Last week on May 23, author Naomi Wolf learned in a live BBC radio interview that her new book Outrages: Sex, Censorship, and the Criminalization of Love (6/18, HMH) contains errors based on her misunderstanding of the 19th century legal term “death recorded.” Some of Wolf’s book is premised on the idea that “several dozen” men in England were executed for having sex with other men in the 19th century, weighing on many Victorian poets, such as John Addington Symonds. But interviewer Matthew Sweet explained to Wolf that the term “allowed judges to abstain from pronouncing a sentence of death on […]
