The best-selling author of , Give Me Liberty, and The End of America illuminates a dramatic buried story of*history?how a single English law in 1857 led to a maelstrom, with reverberations lasting down to our day Until 1857, the State did not?link the idea of?&ldquo*rdquo; 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*men. ? Before 1857 it wasn?t?&ldquo*rdquo; that was a crime, but simply the act of* 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*dissidents, including Walt Whitman in America and the closeted*English critic John Addington Symonds?in love with Whitman?s*voice in?Leaves of Grass?as, decades before the infamous 1895 trial of Oscar Wilde, dire prison terms?became the State?s penalty for *? Most powerfully, Wolf?recounts how a dying?Symonds?helped write the book on?&ldquo*inversion?? that created our modern understanding of * And she convinces that his secret memoir, mined here fully for the first time, stands as the first*rights manifesto in the west.