
Eric Berkowitz evokes the entire sweep of Western sex law from the savage impalement of an Ancient Mesopotamian adulteress to the imprisonment of Oscar Wilde in 1895 for 'gross indecency'. The cast of Sex & Punishment is as varied as the forms taken by human desire itself: royal mistresses gay charioteers medieval transvestites lonely goat-lovers prostitutes of all stripes & London rent boys. Each of them had forbidden sex & each was judged
- & justice as Berkowitz shows
- rarely had anything to do with it.