PanThe Times Literary Supplement...as a piece of scholarship, Outrages is definitely creative ... Although it is at pains to present itself as accessible – even raunchily inspirational, at key points – this book is substantially a rewrite of a doctoral thesis, Wolf’s own Oxford dissertation from 2015 ... Wolf’s binary slicing of history leads her into continual problems of tone – and some severe errors of fact. Most notably, as first pointed out by the BBC radio presenter Matthew Sweet, in her desire to paint the blackest possible picture of the past, she has misread the wording of some crucial court records of her period, a mistake which leads her to claim that substantial numbers of men were executed for the crime of sodomy in London during the formative years of Symonds’s writing life. Quite how this howler – which if it were true, would completely rewrite our understanding of British queer history – managed to get past the four-page swarm of academics and mentors, whom Wolf thanks at the end of the book for overseeing her work, is a mystery. Did no one see fit to question her momentous discovery, which fifty years of queer studies had failed to light on? Apparently not. And this is not Wolf’s only error ... Some of Wolf’s other errors are tiny in comparison; nonetheless, they nibble away at her credibility ... Wolf’s largest misrepresentation – again, whether this is wilful or not is hard to say – is that she presents Symonds as an author so terrorized by the oppression of his times that he has effectively had to wait for her to rediscover his bravery and pass it on to the waiting world ... Wolf prefers her gay men when they need rescuing, rather than when they rescue themselves. Although she clearly has the best of intentions, what she offers in the end is a reductive and even sentimental vision of queer history, one in which the past only exists to pave the way for the present, and in which queers and other sexual non-conformists can only ever live in one of two binary states, freedom or oppression.
