In 2017, I started following the trials of a British student convicted of a rare crime known as ‘rape by deception’. Her best friend claimed she had been misled for years, and the trials turned on whether deception of that kind could negate her consent. I became absorbed: a queer sex offence trial in which two students – only a few years younger than me – were brutally examined about their friendship, secrets and intimacies, including encounters involving a blindfold and a dildo. The court reporting was sensational, inviting titillation and laughter. In response, I found myself deeply moved by the case and increasingly alert to the way queer sex was being represented and judged. That unease, and a growing sense that something vital was being misunderstood, led me to begin work on a book about sex, deception and the law. To get beneath the coverage, I turned to the court transcripts and began trawling through thousands of pages of legal documents.…