The Queer Thing About Sin: Why the West Came to Hate Queer Love

by Harry Tanner

A gripping new journey through ancient history, uncovering the origins of homophobia and the untold stories of those who dared to love.

In the early days of ancient Greece, queer love was celebrated. The most famous warrior in antiquity loved another man, the poet whose lyrics were memorised by philosophers and kings sang of her desire for women. Men could swear oaths of undying love and live out the rest of their lives together in peace. What fragments survive of this ancient world all tell us one it was not a sin to be queer.

In this extraordinary book, Harry Tanner sets out on a journey to discover the origins of homophobia in the West. From the rise of belligerent tyrants to civil unrest and the birth of radical new philosophies, Tanner follows the traces of this sinister idea as it swept across the ancient Mediterranean. Wherever he discovers the roots of homophobia taking hold, from ancient Judea to imperial Rome, Tanner finds a confluence of crises mirrored across the centuries. Inequality, fear and an obsession with self-control – this is how societies turn on their queer citizens, time and time again, since the dawn of history.

This is a powerful story that draws on the rich world of the ancients to reveal how homophobia infected Western religion and ideology - the consequences of which we are still living with today - and to that end how we can move forward and resist homophobia in the future.

Genres: Nonfiction, History, LGBT, Queer, Audiobook, Cultural, Religion

272 pages, Hardcover

First published September 25, 2025

Reviews

[bri]

Thank you to the publisher for sending me a finished copy in exchange for an honest review. All opinions are my own.

I was so ecstatic for this premise: Harry Tanner is an ex-evangelicalist and classics scholar who opens his book with a foreword expressing his intention to investigate the historical background of homophobia, specifically as weaponized by the church. I was so excited to deep dive into Biblical translations and intentions and the contexts and impacts of certain Christian texts and movements throughout history. But it turned out to be a mostly aimless gallivant through the lives of potentially gay historical figures in ancient cultures, pinned together with flippant attempts at signposting towards a poorly crafted (and barely present) thesis about political and economic contexts, peppered with a single chapter about non-Christian and non-Greco-Roman history, and with one single chapter dedicated to the entirety of queer Western history from the time of Jesus to present day.

The book starts out strong, firmly within Tanner’s western classical background of Greco-Roman culture: exploring perspectives on homosexuality in Ancient Greece throughout the millennia based on different contexts and through different lenses of translation, discussing how information or meaning might be warped, conflated, or misinterpreted surrounding queer desires and lives. At this point, I was LOVING this book, and already prepared to recommend this around. But then Tanner starts slowly losing the plot.

The structure of this book is just utterly ridiculous. As mentioned, Tanner meanders into tangential deep dives as to whether certain figures in history are gay, such as Plato and Aristotle. There’s an attempt to bridge this with the central idea of tracing anti-queerness into the foundations of Christianity, but the argument and threads are vague at best, and way too much time is taken up with these deep dives considering their impact on the historical narrative Tanner is attempting to showcase here. We have a whole chapter on Plato and a whole chapter on Alexander the Great, out of the total 9 chapters. Wildly disproportionate.

The following chapter is about “ancient Jewish law” called: “Love in the Time of the Old Testament.” Now, [imagine me doing a really deep long sigh here] I was immediately concerned when the approach to Jewish texts was framed as the “The Old Testament.” I understand that Tanner is ex-evangelical and that generally the purpose of this book is to track the history of anti-queerness as it affects Christianity today, but if the angle here is to look at the original Jewish texts and their relationships to Jewish culture and queer people, I find it utterly frustrating to refer to the text by the title that was later necessitated through Christian amendments. Jews do not call the Torah the Old Testament because we don’t have a different testament to require a comparative adjective. Or the "Old Testament" would have been fine if Tanner was openly looking at Judaism as it exists with the framework of Christianity, but he also wasn't doing that. Chapter title beef aside, Tanner's approach to Jewish text was almost offensively decisive and distanced, Tanner making incredibly bold assumptions about the Jewish culture and context. This was especially jarring considering Tanner consistently offered multiple options of interpretation and lots of room for uncertainty when discussing the texts of Rome and Greece. So for him to say that queer people were an “inconvenience to the religion” by citing the Torah’s separation of land and sea animals as evidence of a strict binary thinking was upsetting to say the least. His ignorance was startling, excused with a “guess we’d have no way of knowing how this would be interpreted so this is what Christian scholars think” approach, as if Jewish people are extinct and as if there are no such thing as contemporary queer Jewish scholars. I honestly wouldn’t have been upset about this if Tanner approached these Jewish texts more opaquely from his Evangelical background, explaining how they are used and interpreted BY Christianity (I find that very interesting and important, actually!) but instead he decided to speak for Jewish people on how Judaism interprets our own texts and boy, does he have it wrong. (We have 6 genders in our religious text! and 6 might actually be wrong because Jews famously love to debate and question our religious texts! We are not “inconvenienced” by people who are cool enough to question Jewish law, that’s actually considered commendable and holy and super Jewish!) And this chapter, supposedly dedicated to Judaism, is actually just dedicated to the non-Greco-Roman ancient world, as much of its time is spent talking about Egypt and Babylon, and other surrounding lands. Might as well cram everything not Greco-Roman into one chapter, am I right?

(Also side note: if we’re just randomly exploring different gay stories in historical and Biblical contexts, and you’re claiming to try to provide equal opportunities for lesbians and trans people, how did you NOT mention Ruth and Naomi? Anyways.)

Then, we spend one chapter in Ancient Rome, covering some basics and speculating whether Marcus Aurelius was gay. Tanner also gives some historical lesbians some time to shine here, that was nice. (He does mention sapphic and trans narratives and individuals throughout the book, and I have to give my kudos. But of course, the majority of his investigation regarding queerness relies upon philosophies surrounding homosexuality between cis men.) No real complaints about this chapter though, again, Tanner is at his best in his own Greco-Roman wheelhouse.

The second to last chapter finally ACTUALLY talks about Christianity (the apparent driving force behind this whole book), though it spends a lot of the chapter talking about the circumstances of the land surrounding the genesis of Christianity. Again, I do think this was meant to fit into some thesis about difficult circumstances of the world connecting to times of hatred and homophobia (I guess, therefore necessitating a messiah? which does actually just end up feeling like Tanner is subconsciously regurgitating Christian ideology instead of interrogating it as he initially said he was setting out to do).

And finally, as mentioned previously, the last chapter is spent literally summarizing homophobia across the Western world from that time onward via a laundry list of deaths. Even King James VI/I—whose version of the Bible was one of the first widely used English translations and which revolutionized wider access to Biblical texts—is relegated to a couple paragraphs in this final chapter, despite the fact that I’m certain a deep exploration into his circumstances as a gay king who oversaw a deeply homophobic text would be RIPE with material for this book!

