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1. My new book is hitting the shelves this week, and I want to celebrate that accomplishment. But this is a hard book to promote with celebratory tweets. It’s not an appealing history. It’s not a heroic history. It’s an unwelcome history about a past we’d rather not confront.
2. The title of the book is “Unspeakable” because the subject poses challenges to discussion. It’s a social history of sex between adults and children told through the life of one man: the 20th-c writer Norman Douglas, who was an unrepentant pederast. #newbook #twitterstorians
3. Douglas left an unparalleled archive that includes letters and diaries of children he abused, as well as his own explicit writings and countless people’s writings about him. This archive reveals how un-troubled people were by sexual exploitation of children in the recent past.
4. My book rejects framing Douglas as a monster because monsters stand outside their society while Douglas stood very much within it. His behavior followed norms. And he was beloved by many famous writers like Bryher, Conrad, Huxley and Graham Greene, who knew about his sex life.
5. Many of the children adored him too. This is the aspect of my book that is most upsetting to process. But we can’t understand the history of intergenerational sex if we refuse to reckon with its toleration in the past – by children as well as adults. #histchild #histsex
6. I wrote this book because I believe that historians of sexuality can’t just do work that confirms our moral sensibilities. The history of sexuality teaches that sexual morality is not a constant. What was once seen as immoral becomes acceptable. Change works the other way too.
7. I knew this book would be nearly impossible to sell (it was) and nearly impossible to market (it is). But I thought it vital to research, because intergenerational sex was common in the past and remains so today.
8. To pretend otherwise does no favor to children. And to pretend that monsters are solely to blame actually makes abuse harder to see and stop. I hope my new book enlarges our understanding of the past _and_ serves the present. #history
9. My takeaway from the research is that social orders with steep sexual hierarchies, where men have lots of power over subordinates, enable intergenerational sex. If you want to stop child abuse make the power structure more equal. Empower children. Don’t police their sexuality.
10. In short: I wrote a book on a topic that’s impossible to market in short upbeat tweets. Or really, to market at all. But the topic matters. And it’s out now. If you want to learn more, here’s the link https://press.uchicago.edu/ucp/books/book/chicago/U/bo59570227.html
11. Also, I will be having a Zoom book launch event tomorrow in convo with the generous @alexiscoe (whose new book, You Never Forget Your First, is on Time’s top 100 reads of 2020!) Here is a link https://www.eventbrite.com/e/rachel-hope-cleves-in-conversation-with-alexis-coe-tickets-120435853881 END OF THREAD #twitterstorians
