Sexual Blackmail: A Modern History (review)

In 1937 the blackmail trials of a New York City abortion ring involving over two hundred physicians and pharmacists caused a sensational scandal. The front pages of the New York press revealed that one rogue doctor collected "fabulous sums" extorting money from colleagues by threatening to reveal their illegal practice. Adding to the outrage, judges and public officials had received tens of thousands of dollars in hush money to protect the abortionists. Ultimately, the state indicted a number of doctors and thirty-seven public officials, including the judge who had quashed earlier indictments brought against the abortionists.

This is only one of the many fascinating blackmail stories Angus McLaren tells in Sexual Blackmail: A Modern History. Tracing the two-century rise and decline of sexual blackmail in England and the United States, McLaren, who has written lively, informative accounts of contraception, eugenics, masculinity, and serial killings, examines the blackmail stories told in courts and their depictions in the popular culture to cast new light on the history of abortion, prostitution, sexual assault, adultery, and homosexuality.

Blackmail stories first emerged in eighteenth-century Britain when changing attitudes toward same-sex relationships provided criminals with ample opportunity to prey upon the fears of those who would pay rather than allow their reputations to be destroyed by being labeled sodomites. Throughout the nineteenth century, as Anglo-American society embraced stricter norms of sexual respectability, laws against abortion, adultery, and prostitution provided a further boon to the assorted lowlifes who extorted money for keeping quiet about illicit sexual behavior. According to McLaren, by the late twentieth century, reform of the laws, as well as the abandonment of a notion of public morals, meant that stories of homosexuality, incestuous relationships, abortions, and multiple infidelities were far less likely to appear in court. Instead, former victims—now fifteen-minute celebrities—willingly told their tales to millions of listeners on talk radio and daytime television.

While similarities existed in English and American blackmail stories, because of the 1885 Labouchère Amendment to the Criminal Law, which criminalized a wide variety of acts as "indecency between males," the English courts and press were most concerned with homosexual blackmail cases. In addition, the English desire to maintain class distinctions fixed the court's attention on lower-class hooligans threatening the propertied, professional classes.

The laws of the United States evoked a different set of concerns. American blackmail stories concentrated on a newly mobile society's challenges to older Victorian sexual values, especially as women entered the public realm. The 1910 Mann Act, which made it a federal offense to travel across state lines for the purpose of having sex with a woman other than a wife, focused the narrative of blackmail on the prostitutes and bully boys who threatened heterosexual males with public exposure. The Mann Act revealed another American taboo: interracial sex. One of its most famous victims was African American heavyweight champion Jack Johnson, who was sent to jail because his white mistress traveled with him.

McLaren understands blackmail cases to be a forum in which contemporary society examined gender, class, and race relations. Even as the courts and the press attempted to uphold the moral and sexual status quo, these cases provided the public with subversive lessons about the kinds of transgressive sexual behavior that were taking place all around them. Cautionary tales of the dangers of men having sex with men or prostitutes, unmarried women getting pregnant and having abortions, and interracial sexual relationships ultimately helped to undermine the very mores they sought to uphold.