Historian Harry Tanner explains how a classic play led him on a quest to discover why ancient societies turned against their queer citizens

When I was a teenager, I believed I was going to hell. For centuries, it was almost universally acknowledged that all gay men would. It wasn’t until years later that I asked myself where that idea came from, and why was it that, thousands of years ago when the Bible was written, people decided that queer love was a sin?

It hadn’t always been a sin to be queer. In many cities across the ancient world, same-sex love was celebrated. So how did homophobia take root? Why did so many societies start executing men and women for the same love once praised by their philosophers and rulers?

I have personal reasons for wanting to know the answer. My father died when I was two years old and for many years being Christian made me feel whole. Christianity gave me a compass with which to navigate the world and allowed me to commune with the people I’d lost. But that all changed when I fell in love with another boy at school.

The love that upended my world was clandestine and unrequited. Little girls and boys grow up knowing they will get married; they sketch out the geography of their future relationships long before they even feel physical attraction. For queer people, desire arrives unannounced – it comes as a lightning bolt through a clear-blue sky. I knew I couldn’t tell anyone. I had to keep it secret from him, from the world, and at times even from myself. It was what Christianity taught me to do.

Around that time, I was given a book published by an evangelical group which showed two Black girls holding hands beneath the title: ‘What about same-sex desire?’ The answer, printed below the photo, was Lev. 18.22: ‘Thou shalt not lie with mankind as with womankind, it is an abomination.’ I remember feeling sick with guilt. I became deeply preoccupied with atoning for my sins. Every single night, I begged God to make me straight.

Eventually I went to a lay preacher and confessed everything. Sitting on his cosy, blue sofa, the autumnal light streaming in through the windows, I told him I was gay. He reassured me that he could help, but it had to be a secret – just between us. He handed me a yellow Post-it note with a list of websites that he said could teach me to repress and control my desires. Later, he organized a session for me with another figure in the Church who had written candidly about his own experiences ‘suffering’ from same-sex desire. Both of them wholeheartedly believed that it was our unique curse as queers to desire other men, but never to act on them. It might sound strange but, to this day, I do not believe they meant any harm – they were trying to be kind.

With their encouragement and advice, I embarked on my very own programme of conversion therapy. With their techniques I set about cultivating the numbness that they promised would save my soul. What happened instead was that, after only a few months, I casually told a friend on a walk down a dirt path that I wanted to take my own life. I wanted to escape, and the only escape from a world without love was death.

Perhaps surprisingly, it was a dead language, ancient Greek, that turned my life around. I remember my teacher opening a battered copy of a Greek tragedy – Sophocles’ Oedipus the King, I think – and showing me the tiny footnotes beneath the Greek text. ‘We call it the apparatus criticus,’ she said as she traced the foxed pages with her manicured finger, explaining with exemplary patience that those footnotes told us where each and every single word in the play’s text had come from. From dozens of different manuscripts, scattered in fragments all over Europe, buried in archives in the Vatican and the Bodleian Library in Oxford, sequestered in great palaces of learning, teams of scholars had pieced together what that tragedian had written for a sun-soaked stage 2,500 years ago.

My teacher looked at me: ‘Harry, this stuff did not come in the post. It is our job, as inheritors of the tradition to amend, to fix, to preserve – we pass it on.’

Studying ancient Greek shattered my faith in literal translations of the Bible. I realized that it must have been passed down through the centuries in much the same way as Sophocles’ play; it had also been subject to different translations and interpretations which influenced how people understood and read it. Finally, my unshakeable belief that God hated me for who I loved began to waver. And at the same time, I discovered the rich and strange world of ancient Greece – a land where gay men could be heroes and poets, not just sinners.

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.

Writing this book, I’ve been inspired by my own experiences as a gay man. It is hard enough to rescue any queer life from the ancient world, especially given the purges and revisions of the source material conducted by Romans and Christians alike. But that is even more true for queer women and for trans people. Throughout antiquity, women were subjected to far more stringent controls on their lives than men, and even societies that celebrated love between men remained deeply misogynistic. Where there has been evidence of queer women and trans lives, I have discussed them throughout the book, but inevitably there will be stories and fragments that I’ve missed. The records are dominated by the voices of the free male citizens of Greece and Rome; the lives of enslaved people and women are still emerging. I do believe, though, that the historical forces that conspire to bring about homophobia for queer men are the same as for all other queer people.

But despite these tragic absences and with the acknowledge­ment that there’s so much more for us to discover, I believe that by looking to the lives of queer poets, prophets, warriors, philoso­phers and politicians who felt free to love those of their own sex, we might find the origins of the homophobia that has twisted our culture for so long. And if we can understand that, perhaps we can make sure the freedom to love and to live out queer lives never again dies in the West.

This is an extract from The Queer Thing About Sin: Why the West Came to Hate Queer Love by Harry Tanner (Bloomsbury Continuum, £20). Buy a copy from bookshop.org here.

Or buy a copy from Blackwell’s here.

A Drink with the Idler

Harry Tanner is guest on “A Drink with the Idler” on Thursday, when he’ll be chatting to Tom Hodgkinson about the origins of homophobia and the untold stories of queer love in ancient history.

Mark Vernon will also present a new Thought for the Week.

That’s Thursday 30 April, 6pm-7pm.

Find out more and book tickets here. It’s FREE to subscribers – otherwise £7.50.

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