Feminist author humiliated on radio over gay sex ‘executions’
NAOMI WOLF’S UK publisher has promised to make corrections to the feminist author’s latest book after a British broadcaster successfully challenged its accuracy regarding the execution of gay men in Victorian England.
The US author claimed “dozens of men” had been sentenced to death for sodomy in the 1800s and made particular reference to two deaths “recorded” in the 1850s. The last recorded hanging for gay sex was 1835.
In a humiliating interview on BBC Radio 3, Matthew Sweet told her she had not established the meaning of the legal term “death recorded” on court documents and that the capital punishment she referred to never took place.
Houghton Mifflin Harcourt, Wolf’s US publisher, said that while it had “professional editors” it relied “ultimately on authors for the integrity of research and fact-checking”. It was now “discussing corrections with the author”.
Promoting Outrages: Sex, Censorship and the Criminalization of Love, Wolf claimed her research proved hangings for sodomy took place after 1835, when James Pratt and John Smith were executed. She said Old Bailey records show Thomas Silver, “aged 14”, was “actually executed for committing sodomy” in 1859. She wrote: “The boy was indicted for an unnatural offence. GUILTY – Death recorded.”
But in an awkward moment on the Free Thinking programme, Sweet, himself an author, said “death recorded” meant Silver was spared the gallows. “I don’t think you’re right about this,” he said. “I looked it up. ‘Death recorded’ is what’s in most of these cases that you’ve identified as executions. It doesn’t mean he was executed.” Explaining how he found the definition on the Old Bailey portal where Wolf did her research, he added: “It was a category created in 1823 that allowed judges to abstain from pronouncing a sentence of death on any capital convict whom they considered to be a fit subject for pardon. I don’t think any of the ‘executions’ you’ve identified here actually happened.”
He produced an old newspaper stating Silver, “aged 17”, was charged with indecently assaulting a “boy, aged six years”. It said the jury decided the teenager should receive “mercy on account of his youth”. Silver served a prison term in Newgate. Wolf said how she had “read every single sodomy prosecution at the Old Bailey for the entire [19th] century” and that parliamentarians “created a fake moral panic around gay male sex to distract attention from very effective … feminist scrutiny of heterosexual men’s misdeeds”.
The author later issued a statement admitting she had wrongly claimed Silver had been sentenced to death. She told fans at the Hay Festival: “Hang on to your copies because it will be a collectors’ item.” Wolf has courted controversy before. In 2014, she suggested Isil beheading videos were “staged by the US government” and also claimed sending American troops to Africa to help stop the spread of Ebola was an attempt to justify a military takeover.