I enjoyed Kaplan's book and felt a tinge of sympathy for him, once I dove into it and realized that a bit of his thunder had been stolen from him by the publication of Neil McKenna's biography of Oscar Wilde, the SECRET LIFE, which uses much of the same scholarly material in a specious, and yet ultimately thrilling and rewarding way far removed from Kaplan's more leisurely humdrumism. Kaplan wants to be scintillating, and he took ten years or more to perfect every sentence in SODOM ON THE THAMES, and yet when push comes to shove we've read most of it in McKenna's quickly researched and rushed through the presses biography.So what was shocking in May becomes yawnmaking in November; oh, twere ever thus. Perhaps anticipating this, Kaplan quotes freely from the Victorian gay porn classic SINS OF THE CITIES ON THE PLAIN, which mirrors, in his opinion, all three of the sex scandals he relates in his book. I believe him! I was totally convinced by his argument. First there was the Boulton and Park cross-dressing affair, in which two middle-class men were accused of dressing as women and masquerading as women to have sex with men. Talk about rude, the court had a doctor bend them over footstools, shine a flashlight up them, to see if they had ever been penetrated. Can you really tell? Opinions differ and the defense made the most of it.Then there was the schoolboy scandal in which a respected master was forced to resign from Eton after some of his compromising letters came to light. The powers that be kept this one on the hush hush, so it didn't have the tabloid headlines of the Boulton and Park arrests.Fiinally, the Cleveland Street investigation, in which noblemen were caught with their pants down having it off with telegraph boys. Well, the main ones escaped to Europe but it left a bad taste in people's mouths about sodomy.Finally, Kaplan argues, Wilde's "sins" wouldn't have attracted as much attention had not these three scandals bubbled up previously to focus people's attention on what they had not previously been totally able to comprehend. They were like, "sodomy? On the Thames? What's that?" But once the buzz started, you couldn't stuff the lightning back into the bottle and Wilde was literally screwed.