THE QUEER THING ABOUT SIN was nothing less than a mess. It was a self-indulgent deep dive into interrogating the queerness of certain historical and biblical figures and discussing homosexuality in the ancient western world. And hey, those bits weren’t bad, but they were poorly organized, loosely slathered together with the supposed glue of a nonsensical thesis that somehow somewhat reinforces the ideology the foreword claims to be deconstructing. It would actually be interesting to track the history of Western thought—the purposeful and accidental interpretations of Greco-Roman philosophy and Biblical texts—as weapons against queer identities throughout the ages, but this just isn’t that. Though Tanner has clearly done the work to unlearn his learned homophobia from his evangelical upbringing, he hasn’t seemed to really unpack the rest of it. I think if he had reckoned with the fact that he’d be looking at these texts and histories from an ex-evangelical lens and used that as a primary tool in examining his sources, something magical could’ve happened here. But the unawareness of his Christian-centric viewpoint undermines his own research (especially when it comes to analyzing religious texts, and especially especially when it comes to talking about Judaism, which Christianity has a warped view of). And the structure is just so bad. How can you spend a whole chapter on Plato and then cram 2000 years of oppression into the same space? Anyways, someone please actually write a book that traces the ideology that impacted Christian homophobia and its history of translation and interpretation because that would be a cool book. And maybe consult a single fucking queer Jewish scholar, thanks!

[Saimi Korhonen · Rating 4 out of 5]

”Though evangelical Christianity no longer holds the same power over me, I keep returning to that question: how and why did ancient societies turn against their queer citizens? With the world as it is, and with homophobia on the march and back in the pages of the statute books, we need answers.”

In his book The Queer Thing About Sin, Harry Tanner aims to show how and why homophobia and transphobia became so deeply imbedded in western society. Challenging common myths and narratives, he explores the lives and treatment of queer people from archaic antiquity to the rise of Christianity and the establishment of modern Western societies.

I stumbled upon this book quite randomly when scrolling instagram and boy am I glad I decided to pick it up. Tanner’s book offers an easy-to-understand, well written and thoroughly researched look at the history of homophobia and queerness that is not afraid to challenge long-held assumptions and beliefs. There was a lot in this book that I already knew as I have spent quite a bit of time reading about queer history in antiquity especially, but I still learned so much and gained a whole new level of understanding of queer history which I am grateful for.

Antiquity, especially Ancient Greece, is often referred to as this haven of queerness where men had sex with younger men without consoquences and queerness was celebrated. Tanner does a great job at deconstructing this myth and exploring how we ended up with this really simplified image of this society. I knew the truth of antiquity was more complex than that glossy image, but there were so many new revelations for me in this book, such as archaic Sparta having actual anti-gay laws and archaic Boeotia being known for men living together as if married and male couples swearing their love for each other on the grave of Heracles’s famous lover, Iolaus. Tanner did a great job showing how, as the archaic period gave way to the classical era, there was a gradual but continuous shift in ancient Greek societies towards intolerance. The booming gay porn pot industry ended abruptly in 450 BCE, and just a hundred years after Aeschylus’s openly gay play The Myrmidons was staged, gay men were executed in Athens. I knew Athens became a bastion of so-called civilization and was a city where self-control and the like was praised as the peak of masculinity, but I didn’t know there seemed to have been a trend of queer men leaving the city to go to places like Macedon which were much more open to queerness. It is baffling how Athens became what it did when the pair they praised as the ones who saved Athens from tyranny, Harmodius and Aristogeiton, were lovers. The way Tanner explained this pair’s love becoming sanitized and decidedly unerotic – a noble, platonic form of queer love – reminded me of how cis-straights still today can often only stomach so-called family friendly queers.

Tanner also does a lot of great work in the Ancient Rome chapter of clearing common rumors and ideas. He emphasises how Rome was, just like Greece wasn’t, a culture in which queer love was always normalized. He showcases just how commonly the threat of same-sex rape was in Roman discourse, how rumors of someone having engaged in gay sex was used as slander (same as in, say, Athens) and how the wild stories of emperors’ gay sex parties and queer relationships are never positive but nearly always stories used to showcase the moral degeneracy of said emperor. Rome also seemed to have had some kind of anti-gay law, as there were cases of men being punished for seducing younger men. One really uncomfortable, but necessary-to-highlight aspect of Roman culture and its relationship with queerness was how closely it was tied to sexual violence against slaves. Men could have sex with other men to relieve their pent-up energy, provided the other man was below them in status, and ideally, a slave who wasn’t even seen as a fellow human. Interestingly, as I learned, it was during Roman times that gay relationships became defined strictly as a bond between an older man and a teen boy. One of the most enduring assumptions about Greek culture is that there was a widespread practice of pederasty and that all Greek m/m-relationships were, in our eyes, pedophilic. But this is of course not the case and there are plenty of visual representations of men, seemingly the same age, having sex. I appreciated, as someone who is not at all aware of how translating ancient texts work, Tanner bringing up just how complex it is to figure out what the ancients actually meant – for example, the word ”boy” doesn’t always mean a young boy or a teen, but can mean a subordinate, a slave of any age or simply a man younger than the other. The Greeks and Romans had a real thing for hierarchy and there was, it seems, a need to maintain the same heirarchical dynamic in same-sex relationships as there was in marriages. Greek gay relationships didn’t always function in the same, pederastic way, and to think so is to ignore both facts and, let’s face it, common sense.

The chapters on how and why ancient societies went from semi-tolerant cultures to hostility that could even lead to executions were especially interesting. I’ve never before come across a text that highlights the correlation between the rising anti-gay sentiments and wealth inequality in antiquity. It seems, based on evidence, that the more inequal an ancient society was, the less tolerant of difference it became: in Rome, inequality was staggering, as was their hatred of anything ”un-Roman”. While Sparta was deeply conservative and money was mostly in the hands of the few, Megara’s society was more communal and equal in tearms of wealth, and thus, more tolerant of queerness. The links between wealth inequality and the rise of individualism and philosophical sects that promoted self-control was also interesting. When wealth became something people had to work their assess off for, the idealization of self-control and the idea of it as the gateway to wisdom, prosperity and truth became common. This led to ideas of sexual control and all kinds of sex that couldn’t result in its natural conclusion, aka a baby, as either unnecessary, dangerous to your soul or even sick. Plato, for example, writes in Symposium about queer love as an ideal when physicality and passion is removed from it and all that is left is a spiritual, close connection, and later, in Laws, he describes his ideal world and refers to sex between two men or two women as unnatural. It was insidious to see how early people began to paint queer people, especially queer men, as sick, excessive, uncontrollable, greedy, loose and dangerous to kids.

