The Essay in the Drawer
c. 1785 · Jeremy Bentham, who has finished an essay arguing that sex between men should not be a crime
The essay is finished and it is careful. It works through every argument anyone has offered for why sex between two men should be a crime (that it weakens the population, that it corrupts the young, that it offends God), and it takes each one apart on its own terms. Then it asks the only question his whole method allows: who is harmed?
Nobody. That is the answer, and he has shown it.
In England, at this moment, men are hanged for it.
He is at the start of a career trying to rebuild the entire legal system from the ground up: prisons, courts, education, poor relief, the franchise. All of it depends on being taken seriously by people in government, and none of it has happened yet.
If he publishes, he becomes, in one afternoon, the man who defended sodomy, and every other argument he ever makes arrives attached to that. If he doesn't, the essay goes in a drawer, and the hangings continue, and he goes back to prison reform.
Put it in the drawer
Publish itOn your own? Play it first, then reveal.
Reveal what happened
What really happened
Bentham put it in the drawer. He kept writing on the subject privately for decades (there are hundreds of pages) and published none of it in his lifetime. The first substantial part appeared in print in 1931, nearly a hundred and fifty years later, and the rest later still. Executions for sodomy in England continued into the 1830s; the death penalty for it was not removed until 1861. Meanwhile the reform program he protected did arrive: prison reform, free education, the secret ballot, votes for women, animal welfare (a list that sounded impossible when he wrote it and now sounds like a description of the world).
The philosophers weigh in
File it"A warped board is straightened slowly and in one direction at a time. Force it everywhere at once and it splits, and then you have neither the board nor the work."
Publish"I published mine in six weeks and was laughed at for a century. He had the argument, he had the proof, and he decided the timing was somebody else's problem."