Gross Indecency

Gross Indecency
Title Gross Indecency PDF eBook
Author Moisés Kaufman
Publisher Dramatists Play Service Inc
Pages 92
Release 1999
Genre Biography & Autobiography
ISBN 9780822216490

Download Gross Indecency Book in PDF, Epub and Kindle

THE STORY: In early 1895, the Marquess of Queensberry, the father of Wilde's young lover, Lord Alfred Douglas, left a card at Wilde's club bearing the phrase posing somdomite. Wilde sued the Marquess for criminal libel. The defense denounced Wild

Outrages

Outrages
Title Outrages PDF eBook
Author Naomi Wolf
Publisher Chelsea Green Publishing
Pages 386
Release 2020-10-09
Genre Social Science
ISBN 1645020169

Download Outrages Book in PDF, Epub and Kindle

From New York Times bestselling author Naomi Wolf, Outrages explores the history of state-sponsored censorship and violations of personal freedoms through the inspiring, forgotten history of one writer’s refusal to stay silenced. Newly updated, first North American edition--a paperback original In 1857, Britain codified a new civil divorce law and passed a severe new obscenity law. An 1861 Act of Parliament streamlined the harsh criminalization of sodomy. These and other laws enshrined modern notions of state censorship and validated state intrusion into people’s private lives. In 1861, John Addington Symonds, a twenty-one-year-old student at Oxford who already knew he loved and was attracted to men, hastily wrote out a seeming renunciation of the long love poem he’d written to another young man. Outrages chronicles the struggle and eventual triumph of Symonds—who would become a poet, biographer, and critic—at a time in British history when even private letters that could be interpreted as homoerotic could be used as evidence in trials leading to harsh sentences under British law. Drawing on the work of a range of scholars of censorship and of LGBTQ+ legal history, Wolf depicts how state censorship, and state prosecution of same-sex sexuality, played out—decades before the infamous trial of Oscar Wilde—shadowing the lives of people who risked in new ways scrutiny by the criminal justice system. She shows how legal persecutions of writers, and of men who loved men affected Symonds and his contemporaries, including Christina and Dante Gabriel Rossetti, Algernon Charles Swinburne, Walter Pater, and the painter Simeon Solomon. All the while, Walt Whitman’s Leaves of Grass was illicitly crossing the Atlantic and finding its way into the hands of readers who reveled in the American poet’s celebration of freedom, democracy, and unfettered love. Inspired by Whitman, and despite terrible dangers he faced in doing so, Symonds kept trying, stubbornly, to find a way to express his message—that love and sex between men were not “morbid” and deviant, but natural and even ennobling. He persisted in various genres his entire life. He wrote a strikingly honest secret memoir—which he embargoed for a generation after his death—enclosing keys to a code that the author had used to embed hidden messages in his published work. He wrote the essay A Problem in Modern Ethics that was secretly shared in his lifetime and would become foundational to our modern understanding of human sexual orientation and of LGBTQ+ legal rights. This essay is now rightfully understood as one of the first gay rights manifestos in the English language. Naomi Wolf’s Outrages is a critically important book, not just for its role in helping to bring to new audiences the story of an oft-forgotten pioneer of LGBTQ+ rights who could not legally fully tell his own story in his lifetime. It is also critically important for what the book has to say about the vital and often courageous roles of publishers, booksellers, and freedom of speech in an era of growing calls for censorship and ever-escalating state violations of privacy. With Outrages, Wolf brings us the inspiring story of one man’s refusal to be silenced, and his belief in a future in which everyone would have the freedom to love and to speak without fear.

The Trials of Oscar Wilde

The Trials of Oscar Wilde
Title The Trials of Oscar Wilde PDF eBook
Author Michael S. Foldy
Publisher Yale University Press
Pages 236
Release 1997-01-01
Genre Literary Criticism
ISBN 9780300071122

Download The Trials of Oscar Wilde Book in PDF, Epub and Kindle

Following Oscar Wilde's trials for committing acts of gross indecency with men, he lost his family, his freedom and his will to live. This book sets out to examine how Victorian society could allow, or indeed, need this to happen.