It was also frustrating to see how, in times of crisis or in times of huge inequality, people have always looked for scapegoats and often turned to the most vulnerable minorities to blame. Some ancients saw Philip II’s murder at the hands of his ex-boyfriend as a direct consoquence of his lavish queer lifestyle – a cautionary tale to warn off men from embracing their same-sex desires. Christians have used the story of Sodom, which for the longest time wasn’t seen as being about homosexuality but about the dangers of inhospitality, to explain that just like back then, God is know punishing them for the sins of the gays. In 1730’s Netherlands, this resulted in mass killings and imprisonments of queer people. Byzantine Emperor Justinian went the same route as the Dutch when he had to explain why Byzantium was suffering from plague, famine and economic decline. In this book you can see how queer people go from being seen as threats to, say, individual boys, to threats to whole societies.

I am not super familiar with early Jewish and Christian history, so the chapters about the creation of the Bible, the times of Jesus of Nazareth and how Christianity came to embrace anti-gay sentiments were full of new information for me. Tanner, who openly talks about his own religious trauma, goes into detail about some of the most famous passages of the Bible which are used to justify homophobia (Sodom, Levictus 8.12, the story of Ham and Noah, as well as a myriad of writings by St. Paul who referred to gay sex as God’s punishment and way of showing his disappointment) and why common interpretations of them might be a bit misleading or at least not as clear-cut as they are made to seem. I really liked this quote about how the Bible has been used, moulded and discussed: "– the history of homophobia in these texts has as much (if not more) to do with how they've been read and interpreted over the years as how they were written." It is quite common to think that antiquity was pro-gay and then Christianity came and ruined everything for the gays, but Tanner makes it very clear that the slow decline of queer acceptance began early on, way before Jesus ever walked the earth. In many ways, Christianity embraced the already homophobic ideologies of antiquity, such as the image of the gay man as greedy, morally loose, predatory and money-obsessed, and built on them. The same obsession with self-control found in Plato’s text can be seen mirrored in Paul’s texts. Christians weren’t the ones who first decided that the only moral, natural type of sex is between a man and a woman in order to make a baby (everything else is too much). They weren’t the only ones preaching the dangers of pleasure. These Bible and Christianity chapters were great to read cause even though I am not personally super interested in early Christian history, I could feel my brain developing as I read the book.

Near the end of the book, Tanner discusses briefly our current political climate and how today we can see similar strategies used by the far-right against queer, especially trans people, as those that were used thousands of years ago. Instead of admitting that, for example in USA, a lot of issues stem from rampant racism, deeply imbedded misogyny, capitalism, frankly catastrophically dumb decisions by certain orange presidents and other stuff like that, those in power prefer to blame trans people for corrupting the youth and some kind of shadowy queer agenda of ruining the country's economy. The way we see the world and what makes a person "normal" or "good" has changed – though in some ways it hasn't: men are, for example, still the ideal – but it seems some things never really change or go away, they just adapt. And one of those adaptable things seems to be the need to bolster "normality" by aggressively targeting everything and everyone outside that narrow concept of "normal". But as Tanner points out, even though it is frustrating to see similar things happen time and time again, by knowing the history of homophobia, understanding its artificiality and the motives behind people who crafted anti-gay laws you can better fight it today.

I would happily recommend this book to anyone interested in the history of queerness especially in ancient western and European societies. It can be a tough read at times because it focuses on how the west came to "hate queer love", but it's deeply informative, very well written and incredibly insightful. I've decided to rate it 4/5 and not higher not because there is some objective big flaw in it, but just because I so rarely give nonfiction 5/5 stars (it really has to transform me as a person or be absolute impeccable to get that rating). For me, a 4/5 nonfiction is very, very good and something I would recommend without hesitation. I will keep an eye out on what Tanner publishes in the future, for sure!


Here are some cool facts I learned:

- Athens was not the first Greek democracy.

- It is said Aeschylus died when an eagle dropped a turtle on his head. What a way to go.

- For centuries, people repeated the story of Sappho’s ”husband” as fact. Finally, in the 1850s, William Mure pointed out the husband story is most likely a joke as the man’s name, Kerkylas of Andros, literally means Dick All-cock from the isle of Man.

- While the idea of a homosexual identity is modern, the ancient Greeks did have an understanding of a queer identity, as they sometimes referred to men who fancy men with the word ”tripos” which literally means orientation. Aristotle also wrote about how some men are drawn to men, or ”sick” as he puts it, by nature.

- Euripides died in self-imposed exile in Macedon, where he, perhaps, ran to with his friends to escape the increasingly hostile (to queer people) atmosphere of Athens.

- Some claim Plato’s dad was Apollo – it’s quite common to see notable historical men being given a divine parent cause surely so great a man cannot be a mere mortal.

- The cynic philosopher Diogenes was known for living in a wine jar, farting excessively in public and masturbating in front of people while grinning at them. He also, perhaps, sent a letter to Alexander the Great saying he’s not a good king cause he is ruled by his companion Hephaestion’s thighs. What a menace.

- It is possible that the story of David and Jonathan is somewhat based on Gilgamesh and Enkidu.

- There is evidence of a small sect of early Christian who wrote about Jesus falling in love with a man he raised from the dead and sharing a bed with him when naked. They were branded as heretics. They are known as the Carpocratians.

- In the Bible, Jesus never, in fact, says a direct word against same-sex desire. There is one section (Matthew 19:12) that can even be interpreted as him showcasing acceptance of queer people.

- Socrates was sentenced to death for atheism and ”corrupting the youth”, which most likely at least partially referred to him seducing young men.

- Ancient Greeks saw gender as fluid and believed a man could make himself more woman-like if he behaved in an unmasculine, immoral way. This was one step on the path towards the linking of immorality and queerness.

- The treatment of gay people differed in Mesopotamian societies. Assyrians had a law that said gay men should be raped and castrated. Babylon had no laws forbidding queer desire and seems to have embraces genderqueerness in religious contexts, such as in the cult of Ishtar.

- In 1791, Revolutionary France decriminalized homosexuality.

