During a Monday talk in the Petteruti Lounge, author and classicist Harry Tanner traced instances of homophobic rhetoric and the acceptance of queer people throughout ancient civilizations. During the event, which was sponsored by the Department of Classics, Tanner discussed his 2025 book, “The Queer Thing About Sin: Why the West Came to Hate Queer Love.”
Today, there is a “well-established” socioeconomic correlation between “poverty and attitudes to same-sex desire,” Tanner said. For every $2,000 increase in gross domestic product per capita, there is a “point rise in an eight-point scale of tolerance for same-sex desire in countries around the world,” he added.
Homophobia in ancient Greece and Rome was constructed by “economic changes and specifically rises in mass inequality and debt,” Tanner said in an interview with The Herald after the event.
This correlation between heightened homophobia and times of social disruption can be traced back to the ancient world, Tanner explained during the talk.
“Plato’s increasingly homophobic interdictions roughly track with the literature on increasing wealth inequality in Athens, Rome, one of the most wealth-unequal cities in human history,” Tanner said.
Additionally, the law codes of Leviticus in the Old Testament of the Bible can be “tied to moments of great social upheaval, such as the Babylonian invasion,” he said. Some Leviticus verses — such as Leviticus 18:22, which is translated as “Do not have sexual relations with a man as one does with a woman; that is detestable” by the New International Version of the Bible — are often used to justify opposition to same-sex relationships.
Tanner also pointed to how “ancient Athens stopped producing same-sex scenes on pottery and staging plays which celebrated same-sex desire.”
As a teenager, grieving the deaths of his father and godfather, Tanner turned to an “evangelical Christian group” that “weaponized ancient texts” to make him think that his sexual orientation was a “curse, not a blessing,” he said.
“I had no means to fight back against it, I had no means to understand it,” Tanner said in an interview with The Herald. After training in Greek linguistics and ancient texts, he said he wrote the book to answer questions he had about homophobia during his teenage years.
Tanner hopes that readers of his book who have “suffered from queerphobia” can better understand that homophobia arises from a systemic issue rather than just “arbitrary hatred,” he told The Herald.
For Ella Hochstadt ’26, the talk was “super eye-opening and very approachable” and made her want to read Tanner’s book.
Conversation around homophobia is “really poignant nowadays, so I’m excited to see that it’s coming more into academia, moving into classics,” said Erin Finn ’27, who also attended the event.
Kiran Mansukhani GS, a doctoral candidate in classics who has read Tanner’s book, found the text “quite accessible as someone who isn’t a specialist” in the material.
The book raised an “interesting thesis about how we perceive homophobia and how it changes the future across different times,” he added.
Tanner concluded the talk by imploring academics to publish works that challenge interpretations of texts “which have been used to justify illiberal doctrines.”
“You get out there and you publish it,” Tanner said. “Write it in the trade press, get it in the New York Times and make sure the world knows about it.”
Ivy Huang is a university news and science & research editor from New York City Concentrating in English, she has a passion for literature and American history. Outside of writing, she enjoys playing basketball, watching documentaries, and beating her high score on Subway Surfers.
