Greek Elegiac Poetry: From the Seventh to the Fifth Centuries BC

"This is very special, because it’s probably the oldest queer love poetry that we have from ancient Greece, alongside Sappho . It comprises hundreds and hundreds of lines of poetry about all manner of topics, from friendship to love of other men, to the pain of unrequited love, and it does so in a very celebratory style. There’s also a certain tongue-in-cheek level of wit that can be a bit naughty at times. It’s very endearing to read. It’s also a powerful reminder that queer love has been there for as long as our race has, and certainly as long as our literature has existed, and that there is evidence of that. Most of them are addressed to men, and then some of them are also addressed to a friend. To the best of my knowledge, there aren’t any addressed to women. The poetry of Sappho is addressed to women, but it is slightly harder to read because it’s much more fragmented than Theognis of Megara. The poems of Theognis of Megara make for wonderful reading and allow one to dip into some very ancient queer love poetry. I haven’t tried to write another book about sexuality in the ancient world: I wanted to write a book about its opposite, homophobia and queerphobia. It is something that is stalking all of our lives at the moment. It’s rearing its head in different parts of the West, and it almost feels like the tide of LGBT+ rights, which felt inexorable before, is being rolled back and is facing new challenges. And I think it was time for me, at least, to examine why that might be so. The book looks into the long history of homophobia from the ancient world, and then, towards the end of the book, we move into the medieval world, with some later discussions of what’s been happening in the modern world as well. The book argues that throughout history, homophobia has been motivated by social crisis and financial instability, and happens because of the politics which emerges around self-control and restraint of finances and resources in response to crisis. It argues that we will see a similar pattern as instability increases in the modern world, in the rollback of LGBT+ rights. For me, it is also a very personal book because, as I discuss in the introduction, as a teenager, I was an evangelical Christian. And what I always really wanted was a rational explanation for why the law codes exist—For example, in Leviticus 18:22: ‘Thou shalt not lie with mankind as with womankind. It is an abomination.’ If you look at the law codes of Leviticus or Deuteronomy, which banned certain foodstuffs, there’s usually a logic to it. It’s because there are parasites in pork or certain shellfish go off faster than others, for instance. As a teenager, I was grappling with this, at times in very difficult circumstances. People in my prayer group were encouraging me to engage in what would be described as conversion therapy, something I describe in the opening of the book. I’ve wanted to look back since at providing a rational explanation for where this stuff comes from. Because I think if you can academically, historically and rationally understand something, you stand a very good chance of gaining some mastery over it, of making it make sense in your own life. That’s what I’ve sought to do in The Queer Thing About Sin , so that people can understand that if they hear a church pastor or someone they love attacking them for their sexuality, that is not a moral law. These were a series of thoughts that have been invented by human beings in response to social strife. If we understand that, we might be able to make sure that when social strife hits our shores once again, we don’t go down the same route."