[metempsicoso · Rating 3 out of 5]

Saggio molto scorrevole che, però, speravo mi piacesse un po' di più.
Riducendo tutto ai minimi termini, il problema fondamentale è che Tanner non deve aver avuto in modo abbastanza chiaro in testa l'oggetto della sua indagine: a volte, come suggerisce il sottotitolo italiano, pare voler scoprire dove e come è nata l'omofobia; altre sembra voler sostenere la tesi per cui, nella storia, le crisi socioeconomiche si sono sempre accompagnate a un esacerbarsi degli attacchi alla comunità queer. Se per la prima accezione, di fatto, la ricerca è inconcludente per mancanza di elementi, per la seconda il campo d'indagine è troppo ristretto per sorreggere un'asserzione con ricadute tanto estese.
Purtroppo, a voler dire proprio tutto, per me più spesso che no questo saggio è parso un susseguirsi non sempre ordinato di excursus su un po' tutto ciò che di queer ci è rimasto dell'epoca classica, soffermandosi sì sul commentare come questi casi si suppone siano stati recepiti dalla comunità, ma spendendo di fatto ben più parole per inquadrare il momento storico in analisi - atto dovuto, visto il saltellare qua e là in fasi diverse della storia greca, romana, ebraica, cristiana.
Ciò che mi ha "turbato" di più, comunque, è come Tanner, pur criticando in altri studiosi la tendenza a collegare in modo arbitrario i puntini dati dalla scarsità di informazioni che ci sono rimaste, finisca per cadere nella stessa trappola e si lanci in interpretazioni che, forse, sono troppo gravate da una prospettiva eccessivamente "contemporanea".
Chiudo il libro con molte curiosità che forse un giorno varrà la pena approfondire, ma qualche riserva sull'autorevolezza dell'autore.

[3 stelle, ma scarse]

[J. Joseph · Rating 4 out of 5]

Thank you to Bloomsbury Continuum and NetGalley for this advance reader copy (of the North American edition - UK edition already out) in exchange for my honest thoughts.


This is a comprehensive look at queer history in the Archaic/Homeric and Classical Greek periods (roughly 800-323 BCE). For those who aren’t up on this history or region, this is the birth of Greek philosophies up to the establishment of the Greek democratic Golden Age. Tanner, holding a doctorate in Classical Studies, clearly contextualizes the history for his reader — making connections I have seen in my own studies but haven’t seen others discuss, and additional revelations I hadn’t ever considered but which make a lot of sense. For example, and this really is one of the big learnings from this book, queerphobia has always risen during times of austerity, economic downturn, political upheavals, and whenever the common person has been squashed under the rich for too long. This isn’t a new phenomenon, and Tanner demonstrates this quite convincingly.

So why only 3.5 (rounded up)? Honestly, there are two main reasons and both are connected. First, the book is advertised around the Christian concept of sin, and how queer love is now connected to this in modern views, but… Second, and here’s why the first is a problem, over half the book is Greece pre-Christianity. It's why I opened this review by situating it only in Archaic to Classical Greece. There’s one chapter for all of the Near East and Judean history, one chapter for Greece under Alexander, one chapter for all of the Roman Republic and Roman Empire, and one chapter for literally everything from Augustine to 2025. So, this is more of a “queer love in Ancient Greece + some other connections” than it is “queer love and sin in the West”.

[Mandy · Rating 3 out of 5]

Rating nonfiction remains something I’m not equipped for.

This read a touch more like a text book than I wanted while also making me question my grasp of somehow both history and economics (one of which , I had nothing to grasp on to be fair).

I think I was maybe looking for something a bit more …abstract and essay adjacent and now I’m out here sorting out Greek to English translations and googling words like “parsimony”.

TL;DR: translation is always up to interpretation & sapphics always get washed out of the records.

[Josh C · Rating 4 out of 5]

Again basically impossible to really rate or evaluate a history book about a topic I have zero knowledge of but I liked the style and layout of this book, hitting a bunch of historical civilizations and tracing somewhat chronologically. Was really fascinated by the emphasis on word definition and context and how much we take for granted about certain religious texts that could be as simple as a translation error and it means something completely different.

I also appreciated the emphasis on figuring out the general discourse and attitudes of an era through snippets. Add to that the clear understanding that since so much of this is hearsay and oral retelling, you can only work in generalities and try to understand the climate rather than confirming what people said or did. Definitely a bit dense at times but never too much and I didn’t feel like it was unnecessary.

Eye-opening to see the overarching trend of the economic facets of demonization that Tanner is getting at as it all comes into focus, and it has obvious practical applications. I certainly didn’t know most of the history of queerness in all these historical societies so as always I’m really happy to have learned something :)

[Denise · Rating 4 out of 5]

Fascinating look at queerness in antiquity, focussing largely on ancient Greece (not surprising, given that that's the author's field of expertise), and the rise of homophobia that came to be ingrained in so much of Western religion and ideology and has yet to be banished.
One the whole, I found this to be a highly interesting read, though would at times have liked more depth and detail.

[Lina Kerstin · Rating 5 out of 5]

Mycket!!!! intressant bok.

[Bungaku Shoujo · Rating 2 out of 5]

It’s difficult not to approach this book with tenderness. It begins with the author recounting the self-hatred he developed as a gay man growing up in an evangelical community, and I wholeheartedly agree with the anti-homophobia message. I also find Tanner’s thesis that homophobic sentiment arises/intensifies with economic inequality, the contemporary resonances of which will delight or frighten depending on how concerned you are about presentism, to be interesting. However, this thesis is not always well-supported.

Tanner frequently uses the anachronistic terms “queer people” and “queer sex”, sometimes including token references to trans and non-binary people even when they are not relevant to the discussion. However, “queer people” almost entirely refers to queer men (sometimes the unwieldy term “men who have sex with men” is used), and “queer sex” mostly means “anal”; the Romans certainly talked a lot about oral sex, and it even somewhat destabilized their thinking on sexuality, as there was ambiguity about which partner should be considered the dominant one in such an arrangement. Tanner excuses the infrequent mentions of lesbians as a consequence of androcentric texts, which has some truth to it, but also belies the book’s intentions to be about “queer love”. In fact, while adult male citizens willingly being penetrated was the nightmare of respectable Greeks and Romans, lesbians mostly engendered nothing but amusement, with heterosexual female sexuality being of much greater concern to legislators; it didn’t even count as adultery under Augustus’ adultery law. This may have been because lesbian sex did not carry the possibility of getting pregnant by a man other than your husband and disrupting the patriline, and with such activities being conducted in the female world. Leaving half of the population out of the definition of queer undermines sweeping claims made about what so-and-so philosopher said about "queerness".

For a book concerned with wealth inequality, Tanner is largely blind to status differences, even in about half of the Rome chapter. Many instances of homophobia are not condemnations of male-on-male sex per se, but discomfort at men emasculating themselves or being prostitutes, which has more to do with misogyny. Tanner is also blind to context at times; while stories about the wild gay orgies of people like Elagabalus were used to slander him, having lots of sex was considered a sign of lack of self-restraint regardless of the gender of your partner, and it was not uncommon for politicians, such as Julius Caesar, to be denounced as both a womanizer and a bottom. There were some facets of ancient gay sex that I felt were relevant but were never mentioned, such as a supposed class of male prostitutes who specialized in taking the dominant role; there is a possible advertisement for this kind of prostitute in Pompeii, and his price is higher than usual. Even within Tanner’s chosen examples, I felt many of his interpretations, like the supposed homophobic moral behind the stories of Philip II’s assassination, the alleged queerness of the Dildo of Alexandria, or the implication that Euripides left Athens because he was gay, were reaches.

