The origins of queer hate is investigated in Harry Tanner’s history ‘The Queer Thing About Sin’ in a detailed analysis of homophobia as it was channeled through myths, religions, philosophies, politics and socially in ancient Greece, Rome, Jerusalem, nurtured over millennia in a crucible lies told about queer human beings tagged a deviant because of their nature. Tanner is all over the map BCE and BC to deconstruct how garden variety GLBTQI hate flourished and thrives to this day.
Dr Tanner is a PhD in Ancient Greek at National University of Ireland, Galway. He grew up an Evangelical Christian and when he realized he was gay, he was so ashamed that he turned to ‘conversion therapy’ otherwise known as psychological torture to induce self-inflicted shame. But when he fell in love with another male he embraced his personal truth- emotional, intellectual, sexual, spiritual and soulful.
His study is an comprehensive study about queer life, some affirming same-sex desire and relationships a fact of life. Evidence of genderfluid sexuality in visual arts, poetry, plays, literature, and visual arts, some cryptic, some clear validation of the spectrum of queer existence. Condemnations about queer identities were there from the start propagated by religions and regimes establishing social caste systems of control. And the stakes that regimes had to target queers as not only immoral, but affronts to a natural order as proscribed by religious sects, city-states and arbitrary societal rules.
In his opening chapter Tanner flashes forward to 1895 in a defining moment in queer history when Oscar Wilde was in the Queen’s dock for having gay sex with male prostitutes and fielding a question by a solicitor who asked what is the ‘love that dare not speak its name?’
Wilde’s responded that it is “…such a great affection of an elder for a younger man, as there was between David and Jonathan. Which as Plato made at the very basis of his philosophy, and such as you find in the sonnets of Michelangelo and Shakespeare….in this century misunderstood… The world mocks at it, and sometimes puts one in the pillory for it.”
Wilde’s portrait of older men in relationships with much younger men is reductive to the full range of mutual same sex desire and varied identities and relationships. However Wilde’s words was a rare instance of queer visibility. Many in the courtroom burst into applause, but the magistrates weren’t sympathetic and Wilde was sentenced to two years of hard labor which was led to his early death two years later in Paris at age 46.
Tanner reports how Victorian etymology of ancient language has been mis-translated, further dismissing or the ambiguous references (and shade) even from the berobed (closeted) philosophers Socrates and Plato.
Societies with rulers of enormous wealth while countless citizens lived in such poverty that they would be forced to offer their own bodies as collateral, and when the debt can due could be enslaved. Other atrocities included soldiers would commonly rape other males to humiliate defeated enemies. Intersex people, transgender women, eunuchs, males with perceived feminine characteristics were vilified, ridiculed or exploited as prostitutes or condemned as freaks or burned at the stake.
Tanner doesn’t dilute the graphic about vulgarities of Greek argot often lacing it through with violent forensic and dehumanizing connotations to tract the long lineage that has currency today especially pertaining to gay sex. Some descriptives almost burlesque in there raw imagery they read like a satirical scene from Fellini’s Satyricon or the raw power of a John Rechy novel.
The topic of same-sex love or expression of love was not discussed publicly, but queer people were defiantly living and even documenting their culture. Representation is evident in artwork, poetry, private papers and artifacts such as pottery with depictions of the commonality of gay men in mutually exclusive relationships. In some pagan religious Intersex humans were viewed as blessed. Out Poet Sapho was not only legendary in her time on the Isle of Lesbos (inspiring the moniker lesbian) her mythic life celebrated for centuries.
Tanner notes that representation of and all women of the era were primarily expected to be child-bearers, acknowledgement of women in any other context was ignored in histories of the time, except in goddesses in mythological tales.
After the fall of Rome, there were though safe gay haven like Byzantium, but mostly for a time Florence before queerness was outlawed, so reviled if one were Florenzen it was code for sodomite. Meanwhile, state-run brothels for men to hook-up with women to encourage heterosexual sex. In Britian Henry VIII men found guilty of buggery were punished with hangings and women with drownings. But not, of course, for King James of Scotland who ascended the throne after Elizabeth I’s death and his male lovers were welcome at court. Utrecht was most notorious for mass executions of gay men in which began in the 17th century and the crimes against gay humanity spread across the Netherlands.
In America homophobia caught on quick, laws banning our existence were in place, But there were safe environs including New England where society was tacitly aware of women in ‘Boston marriages.’
Tanner’s final chapter surveys pivotal moments of queer bashing in medieval, Renaissance and l as well as GLBTQ+ overview of homophobia’s relentless agency. But also proves the fearless validation of queers living lives and defying centuries of oppression up to this day, the current rabid queer bashing aimed at transgender, binary and genderfluid youth, and in general the same old homophobic flames are burning right now in ‘conservative’ red-states, churches and media. Tanner’s history of homophobia in The Queer Thing About Sin is an essential reminder that GLBTQI+ communities are ready to fight the homophobic fires this time.
