Sexual Blackmail: A Modern History

Sexual blackmail first reached public notice in the late eighteenth century when laws against sodomy were exploited by the unscrupulous to extort money from those they could entrap. Angus McLaren chronicles this parasitic crime, tracing its expansion in England and the United States through the Victorian era and into the first half of the twentieth century. The labeling of certain sexual acts as disreputable, if not actually criminal—abortion, infidelity, prostitution, and homosexuality—armed would-be blackmailers and led to a crescendo of court cases and public scandals in the 1920s and 1930s. As the importance of sexual respectability was inflated, so too was the spectacle of its loss.

Charting the rise and fall of sexual taboos and the shifting tides of shame, McLaren enables us to survey evolving sexual practices and discussions. He has mined the archives to tell his story through a host of fascinating characters and cases, from male bounders to designing women, from badger games to gold diggers, from victimless crimes to homosexual outing. He shows how these stories shocked, educated, entertained, and destroyed the lives of their victims. He also demonstrates how muckraking journalists, con men, and vengeful women determined the boundaries of sexual respectability and damned those considered deviant. Ultimately, the sexual revolution of the 1960s blurred the long-rigid lines of respectability, leading to a rapid decline of blackmail fears. This fascinating view of the impact of regulating sexuality from the late Victorian Age to our own time demonstrates the centrality of blackmail to sexual practices, deviance, and the law.

Blackmail trials revealed that one's sexual reputation—that vague entity—had, in an increasingly commercial age, a definite monetary value. And as middle-class notions of sexual respectability emerged, so in tandem did sexual blackmail. Chronicling the emergence of this parasitic form of crime casts a fresh light on the history of sexual assault, prostitution, divorce, abortion, and homosexuality and provides striking evidence that when morality was made the law's business it often became the criminal's business as well.

Publishers Weekly

The central premise of this carefully researched volume is that sexual blackmail-the attempt to extort money by threatening to expose sexual secrets-has a past. McLaren, author of Twentieth-Century Sexuality: A History and a professor at the University of Victoria, has delved extensively into court documents and news archives to furnish hundreds of examples of his subject. >From 18th century England to 20th century America, he details blackmail threats built around homosexuality, adultery, prostitution, abortion and interracial affairs. Sexual blackmail is a crime without much of a present, though, and so McLaren's work is unlikely to hit the sort of nerve that tips an academic book into mass readership. He mentions Autumn Jackson, who in 1997 was convicted of attempting to extort money from the comedian Bill Cosby by threatening to publicize her claim to be his illegitimate daughter. But that case was an exception, and the author shows persuasively that in an era of greater sexual tolerance, sexual blackmail has lost its bite. Unsurprisingly, President Clinton's political survival after his affair with Monica Lewinsky is cited to show how little we now judge a public figure's private behavior. McLaren's most useful cautionary tale is that blackmail flares up in times when widely practiced sex acts are most stigmatized. 12 b&w illustrations. (Nov.) Copyright 2003 Cahners Business Information.

Angus McLaren is Professor of History at the University of Victoria, British Columbia.