There were also a couple of historical errors, and while most of them were nitpicks, combined it made me suspicious of any errors I didn't pick up. Catullus is denounced as a homophobe before Tanner remembers that Juventius exists, but many critics believe that his poems play with gender in revolutionary ways; Sappho’s famous “slender Aphrodite, I cannot weave” poem identifies her beloved with a Greek word that refers to a young person of either sex and not a “girl” as is translated, which was particularly strange in a book concerned with appropriate translations; it is claimed without citation that women in archaic Greece were probably highly restricted, when many scholars think they were probably less restricted than they would be in later eras; and neither Caesar’s troops nor Christians burned the library of Alexandria to the ground. And while I wouldn’t necessarily view it as an error, Tanner's rightful concern about the decline of LGBT rights in the west ignores how some of the most homophobic countries in the world today are Middle Eastern or African, and are heirs to different traditions than the ones highlighted in this book. While some of this homophobia can be linked to colonial-era laws and large and devout Christian populations, some countries, like Uganda, actually adopted more homophobic laws after independence, with some politicians there claiming that homosexuality is a western perversion.

For people who subscribe to the view of ancient Greece and Rome as queer paradises, this book’s deconstruction of the myth will help them. For others, this well-meaning book will sadly miss the mark.

[Gaetano Lamberti · Rating 3 out of 5]

3,5

Un saggio che pensavo potesse essere pesante, invece si è fatto leggere molto facilmente e mi ha acceso una curiosità che vorrò approfondire. Alla fine del libro non scopriremo quando sia nata l'omofobia in occidente, perché la Storia si perde nella notte dei tempi, ma è molto interessante fare dei salti in periodi storici in cui l’omosessualità era considerata normale.
È un viaggio interessantissimo attraverso l'Antica Grecia, l’Impero Romano, l’Antico Egitto e i secoli dell’Antico Testamento, epoche in cui i grandi filosofi, eroi, imperatori e messia spesso avevano dei compagni, in onore dei quali si facevano ergere statue in loro memoria.
È altrettanto interessante e destabilizzante vedere come bastasse poco per trasformare qualcosa di accettabile in qualcosa di pericolosissimo da eliminare. Consigliato.

[Sam · Rating 5 out of 5]

The crux of this book comes down to Tanner’s argument that, throughout Western history, queerness has been linked to excess and a lack of self control. Tanner makes a strong case, and if you’re interested in the intellectual and cultural roots of Western homophobia, this is the book for you.

I expected a lot more of a focus on Christianity in the CE rather than the extensive coverage of Ancient Greek and Roman thought. The coverage of the ancients’ attitudes takes up about 2/3 of the book, but it does set good groundwork for Tanner’s explanation of how early Christians were influenced by the popular scholarly texts available to them. Anything past approximately the year 500 was crammed into about a chapter, so the pacing overall felt odd, but not bad.

Thanks to Netgalley and Bloomsbury for an eARC in exchange for this review.

[Gonçalo · Rating 4 out of 5]

From Rainbow to Red Flag

The Queer Thing About Sin is a smart, accessible dive into how queerness went from largely unremarkable to morally condemned — and Tanner makes it clear this wasn’t divine intervention so much as a long series of bad cultural decisions.

Moving through ancient Greece, Rome, and early Christianity, the book shows how power, hierarchy, and fear did most of the moral heavy lifting. It’s history, but it reads like a careful unpicking rather than a sermon.

Some sections get dense, but never dull, and the payoff is a sharper understanding of how arbitrary — and stubborn — these ideas still are.

Thought-provoking, well-argued, and proof that a lot of “sin” was very much man-made.

[Rebecca · Rating 5 out of 5]

Thanks so much to NetGalley for the free Kindle book. My review is voluntarily given, and my opinions are my own.

It's amazing to me that so many people think gay people are just a modern day phenomena, some weird fad. Which makes absolutely no sense if they think it was the sin of Sodom and Gomorrah (it wasn't). Too much critical thinking, I guess.

I learned so much from reading this book. It has only been in recent years that I have really been reading up n this topic, and even if I had been researching it for years, there is always more to learn. It's why I love reading non-fiction books and wish more people would.

Definitely would recommend this book!

[Walter Zogg · Rating 2 out of 5]

My takeaway is that society has always had queer individuals but their acknowledgment/acceptance by the ruling class has fluctuated throughout history. This book is mostly compiled of snippets of evidence from ancient Greece/Rome where gay sex is mentioned. It was organized in an unorderly manner and rambled on often with no connection to the thesis. If you find analyzing gay deeds on an ancient pot to be interesting this book might be for you.

[Chris Shoop-Worrall]

This is a deeply researched and often-fascinating book that is at its best when it is focused on the author's area of expertise; the first half of the book is a brilliant exploration of histories of queer cultures within Greco-Roman eras, and blends economics with language, memory, and ideas about love and relationships in ways that resonates right into the present.

The second half seems to try and cram in so, so much that the central lines of argument feel far less focused; the final chapter - the very heart of the book's title - rattled through over a millennium of history in a way that feels very rushed. It is also, frankly, staggering to see a book that spends so much time exploring complex ideas about sexuality within diverse and interconnected cultural and religious contexts - Southern Western Europe and the areas of the Middle East and North Africa - and not even mention at all, any aspect of Islam. A fundamentally important component of much of the later (rushed) linear history, and vitally relevant in the context of much of its discussions of other Abrahamic faiths and queer love, and of geographies and legal systems discussed elsewhere in the book...is just not mentioned at all...

A great half a book, and then a second half that grows increasingly muddled and patchy.

[lilac · Rating 2 out of 5]

It was okay. I'm sorry, Harry Tanner, because you didn't really deserve the 2 stars - the book itself is wonderfully written & researched, and the information is presented in an eloquent yet accessible manner - but it just wasn't for me.
The book really focused on male homosexuality - maybe as I should have known from "queer", but now it's such an umbrella term that I didn't think that's all it would be about. Personally, I don't have a huge interest in male homosexuality, not enough to keep me sustained and fully interested throughout the whole book. Because female homosexuality is a whole other kettle of beans, one that would include discourses on misogyny as well, I guess. So I don't think I was the target audience on that front.
And my second issue is the Greeks... way way way too close to paper 3 for comfort 😭😭😭😭
Maybe I would enjoy this book more when Classics A-level is a distant memory and not a few kilograms of notes on my desk, in the same room as me as I type this. God above do I hate Plato...

TL;DR: It's not you, Tanner, it's me!

