The Queer Thing About Sin

Before the year 500 BCE, Greece was a land where two men swore oaths of love to one another. Queer sex was commonplace; pottery and vases depicted pornographic images of gay orgies (go and look closely at those pots in the British Museum). The most famous warrior of all antiquity was thought to be gay. In archaic Athens, Megara, Boeotia and Lesbos - where of course thanks to Sappho we get the word Lesbian - same-sex desire proliferated. But by the end of the 5th century, a sinister idea had swept across the Ancient Mediterranean. Men and their lovers fled overnight from ancient Athens. Gay people were put to death, and a new philosophy was born: a philosophy of control.

In this extraordinary book Harry Tanner, a writer and classicist, will identify this principle as the birth of homophobia and will chart the toxic ideology from ancient Sparta to the Biblical law codes of Leviticus to Imperial Britain. To understand this cascade of historical phenomena is to understand the West's relationship with desire, with sex and with money. The story of how this came to be is The Queer Thing About Sin.

Harry begins with his experience of evangelical Christianity and conversion therapy, then turns to a wider history of why same-sex desire was banned in the Ancient World. The story is told in a series of powerful vignettes from ancient history; gay kings killed by their jealous lovers, ancient same-sex marriage rites, and gay pogroms.

Harry hopes that by exposing the ancient roots of homophobia, he can make plain that queer liberation is a matter of power and politics, and one that affects us all.