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In her bookOutrages , Naomi Wolf shows how legal persecution of writers , and of human who loved homo affected Symonds and his coeval , including Christina and Dante Gabriel Rossetti , Algernon Charles Swinburne , Walter Pater , and the painter Simeon Solomon . All the while , Walt Whitman’sLeaves of Grasswas illicitly crossing the Atlantic and finding its way into the hands of readers who reveled in the American poet ’s festivity of exemption , democracy , and unfettered lovemaking .
revolutionize by Whitman , and despite terrible dangers he faced in doing so , Symonds keep trying , stubbornly , to observe a path to express his message — that love and sex between men were not “ morbid ” and aberrant , but natural and even ennobling .
The following is an excerpt fromOutragesby Naomi Wolf . It has been adapted for the vane .
Whitman lines from Leaves of Grass carved into New York City’s AIDS memorial, 2016; Photo Credits: Richard Levine / Alamy Stock Photo
( Carving on outside of Magdalen College ; Photo reference : Jon Bower Oxford / Alamy Stock Photo )
The History of Leaves of Grass
In his pursuit for freedom and equality for men who loved military personnel , John Addington Symonds had supporter from an unlikely generator . Leaves of Grass — a loudness of poem publish in 1855 by the American poet Walt Whitman — would be the catalyst of a lifetime for Symonds . This aggregation , in an utterly original vocalism , robustly observe the self and its euphoric kinship to the natural world and to other man and women .
It sent transformational wavelet through British and American subculture . It would affect groups of London bohemians , Boston Transcendentalists , artists , writers , feminists , Socialists , Utopians , social reformer , and revolutionaries , who would in turn produce new ways of seeing human gender , societal equality , and love itself , and who would utilise that sight in turn to ramp up Modern institutions .
Whitman lines from Leaves of Grass carved into New York City ’s AIDS monument , 2016 ; Photo Credits : Richard Levine / Alamy Stock Photo
There would eventually be seven to ten authorized editions of the Scripture , depending , as scholars repoint out , on what you count as an version . There would be the realLeaves of Grass ; the forgedLeaves of Grass ; the piratedLeaves of Grass ; the bowdlerized , legalLeaves of Grass ; and the smuggled , uncensored , illegalLeaves of Grass .
There would be theLeaves of Grassthat was take in secret groups of workingmen in northerly Britain , who felt it spoke especially to them , and theLeaves of Grassthat other feminists show in London , New York City , and Philadelphia , who believe that it speak unambiguously to them as well .
After readingLeaves of Grassas a young man, Symonds would spend the rest of his life trying to respond to the book’s provocative themes.
Physically fragile , position - witting , fearful of societal rejection , John Addington Symonds realize a temperamental opposite word in Whitman . The older poet was fearless , physically robust , all - embracing , stubborn in his convictions , barefacedly prophetic , and perfectly ready to discompose everybody .
John Addington Symonds never met Whitman in soul , but the two maintained an epistolary friendly relationship across the Atlantic , at a clock time when letter were transported on six - week journeys by ships under sheet . The Englishman ’s sometimes overbear literary courting of Whitman would span more than two decades .
Comforted and enkindle by this friendship , Symonds step by step became less and less guarded . At the very end of his life , he lastly stop render to express his touch in veiled ways and burst out at last into straightforward protagonism . His foundational essay , A Problem in Modern Ethics , spread on the Q.T. before his death , declared outright that love life between valet de chambre was natural , and that it was good .
At the remnant of his life , he get together on the sexological treatiseSexual Inversion , which would introduce the conception of homosexuality as an identity element on a natural spectrum of sexual identities , as we understand it today . That argument have a bun in the oven with it an implicit claim for adequate treatment of men who love men . A Problem in Modern Ethicscould well have been the first gay rights pronunciamento in English .
Given the significance in LGBTQ+ history of John Addington Symonds ’s narrative , I ask many members of that community to read this book in holograph . Based on their response , I wish to portion out some notes .
Language about sex and gender is always evolving . I did my dependable , when draw the yesteryear , to use speech communication that was exact for the time , while still being alert to present - day exercise .
My enquiry found a cryptical connexion between the bloodline of the feminist movement in the West , the advanced ( re-)invention of Western homophobia , and the starting time of the Western homo rights effort ; this emboldened me to a level to tackle this project .
John Addington Symonds , patriarch ; Photo mention : University of Bristol Library , Special Collections ( DM375/1 )
Nonetheless I had a sensation of humbleness , not being identified as a member of the LGBTQ+ community , in undertaking to tell this story . I was advised by my LGBTQ+ referee of the grandness of the source ’s foil .
So I am sharing that while I do not describe as a member of this community of interests , I am aware of the responsibilities of an ally . This research material came my way ; I was moved to do my uttermost to shine a illumination on it .
By the metre of Symonds ’s death , in 1893,a new generation of men such as Oscar Wilde were less indirectly signaling in their work what we would call jovial motif and were no longer so unforced to populate what we today call “ the closet . ”
Many reviewer describe the front for gay right as originating with Wilde and the trials of 1895 that get down the playwright , sentence him to two years ’ punishing toil in prison .
But a propagation before Wilde , a small mathematical group of “ sexual objector , ” act upon by Symonds and his have a go at it acquaintance and sometime opposer Walt Whitman , struggled at great personal peril and in the face of extraordinary oppression to preach for these freedoms.1
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