[Erin · Rating 3 out of 5]

deserves more than three stars, but the disordered nature of the chapters took me out a little bit, I entirely respect the investigation into finding queer life literally everywhere in the ancient world (kinda argues that what is homophobia but repressed homosexual desire), and the argument laid out about the interaction of economic stress being directly equated with rising homophobia is very convincing- has also motivated to continue my reading of lower than the angels to further explore the role of the bible in all of this

[Kristian Tempelmans · Rating 4 out of 5]

Niet altijd heel gestructureerd geschreven, en soms meer een algemene geschiedenisles dan een focus op homofobie en -acceptatie. Maar mooie inzichten, ondersteund met voorbeelden uit de tijd van de oude Grieken, Romeinen, de vroege Christenen en meer.

[Jasmine · Rating 4 out of 5]

The ending made me cry and i don't even know why.
Also it would've been better if in complete chronological order but it was brilliant nonetheless. Extremely thought provoking and definitely something everyone should read at least once in their lifetime.

[Morgan Williamson · Rating 2 out of 5]

Could notttt bring myself to finish this, tell me why I’m 7 hours into the audiobook and we’re still in Ancient Greece?
That’s what I get for trying to be a better ally 😔

[Steven · Rating 4 out of 5]

This book is a rather convincing argument that says that homophobia is linked to material conditions. When a country has an unstable economy or an unhealthy relationship to debt, queer people are painted as lascivious or excessive and can be scapegoats for deeper issues of economic inequality.

Almost always, this tendency to accuse queer people of excess is accompanied by virulent misogyny, as was the case in the Greek and Roman empires. Self-restraint is seen as a display of masculine strength, and sometimes homophobia is a consequence of a wider anti-sex attitude in which both women and bottoms are accused of being too feminine. In a more general sense, when self-restraint is seen as both a virtue and a masculine quality, its opposite, which is femininity, is demonized and oppressed.

The most interesting part of this book, in my opinion, is that the author implies that these dichotomies are purposely promoted by the ruling class in order to divert attention away from their hoarding of wealth. In this way, homophobia and other forms of bigotry are a tale as old as time--The inheritors of generational wealth engage in whatever behavior they want, while they allow the nouveau riche to promote the myths of bootstraps capitalism and wealth via puritanical discipline. When middle class or lower class people are saddled with debt or face multiple obstacles in generating financial subsistence, the myth of self-restraint is then passed on to them (homophobia and all), as if THEY are the problem, and not the people doing the actual wealth hoarding.

I think this book closes in a nice succinct fashion as well--In our modern era, we do have wealth inequality, but people are more comfortable with the queer community because (at least in Western countries) we have a healthier relationship to debt, or rather, moderate debt is not seen as a moral failure. Recently, though, economic instability has engendered a new crusade against trans people, who are now seen as the harbingers of so-called liberal excess. And so, the cycle begins all over again. People would really prefer to focus on any other issue than the most pressing one, which is that a high percentage of society's wealth is concentrated in the hands of a very small percentage of the population.

[kylie · Rating 3 out of 5]

Really interesting (primarily ancient) history on queerness. It did feel like it was lacking something, thought I'm not quite sure what.

There were a couple things that I felt didn't get enough attention -

1) In chapter one, right from the start, we get the incorrect association between gay men and pedophilia. We learn the roots of this connection and its possible origin in bad translation (almost like submissiveness = youth), but it lacked a clear statement: being gay ≠ pedophilia, and any man (like Wilde) that wanted to argue it did (and was therefore very natural) was doing incredible damage to the gay community. He wasn't just wrong, but he was looking for a cop out for his harmful behavior.

2) Throughout, but especially in chapter two, we're introduced to the idea that gay sex in the ancient world wasn't necessarily primarily for consensual pleasure, but rape. Similar to the above, we got lots of background on how this was misconstrued and/or what it meant, but it seemed to lack a clear statement: Rape isn't sex and it's harmful to associate the two. It didn't matter the sex/gender of the victims - it was rape and has nothing to do with queer sexuality.

These both seem like obvious declarations that maybe you don't think need to be said. Without it though, the information feels like it's meant to be neutral, and it's not.

**I received my copy from Netgalley.

[Ja · Rating 3 out of 5]

A little bit of queer history through the lens of ancient history. Tanner tackles the history of homophobia by examining some of the stories and myths that we've heard over the years. Famously, there's the simplified myth of ancient greeks having sex with younger men without any consequences, but the reality is far more complex than that. He looks at the stories of Achilles and Patroclus and how we can discern their relationship through texts like The Iliad. There are chapters on ancient Rome, Christian history and the Bible, and so much more.

While interesting, I did find some of the actual text to be a bit dry and boring. Perhaps it's just the subject matter, it started to feel a little stiff and academic, which has its time and place. It just wasn't doing it for me in this reading. Also, the book really focuses on queer male love, with very little information on sapphic love.

If you're looking for something more intellectual, then this would probably be an interesting read for you.

[Elle · Rating 3 out of 5]

3⭐️

I liked how this book showed the transition from the tolerance of queer people to hate of queer people it clearly showed the turning points in history which really cemented the change in views

Some times the author focused to long on certain points or facts which didn’t overly influence what the author was trying to say for the extent they spoke about it u could tell it was something the author found interesting rather than something that was overly important


While it says this is about all queer people it is mainly focused on the white gay men’s experience there r brief mentions of lesbians, trans people and other races experience but its very much is from a whit gay man’s point of view focusing mainly on their experiences and history

[Seolhe · Rating 4 out of 5]

I still don't know how I feel about this book, and I keep questioning my rating, but I'm erring on the generous side and going with 4 stars (even if perhaps it should be closer to a 3,5).

The topic of this book is really interesting, and I found the author's theory about how rises in homophobia can be linked to financial inequality really compelling. Tanner's writing is also really engaging, and I thoroughly enjoyed the reading experience. I would definitely be willing to read more by the author in the future.

I think it's worth saying that the majority of the book focuses on ancient Greek and Roman history and, to a lesser degree, early Christian history, to the point where everything after that feels like a bit of an afterthought. I definitely think this book could have been structured better, but at the same time, as someone who's really interested in ancient history, this ended up working in my favour I suppose, haha.

Now, there were definitely parts of the book I took umbrage with.
For example, while I understand why he may have wanted to push back against some of the less savory aspects of ancient Greek sexuality (questioning the prevalence of relationships between adult men and adolescent boys, for example), I do think he often over-corrects to the point of completely white-washing any potentially problematic aspects of this history.

Taking the pederasty discussion as an example - while I do agree that there were no doubt plenty of age-appropriate relationship between men in Ancient history, I do find it somewhat disingenuous to insinuate that that was actually the norm and downplaying the existence of "boy love" into nothing more than some Victorian era misunderstanding.
I find it noteworthy, for example, how the author mentions pottery depicting same-sex couples that appear to showcase men of similar ages, while conveniently ignoring the plethora of pottery showcasing older men with younger boys.

