is correct and not a misrepresentation of any sort,” said Wolf. In a statement to the Guardian, Wolf said that her book had been reviewed and checked “by leading scholars in the field”, and that “it is clear that I have accurately represented the position”. Riddell said that Wolf had “knowingly ignored” evidence to depict paedophiles as consensual gay men, and that publisher Virago should have “check every case” before going to press on the paperback. “The second edition removed references to executions after 1835 but still represented these cases and many others as consensual,” he said on Monday. Sweet informed Wolf that several of the cases involved sexual assaults on children or animals during the Radio 3 interview in 2019. And AGAIN, do you know how easily I found this? In minutes, on a publicly accessible archive.” Riddell commented: “In reality, they were NOT teenage boys convicted of consensual gay relationships. Wolf cites these examples as part of a building crackdown, writing: “That year, more teenage boys than ever before were sent, alone, to the dark and brutal prison at the Old Bailey.” Stephen Alexander and William Tibble, cited by Wolf as teenagers charged with attempted sodomy, were recorded as having assaulted animals, Riddell said, as were three other cases in the book, according to court records. In the book, Wolf claims that Symonds “would have read about what happened to teenagers such as Thomas Silver when word about their intimacy with other boys got out.” Both Sweet and Riddell pointed out that Silver was charged with “indecently assaulting” a six-year-old boy in 1859. Wolf also cites the case of 14-year-old Thomas Silver, “‘indicted’ for an ‘unnatural offence’”, as being an example of teenagers being “convicted more often” for attempted sodomy. Because it was reported in the newspapers.”

Vaccine passport naomi wolf archive#

“And their testimony isn’t hidden, it’s not sitting on a dusty book shelf in an archive somewhere, it’s digitised. We find it difficult enough to comprehend the bravery of someone facing their abuser in court today, IMAGINE doing it in the middle of the Victorian era,” she writes. “One of the most moving and heartbreaking bits of this story is the first-hand testimony of these boys. Writing on Twitter, Riddell said she had “never been so angry about a book in my entire career”. A man whose love was criminalised,” Sweet writes. But John Spencer is present – offered to the reader as a victim of the Victorian state. “The names of these boys do not feature in Outrages: Sex, Censorship, and the Criminalisation of Love. Sweet’s article says that Spencer was a school headmaster who was accused of sexually assaulting a group of schoolchildren and found guilty on one count, according to contemporaneous newspaper reports and Old Bailey records from 1860.

In a blistering article in the Telegraph (£), Sweet pointed to Wolf’s depiction of John Spencer, a man who she describes as “tried three times, accused of sex with three different men”. Now Sweet and historian Dr Fern Riddell have responded to the corrected paperback edition, accusing Wolf of citing cases of men found guilty of sexually assaulting children and animals as examples of a wider persecution of gay men in consensual relationships. The book was subsequently pulled and pulped in the US, and corrected in the UK by Wolf’s publisher, Virago. However, the term reflects a crime punishable by death that was commuted to a custodial sentence, a common occurrence.

Wolf had believed it signified an execution, and claimed that she had found “several dozen executions” of gay men after the last recorded execution for sodomy in 1835. Sweet pointed out that she had misunderstood the term “death recorded” in historical records. The book first ran into trouble when it was published as a hardback in 2019, when Wolf, the author of The Beauty Myth, was confronted during a BBC radio broadcast by the historian Dr Matthew Sweet. Outrages recounts the life of writer John Addington Symonds and how gay men in the 19th century would have feared lengthy prison sentences and hard labour for “unnatural offences”.