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The Queer Thing About Sin: SHORTLISTED FOR FOYLES BOOK OF THE YEAR 2025
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.
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.
- GenresNonfictionQueerLGBTAdult
272 pages, Hardcover
First published September 25, 2025
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418 people want to read
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November 15, 2025
”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.
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.
November 19, 2025
“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!
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!
October 9, 2025
Smart, clear, and fascinating. A brilliant look at our past desperately needed for our future. Loved it.
Displaying 1 - 3 of 3 reviews