Similarly, I took issue with his discussion of sexual acts between Roman men and male slaves. While I agree that these acts should be viewed as rape, I again find it disingenuous to imply that these were only ever acts of domination and that attraction or desire never factored into it.

He's similarly quick to discount any account of queer misbehaviour by the Roman emperors as nothing but political slander.

And look, as a queer person myself, I understand wanting to distance yourself and our community from these less than savory parts of history, but I can't quite get behind this kind of cherry picking of what kind evidence of historical queerness you want to believe. You can't just take any wholesome account of queer love as gospel while insinuating that any uncomfortable facts must be either misunderstandings, exaggerations or lies.

Finally, I think it's also worth noting that, as is often the case with books about the history of queerness (especially ones written by men), this is really a book about queer men.
While the author brings up the occasional token lesbian or the concept of trans people existing, the overwhelming majority of the book deals only with cisgender queer men.
And look, I get that evidence of anything else is sparse, but at some point I would rather you just not try to write a history of queerness as a whole and just call the book "Why the West Came to Hate Queer Men".

I wouldn't say this last point took away from my overall enjoyment of the book, perhaps because it's just what I expect at this point, but it's worth noting nonetheless.

All issues aside, I did ultimately enjoy this book, and I think the ideas it raises outweigh the problems I had.

[Tutankhamun18 · Rating 4 out of 5]

A cultural and historical exploration of the origins of Western homophobia, tracing how queer love, which was once accepted and even celebrated in ancient societies, then came to be viewed as sinful and unacceptable. Drawing on a wide range of ancient sources, Tanners shows that in early Greek and Mediterranean contexts same-sex desire was not stigmatized and queer relationships were part of everyday life, with figures like Homer’s Achilles and other ancient lovers exemplifying enduring bonds. Tanner then follows how this acceptance eroded over time as societies faced political turmoil, economic inequality, and shifting ideals of self-control and virtue, which increasingly cast queer love as excessive and dangerous.

Across chapters covering classical Greece, Rome, early Judea, and the rise of Christian doctrine, Tanner argues that homophobia developed not simply from religious doctrine alone but in response to broader social crises. Periods of instability often led to the demonization of queer bodies and relationships as a way to uphold new norms around discipline and hierarchy, with philosophers and political actors framing same-sex desire as antithetical to self-restraint.

Although I am a novice when it comes to Ancient Greek and Roman histories and stories, the way this was written allowed me to understand the individual stories and they context within society. Paired with this, Tanner manages to include references to how history can be falsely interpreted by missing or biased accounts. For example, the way much of what we have written about queer bodies was meant as slander and cannot viewed as impartial evidence for their lives.

In the final section he also examines the early Christian period and the way the bible changed meanings as nuance to translations were interpreted.

“Distracted by an overly prurient interest in ritualized homosexuality, scholars have sometimes neglected the clear evidence for age-equal rela-tionships, as well as relationships between a consenting younger adult and his older boyfriend. In other words, love.”

“Writers of queer histories, including Kenneth Dover, have often assumed that any mention of queerness is proof of its tolerance.
These academics have used comedians mocking queer people, laws opposing queer people and speeches in political assemblies denouncing queer people as sources from which to extrapolate ideas about their lives. This is how conclusions have been drawn that lecherous, older gay men stalked gymnasia for young lovers in ancient Greece. I have taken the view that we are really looking at an early homophobic trope here, and not an accurate account of common practices.”

“It is common, particularly in the study of ancient Rome, as we will see, to confuse frequent mentions of same-sex rape with a tolerance of homoeroticism. But a man who rapes another man or who uses sex as a means to express aggression is not the same as a man who desires other men. It may even be possible that the more a society associates homoeroticism with rape, the less likely it is to tolerate queer love.”

“This story also speaks to a very different approach to trans people in the ancient world. Greeks were very familiar with the idea of gender fluidity, since they regarded gender as less a binary box and more a sliding scale. However, they still regarded the masculine as the peak of that scale and anything else as imper-lect and frightening.”

“A new ideology was being born in Athens. Same-sex desire ses ackanwiedged as something that some people felt, but it was inadvisable to act upon it. Aeschines argued that queer sex was evil but that a loving, chaste, mentor-like relationship was accept-able. Provided that homosexuality was bleached of any intimacy and purely thought of as an almost spiritual bond, it could be countenanced. The pain imposed by this doctrine on the queer people of ancient Athens - a people who had contributed to the city's poetry, its laws and the establishment of its democracy
- continues its dire legacy today. Queer people are still told to exercise restraint over their desires; in our professional lives and in our personal lives, we are asked not to perform homosexuality.”

“Amidst this world of bustling commerce and merciless mercantilism, Zeno did not see that pleasure was a goal worth working for. His strict emphasis on self-discipline and poverty coincided with the economic uncertainties, indebtedness, wealth inequality and tax burdens of the age.”

“Queer sex had been fashioned by the Romans into a tool of subjugation and terror, and excised entirely from same-sex love.”

“It served ancient writers' agendas to tell stories of queer debauchery, since it played into their narrative that these men were poor managers of the Roman economy. These tales represent the culmination of a steady process by which gay sex became increasingly associated in Western history with abuses of power and hoarding of wealth.
It has been common in popular culture to assume that these tales are realistic portraits of gay life in Roman times, to assume that Romans were tolerant of gay sex. But nothing about Suetonius' account of the lives of the emperors could be said to condone the behaviour; it was quite the reverse.”

“The court of Hadrian may have encouraged some to express their true desires while protected by the emperor's successes, bur most would still have worried about compromising their Roman masculinity. It was his court where, for the first time in the Greek corpus, the 'love of boys' is explicitly defined as a sexual interest in pubescent boys. This was a cultural phenomenon, a product of the homophobic climate in Rome that made pedophilia with slaves
- the only socially acceptable form of gay sex.”


“In the Lord's Prayer we have inherited from Luke's Gospel, still recited all over the world, the phrase 'forgive us our sins, as we forgive those who trespass against us' has a spiritual meaning of forgiveness of wrongs. In fact, the Greek words used (such as opheilo) mirror the language of debt.33 The Lord's Prayer does exhort its followers to forgive others' transgressions, but it primarily asks them to forgive debts.
This is in keeping with Old Testament tradition, which could not have been rigorously adhered to, that the good Jew forgives the debts of other Jews.”

“small table on which the Gospel was laid out and place their hands upon it, one man's hand on top of the other. A priest would then pray that the two men be granted oneness of mind, peace and love for one another. They would then embrace and thence-forth could call themselves 'brothers'. The ceremony is known as adelphopoiesis or 'brother-making'. This ceremony did not act as a full marriage: it did not confer inheritance rights, it did not exclude a man from marrying somebody else, but it did formalize a loving relationship. 2T
There can be little doubt that many queer men would have taken this opportunity to formalize their bond. But it would be wrong to suggest adelphopoiesis was exclusively for men who were romantically involved with one another. There must have been many straight men who formed great friendships and wished for whatever reason to cement their relationship." The Church - unintentionally - provided a shadowy, mercurial cover for queer men to enjoy some form of sanctioned recognition.”