Indecency

Indecency
Title Indecency PDF eBook
Author Justin Phillip Reed
Publisher
Pages 70
Release 2018
Genre POETRY
ISBN 9781566895149

Download Indecency Book in PDF, Epub and Kindle

Intricate, intimate, difficult, and confrontational poems that push at the boundaries of selfhood, skin, culture, sexuality, and blood.

My Gay Middle Ages

My Gay Middle Ages
Title My Gay Middle Ages PDF eBook
Author A. W. Strouse
Publisher punctum books
Pages 87
Release 2015-05-13
Genre Biography & Autobiography
ISBN 0615830005

Download My Gay Middle Ages Book in PDF, Epub and Kindle

In the world of My Gay Middle Ages, Chaucer and Boethius are the secret-sharers of A.W. Strouse's "gay lifestyle." Where many scholars of the Middle Ages would "get in from behind" on cultural history, Strouse instead does a "reach around." He eschews academic "queer theory" as yet another tedious, normative framework, and writes in the long, fruity tradition of irresponsible, homo-medievalism (a lineage that includes luminaries like Oscar Wilde, who was sustained by his amateur readings of Dante and Abelard during the darks days of his incarceration for crimes of "gross indecency"). Strouse experiences medieval literature and philosophy as a part of his everyday life, and in these prose poems he makes the case for regarding the Middle Ages as a kind of technology of self-preservation, a posture through which to spiritualize the petty indignities of modern urban life. With a Warholian flair for insouciant name-dropping and a Steinian appetite for syntactic perversion, Strouse monumentalizes the medieval within the contemporary and the contemporary within the medieval. "Today, almost nobody reads Boethius, which if you ask me is a crying shame. Because Boethius is so gay. First of all, the heroine of the Consolation is this great big fierce diva, whose name is Lady Philosophy. She's a Lady, and she doesn't stand for anybody's crap. At the beginning of the book, Boethius is crying, all alone in prison, depressed that he's lonely and loveless and is going to be killed. Lady Philosophy descends from the heavens, a la Glinda the Good Witch in The Wizard of Oz. The first thing Boethius notices about her is that she's wearing an amazing dress with Greek letters embroidered on it-they stand for practical and theoretical philosophy. Her dress has been torn to shreds by the hands of uncouth philosophers. They didn't know how to treat a lady." (from "My Boethius") TABLE OF CONTENTS // The Most Famous Medievalist in the World - My Boethius - Memory Houses - The President of the Medieval Academy Made Me Cry - My Medieval Romance - The Formation of a Persecuting Society - The Medieval Heart is Like a Penis - Jilted Again - My Orpheus - Medieval Literacy - My Cloud of Unknowing - The Post-Medieval Unconscious - Coda: The Dedication"

Sex and Punishment

Sex and Punishment
Title Sex and Punishment PDF eBook
Author Eric Berkowitz
Publisher Saqi
Pages 292
Release 2013-04-03
Genre History
ISBN 1908906014

Download Sex and Punishment Book in PDF, Epub and Kindle

Sex and Punishment tells the story of the struggle throughout millennia to regulate the most powerful engine of human behaviour: sex. From the savage impalement of an Ancient Mesopotamian adulteress to the imprisonment of Oscar Wilde for 'gross indecency' in 1895, Eric Berkowitz evokes the entire sweep of Western sex law. The cast of Sex and Punishment is as varied as the forms taken by human desire itself: royal mistresses, gay charioteers, medieval transvestites, lonely goat-lovers, prostitutes of all stripes and London rent boys. Each of them had forbidden sex, and each was judged – and justice, as Berkowitz shows – rarely had anything to do with it.

Talk on the Wilde Side

Talk on the Wilde Side
Title Talk on the Wilde Side PDF eBook
Author Ed Cohen
Publisher Routledge
Pages 268
Release 2013-02-01
Genre Literary Criticism
ISBN 1136037829

Download Talk on the Wilde Side Book in PDF, Epub and Kindle

Talk on the Wilde Side focuses on the formation of a new `type' of sexual category in the newpaper reports of the trials of Oscar Wilde, relating this to middle-class discussions of masculinity throughout the nineteenth century.