It was a quiet night at the Strand bookstore on Thursday night in New York’s East Village, where Naomi Wolf was promoting her new book.

“My friends are here!” she squealed, waving at a handful of people, before dipping backstage.

She returned 15 minutes later to the bookstore’s “rare room”, where she spoke alongside writer Will Schwalbe about her controversial new book Outrages: Sex, Censorship and the Criminalization of Love.

The American edition of the book is not yet on sale, as her US publisher Houghton Mifflin Harcourt pulled it to make corrections after she was criticized during a press interview for incorrectly understanding historical facts.

BBC Radio 3 host Matthew Sweet noted during their interview that Wolf misunderstood the legal term “death recorded” as homosexual men being prosecuted and executed during the Victorian era, in reference to the Obscene Publications Act of 1857.

Wolf said she was thankful for the correction and posted shortly after on Twitter the book would be released in the US after changing the misunderstanding on two pages.

“Following an interview on BBC which raised questions about certain parts of my book, I made necessary changes immediately,” she wrote on Twitter.

This talk at the Strand was clearly to set the record straight. After a pleasant introduction, where she was cited as being avant-garde for writing her Guardian article from 2007, Fascist America in 10 easy steps, Schwalbe dived into the issue , asking Wolf about the BBC interview. What happened?

“I had read death recorded as meaning death recorded,” she said. “The death penalty was the law of the land until 1861, [but] I misunderstood the phrase. Sweet pointed out an 1823 act that allowed judges to report a death without actually sentencing the person to death.”

But it didn’t come without a rebuttal. “There’s questions about his definitions. Some people disagree,” added Wolf. “Some things he said in the interview I don’t agree with. The bottom line is that he did me a favor by identifying a misreading that I corrected.”

Outrages Sex, Censorship and the Criminalisation of Love by Naomi Wolf. Photograph: PR

In a tit for tat, she targeted inaccuracies in the news reports about her own mistake. “There’s been a lot of coverage on these two inaccuracies, and there have been inaccuracies in the coverage as well,” said Wolf.

That includes news reports that claim there was “a long awkward silence” when Sweet showed her a newspaper clipping to back up his argument that countered her own. “The internet interpreted that as my humiliation, my shocked horror,” she said. “In fact, I was pausing because his newspaper clipping had anomalies where the ages of the youths and the trial dates were different. I was pausing because I was trying to understand what those anomalies were.”

The Strand is selling the UK version of the book while the US edition of the book is awaiting corrections. Wolf will be adding what she calls “a real foregrounding of the scholars whose work I draw on, to give a picture of sentencing for sodomy-related offences,” she said.

That includes the works of three scholars, among them Charles Upchurch, a history professor at Florida State University who wrote a book called Before Wilde: Sex Between Men in Britain’s Age of Reform, which traces how the British government started policing same-sex love.

While Sweet said “several dozen executions” was incorrect, Wolf claims the scholars use trial records and newspaper records to cite thousands of arrests. Apparently, Charles “found hundreds of trials and reports of trials”.

“It’s not just what we know what these scholars have found. It was difficult times before the trial of Oscar Wilde and same sex intimacy,” said Wolf. “My focus is not a criminological take. My focus is the effect on Symonds and his friends reading about these trials.”

Beyond the mishap, Wolf urges people to read the book and judge for themselves. It’s an obscure gay love story squared on the life of English writer John Addington Symonds, who she feels was a forgotten hero that promoted gay life.

“It’s about what’s lost to LGBTQ history that you have to dig for,” she said. “There are huge swaths of history we don’t get in school or college with feminist history and the gay rights movement, unless we seek it out.”

As a well-heeled critic, writer and poet, Symonds had a way for obfuscating his desire for men in words. “Symonds became self-censoring,” said Wolf. “Poetry about sodomy had a legal valiance, his prose became opaque. There was a coded language.”

Early on, he married a woman but wrote about its failure. “He didn’t desire her and the loneliness in this marriage became a prison of repression,” said Wolf.

Alas, the book segues into the story of an epic Venetian romance, where Symonds fell madly in love with a gondolier, who became the love of his life (who was also stuck in a marriage to a woman).

When asked if she felt humiliated by the BBC interview, Wolf said: “I don’t feel humiliated but I’m grateful for the correction. I feel great responsibility and humility about this history.”

She added: “I’m not a gay man and I’m not identified as part of the LGBTQ community, but this is an important man in history, what he did is important for all of us. The history of the freedom to love is everybody’s fight. Its critical to reclaim it. I do feel a great sense of responsibility for getting it right.”

“This man’s life is so extraordinary, he left us such a gift,” she said. “I find what he did so inspiring, as an activist and as someone who cares about love he didn’t give up on love.”

One guest championed Wolf for her level-headedness. “I can’t take any credit for it,” she said. “I’m responsible for getting it right.”

She added: “We’re in a time of spin and fake news, endless lies from people who are not supposed to be lying to us, like press secretaries and politicians. Journalism is losing its ability to correct itself, as I saw with so many stories not correct about this. It’s my job.”