“There were laws in 14*-century Florence that, in letter at least, criminalized same-sex desire, but for a period after the Black Death they were not enforced. Florence was briefly a relative haven for queer people. This, however, changed in the 15" century.34
The first move towards recriminalizing same-sex desire started in 1403. The legislative council established the Office of Honesty (Uficiali dell'Onestà) with the express purpose of countering the rise in homosexuality that had occurred in the last half-century. To do this, the Florentines wielded an unusual tool - the Office of Honesty set up state-run and state-funded brothels so men could have subsidized sex with women. At the same time as they encouraged straight and bisexual men to have more heterosexual sex, the councils approved a proposal.”

[Jack · Rating 5 out of 5]

“But I shall not run from my love - his beauty is mine, with all the beard and hair he has.”

The Queer Thing About Sin is a highly engaging and informative book, which I thoroughly recommend to anyone with an interest in history, social justice, and LGBTQ+ identity more broadly. The author skilfully details the historical attitudes to gay rights/people from antiquity, through the Bible, into Medieval times and then finishes in the 20th century.

Naturally, with gay rights not necessarily something many people were right about in a time of its repression and cultural rejection, many of the points raised within this book can be considered purely hypothetical - important to keep in mind. However, I do think the author handles this constraint ably, acknowledging that different perspectives of sources exist whenever he raises an alternative view.

The author raises an interesting hypothesis, that attitudes and rights afforded to the LGBTQ+ community can be heavily influenced by economic conditions - inequality, inflation, shortages - which encourages ‘self control’, even to love/sexual interest, to be a virtue. This hypothesis is carried throughout the book and a clear connection can be drawn even by the reader, making this book a refreshing analysis of history.

The author does occasionally go on tangents that seem to have no tie in to the overall theme of book - for example, there are two pages that go on about the significance of numbers and astronomy to the philosophical school of Pythagoras. This was interesting, but I struggled to see the immediate thematic connection. That being said, the author is clearly an intelligent man and a talented writer, able to confront distressing historical realities and complex issues with a deftness that makes the book pleasant to read - and I will read more of his books going forward.

The book was simultaneously incredibly uplifting and depressing. It demonstrates that love in all its forms has existed throughout all of time, and that there are pockets of time where it was even fairly normalised - if not celebrated. The book, of course, is also depressing - it is a history largely of suspicion and ostracisation at its best, and horrific torture and cruelty at its worst. The book reminds us that LGBTQ+ rights - increasingly under suspicion and outright attack again - are not set in stone, and that we need to be prepared to defend our rights against the seemingly cyclical approach to social attitudes. The author closes by encouraging each of us to engage in thoughtful conversation with other aspects of society in order to keep these barriers down - in which case, his book represents an incredible window into the significance of this dialogue, and I cannot recommend it enough!

[Daniel Grey · Rating 4 out of 5]

3.5 *

This is an important book detailing the history of queer love and homophobia. I have a lot of thoughts on this book.

Positives:
-The author clearly is very well-versed in ancient history, and the sections that lay out historical events are the most proficient in the book.
-There are a lot of really compelling ideas in this that I think often get glazed over in discussing ancient Greece, such as addressing male-male rape.

Negatives:
-The writing is really inconsistent. There are sections that serve as a historical overview, and those come off as very informative and academic but often very dry. There are also sections where the author has made attempts (and maybe taken some liberties) to bring some of the stories to life, such as telling the story of Harmodius and Aristogeiton. These sections are not well-written and come off almost flippant. There's an almost fanfic style to them that did not really match the more serious academic writing of the rest.
-Some of the writing gets lost in laying out a point, and then it becomes a bit convoluted. Because of this, I feel like some of the points might be overstated or I don't necessarily agree completely with the conclusion drawn from the argument/evidence given. The first chapter is a good example of this, bringing in disparate threads and then abandoning them, such as in bringing up the Simbari people of Papua New Guinea while discussing ancient Greece.

Overall, the substance of this book is good, but the execution is a little rough. I would still recommend this to people interested in the topic..


Thanks to NetGalley and the publisher for providing a free copy of this in exchange for an honest review

[Harry · Rating 3 out of 5]

'the history of the homophobia in these texts has as much (if not more) to do with how they've been read and interpreted over the years as how they were written'

I found the 'meta' element of this book the most interesting. There are linguistic and contextual problems with gleaning attitudes towards queer love in ancient history from ancient historical sources

There is a constant difficulty that pervades all of the time periods and cultures covered which is that while we know what historical words mean broad strokes, their exact meanings are up for interpretation (think of 'I like them' as either a platonic or romantic term depending on context - this could cause confusion in the future)

There is also a difficulty in understanding what is meant when historical figures are described as engaging in same-sex activities. Many roman emperors were portrayed as queer in contemporary accounts (a trope that appears in the recent Gladiator sequel). This shows that queer relationships were something romans were familiar with, these portrayals could show homophobic attitudes, with their queerness representing a lack of control and moral decline, instead of describing actual behavior (think of portrayals of characters such as Dafydd in Little Britain not necessarily showing acceptance of gay men)

though I did find these points in particular interesting, I didn't find much of the actual discussion of historical accounts particularly interesting, largely because the author did such a good job of establishing these difficulties

I also thought that far too much was crammed in between early Christianity and the sections of more modern history in the end. I feel like there was probably a lot of interesting material that was either left out or massively condensed which is a shame

[Jordan · Rating 3 out of 5]

Tanner's book is insightful but ultimately flawed and stilted. Tanner's argument, that historically income inequality led to greater homophobia and persecution of same-sex desire, reads as overly simplistic. The book accurately portrays the ancient obsession with moral self-regulation, but that ignores that this self-regulation applied equally to heterosexual desire in antiquity, at least rhetorically. Men who were obsessed with their wives or men who could not contain their sexual desires for women were seen as equally effeminate as those who engaged in same-sex activities. Tanner gives a lot of attention to this, but not mentioning that it was not a queer-only phenomenon somewhat undermines his thesis.

This is also where Tanner could have spent a lot more time discussing women, because throughout antiquity women were associated with uncontrollable sexual appetites, that they were by nature excessive and could not practice sexual moderation. Thus, queer men were often associated with women. Both were targeted for their inherent "nature" that prevented them from engaging in self-denial and asceticism.

The way the book is organized, often jumping from story to story, results is so many non-sequiturs in which Tanner just leaves one thing behind to pick up something completely different without making a meaningful connection between the two.