I should know better than to Get Involved, but here is my very very long thread about this (shoutout to the helpful friend who told me how to get round the Telegraph paywall), slightly at an angle but exploring some of the issues arising as they relate to my own work: https://twitter.com/FernRiddell/status/1357798400226451458

Those interested in the issues raised by Fern's tweet might be interested to read @RachelCleves's new 'Unspeakable' (my review coming soonish to a magazine near you).

One of the themes of Rachel's book is the consequences of a legal regime that did not have an age of consent for boys/men and that proscribed sex between adult men and between men and boys equally.

For reasons of legal, but also intellectual & cultural, history, in Britain & the British Empire the story of a recognizably 'modern', congenital, sexual-object-choice-based model of male homosexuality is entwined with a story about pederasty.

Symonds, the remarkable man at the centre of Wolf's story, is actually a great example of this: see https://onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/abs/10.1111/1468-0424.12437 https://doi.org/10.1080/03054985.2011.625164 - & me!

I'm working on a big book-length project about, among other things, the place of pederasty in the intellectual history of male homosexuality in modern Britain, discussing Symonds and many other thinkers.

For obvious reasons, this is a real tricky story to get right. Fern & Matthew have introduced a level of complexity here, but I think we can actually take that complexity one step further:

rather than working to separate out unfairly criminalized homosexuals from 'real' abusers, we can examine what it meant that the law - as well as theorists of their own homosexual identity at the time - didn't distinguish between those categories as starkly as we do now.

One consequence: we have to place a potentially unsavoury story about pederasty at the heart of genealogies of male homosexual identity in Britain.

But another: even if sodomy laws were enforced to police child sexual abuse after c. 1840, there was still a threat that the state *could* deploy those laws to police sex btwn consenting adults (as it certainly did, even if that didn't lead to executions, as everyone has shown).

The result might be unsatisfying, certainly if we're looking for easily digestible narratives for LGBT+ History Month. But the past is messy, and it's often very unfamiliar to us.

This at this point very long-running conversation has been positioned in terms of 'whitewashing queer history' and what we owe to queer people today.

I'd suggest that one thing we owe to queer - &, critically, trans - people today is openness to the idea that categories of gender & sexual identity are culturally constructed (often in a dialectic between regulatory norms/institutions & self-fashioning) & often pretty unstable.

We can carry multiple ideas in our heads at once, and balance the need for faithful accounts of the past with present-day queer & trans people's search for representation & recognition across time.

I'll end with a couple more pieces of further reading:

The recent edited volume 'From Sodomy Laws to Same-Sex Marriage' offers more granular detail about the story Matthew and Fern are telling - see esp Ch 7, which discusses selective enforcement of sodomy/gross indecency law to police child sexual abuse in colonial Australia.

. @cupchurch2 has a book coming out soon about the abolition of the death penalty for sodomy, integrating this story into a much wider picture of early C19 British legal, political, and intellectual history.

On theories of the queer past and on unsatisfying genealogies, see variously the introduction to Carolyn Dinshaw's Getting Medieval (1999) and Kadji Amin's Disturbing Attachments (2017).