Naomi Wolf faces new row as book confuses persecution of gay men with paedophiles, claim historians

The American feminist Dr Naomi Wolf has been accused of ignoring evidence of crimes against children to support her view of mid-Victorian Britain as a time when gay men were victims of aggressive persecution by the courts.

In her book Outrages Dr Wolf presents the middle years of the nineteenth century as a time when homosexual men were terrified by the prospect of long prison sentences, including hard labour, because of criminal convictions for “unnatural offences”.

But she has now been accused by British historians of basing this outlook on a misreading of criminal records, which showed that several of her examples were in fact not cases of consensual sex between adult men, but of child abuse, rape and even bestiality.

Dr Fern Riddell, a cultural historian and expert in sex and gender during the Victorian era, said the book is a “calumny against gay people” of the time.

“Outrages is not only horrendously innacurate in its use of historical sources, but it also does a huge diservice to the lives of gay men of that period,” she told The Telegraph.

“Naomi presents child rapists and those taking part in acts of bestiality as being gay men in consensual relationships and that is completely wrong.”

There are now calls for the University of Oxford to re-examine Dr Wolf’s 2015 DPhil, on which she based Outrages: Sex, Censorship, and the Criminalisation of Love, and for its British publisher to withdraw the title.

Dr Wolf’s book first ran into trouble when it claimed that gay men in Victorian Britain were victims of a vicious campaign of judicial persecution, including execution, from 1857 onwards.

She suggests that the atmosphere would have driven men like the poet John Addington Symonds – the central subject of her book – to suppress their true sexuality for fear of receiving punishment they thought was routinely meted out to other men who loved men.

Dr Wolf referred to several executions of men for sodomy in the first edition of her book and in a 2019 BBC radio interview with the British broadcaster and historian Dr Matthew Sweet said that “several dozens” had been hanged and others transported on these charges.

But Dr Sweet pointed out that the last execution for sodomy in Britain had taken place 22 years earlier, in 1835 – two years before the start of the Victorian era – and that she had misunderstood the recording of penal crimes in the Old Bailey records by assuming that “death recorded” meant the prisoner had been executed. In fact, it indicated that though the crime was punishable by death in law the judge had merely recorded this and instead imposed a custodial sentence.

Dr Wolf, the author of the influential feminist tract The Beauty Myth and former advisor to Al Gore and President Bill Clinton, appeared to acknowledge her error at the time and following the controversy her US publishers, Houghton Mifflin Harcourt, dropped the title and pulped all its copies.

The book has now been reissued in paperback edition by the British publisher Virago, with the removal of references to the regular execution of men for the crime of sodomy after 1835.

However, Dr Sweet said the paperback edition continues to rely on a profound misreading of historical records and that several of the men Dr Wolf claims were victims of anti-gay injustice had in fact found been guilty of sexual offences against children and animals.

Dr Sweet told The Telegraph: “Dr Wolf has misrepresented the experiences of victims of child abuse and violent sexual assault. This is the most profound offence against her discipline, as well as the memories of real people on the historical record."

In the book Dr Wolf tells of a William Mepham, writing that he was indicted for b*****y and sentenced to two years hard labour. She fails to record however that the victim was a child.

A contemporary newspaper report of the Mepham case, published on Feb 29 1860 and available in The British Newspaper Archive, reported that: “William Mepham, 43, carman, was indicted for committing a heinous offence upon a boy named Peter Paskerell.”

Dr Wolf also writes of another case: “Sentencing became more aggressive: John Spencer, a sixty-year-old man, was tried three times, accused of ‘b*****y’ with three different men.”

However, she does not mention that according to contemporary newspaper accounts from 1860, held in the British Newspaper Archive records, Spencer was a 60-year-old Hackney schoolmaster and that his three alleged victims were in fact not adult men, but schoolchildren, named Reuben Brascher, Leon Moresco and Wiliam Roberts.

Moresco was aged 12 at the time of Spencer’s trial, and would have been aged 10 or 11 at the time of the offence. Roberts was aged 13 at the time of the trial. Brascher’s age was not recorded in the newspaper accounts, but the only Reuben Brascher in the census of 1861 would have been aged 12.

In a third example Dr Wolf writes: “Sentences handed down at the Old Bailey for ‘the attempt’ at sodomy started to extend in length, from one year to eighteen months. And teenagers were now convicted more often: indeed, that year, 14-year-old Thomas Silver was ‘indicted’ for ‘an unnatural offence’.”

Silver was indeed found guilty and sentenced to two and a half years with hard labour, but Dr Wolf fails to report that his victim was a six-year-old boy called Amar Smith, not a consenting adult.

The Windsor and Eton Express reported on Dec 10 1859 that Silver was sentenced to death for indecently assaulting Amar, but as was common his sentence was commuted after the judge recommended mercy.

Two other cases cited by Dr Wolf in a way that suggested the Victorian courts victimised young gay men and teenagers are those of Stephen Alexander and William Tibble, both 15, who were found guilty of attempted sodomy. Alexander received a six-month sentence, while Tibble was sentenced to a year in prison.

But Dr Wolf fails to report that the offences involved animals. In Tibble’s case the offence is recorded as “B*****y with an Ass, while Alexander was indicted for “bestiality”.

Dr Sweet said: “This matters because scholarship matters and history matters. If one of the world’s most prestigious universities can award a doctorate for work that is sloppy or inaccurate, that’s a cause for concern. In half an hour’s work online, I was able to discover the flaws in her work – that some of the men she identifies as consensual lovers persecuted by the state were rapists or abusers of children and animals.”

Dr Riddell added: “It’s deeply embarrassing for Virago that they didn’t request that these checks be made for the paperback. The paperback edition is when you put things right and she hasn’t done any of that, despite Matthew presenting her with the evidence.

“Historians have to justify that everything they write is true. There’s been a failure at university level and a catastrophic failure at Virago, but ultimately the blame must lie with Naomi.”

She added that Dr Wolf had misunderstood much about the shift in social and legal attitudes which began to take place during the Victorian era.

“The 19th century is an amazing period when we start to see social and legal attitudes begin to change, starting with the removal of the death penalty for sodomy. In the majority of occasions when two men were tried together for consensual sexual offences, they were found not guilty; while other gay men who were the victims of homophobic attacks were treated sympathetically by the press.”

Professor Tim Hitchcock of University of Sussex, who created the Old Bailey Online website, said: “This is about the misrepresentation of original sources and the failure to use other sources that are available. She presents the argument that there was a general attack on gay men led by the judiciary, but many of the cases she has cited in her book are about child abuse. If I was Virago I would not print any more copies of this book or promote it at all.”

The University of Oxford said “a statement of clarification” to Dr Wolf’s D.Phil thesis had been submitted, reviewed and approved, adding that this “will be available for consultation in the Bodleian Library in due course”.

Responding to the claims Dr Wolf’s solicitors cited a number of correct examples in her book of men being prosecuted for consensual sex acts. Dr Wolf's statement said: “My book makes the point that a homosexual man in the 19th century faced the prospect of prosecution and punishment under sodomy laws, which included offences such as child rape and bestiality, although the majority of prosecutions were for what we would now call consensual gay sex.

“I list examples of all types of behaviour criminalised in the 19th century in my book and it is clear that I have accurately represented the position. My book was reviewed and checked by leading scholars in the area.

“I have, correctly, maintained that dozens of men were executed in the 19 centruy. Most of these were in the early part of the century. I made two specific errors in the hardback edition which suggested that execution remained a punishment towards the end of the century, but these were promptly and properly corrected for the paperback edition.”

Virago did not respond to a request for comment.

https://www.telegraph.co.uk/news/2021/02/05/naomi-wolf-faces-new-row-book-confuses-persecution-gay-men-paedophiles/

Posted in full, as its behind a paywall

If ever there was a moment that someone wishes they could crawl up their own backside and hide from embarrassment, this is it.