Pod Insights Betwixt The Sheets: The History of Sex, Scandal & Society A History of Homophobia About this episode Has there ever been a time when homophobia did not exist? And what causes it to rise and fall?
Kate is joined by Dr. Harry Tanner, author of 'The Queer Thing About Sin: Why the West Came to Hate Queer Love'. Harry has been exploring ancient and biblical sources to find out where homophobia began, and why it seems to intensify in times of inequality.
This episode was edited by Tim Arstall. The producer was Sophie Gee. The senior producer was Freddy Chick.
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1:19 Kate Lister? Hello, my lovely betwixters. It's me, Kate Lester. You are you, I am me, and this is Betwixt the Sheets, the podcast where we have a good old root around in the unmentionables of history for our own entertainment. And because we do that, I do have to tell you, this is an adult podcast spoken by adults to other adults about adulty things and adulty ways of going around adult subjects and you used to be an adult too. And we do that because, well, just because we care about your feelings and because lawyers told us to. Right, on with the show.
1:48 Kate Lister? Throughout the ages, human societies have had plenty to worry about. Sometimes we're worrying about war, sometimes we're worrying about money, sometimes we're worrying about real issues like illness and climate change. But we have also spent a lot of time worried about complete and utter bollocks, such as, were the Beatles really making everyone horny? Or if riding a bicycle might permanently... Ruin a woman's face. All genuine historical concerns. But as if that isn't enough, people throughout history have also found a lot of time to worry about other people's personal lives. Specifically, who they fancy. And this went way beyond worry, and still does, to all-out hatred and discrimination. I am talking about homophobia.
2:32 Kate Lister? But when did homophobia begin? Have we always done it? Has it always been something we're worrying about? Does it get worse under certain conditions? Have there ever been any societies which were homophobia-free? Well, I am ready to find out if you are.
3:05 Kate Lister? Hello and welcome back to Betwixt the Sheets, the history of sex scandal in society, with me, Cait Lister. In 2022, research led by psychologist Dr. Tessa Charlesworth found that between 2007 and 2020, American bias against gay people was on a remarkable decline. And they were actually on track to reach a point where there would be no homophobia, no bias against gay people at all. However, by 2024, the same research team found that the pattern they'd been tracking was actually reversing, and that prejudice had also increased in relation to black people, older people, disabled people, and overweight people, not to mention women. So what causes this kind of shift?
3:47 Kate Lister? What has to be going on to stir up hatred and discrimination towards various groups of people? And why do we keep doing it? And, let's try and be optimistic, will we ever stop doing this? Well, I am thrilled today to be joined by Dr. Harry Tanner, who has been researching homophobia throughout history, what causes it to increase, and also, how acceptable was it to be gay in ancient Greece? I know we like to think of them as an absolute gay bonanza, but how true is that? Right, have we all got our anti-homophobia spectacles on? No, I do. Let's do this.
4:29 Kate Lister? Well, hello and welcome to Betwixt the Sheets. It's only Harry Tanner. How are you doing?
4:35 Speaker 02 Absolutely fabulous today. It's such a beautiful sunny day in London, which is uncommonly rare, but it's good.
4:43 Kate Lister? Have men taken their tops off to wander around Tesco?
4:46 Speaker 02 Not yet, it has to be said. Well, not that I have seen.
4:49 Kate Lister? It's coming.
4:50 Speaker 02 But the hamster teeth will very much be out soon, I think. The temperature in the water is rising.
4:57 Kate Lister? So, Harry, you are a scholar of, well, of many things, but in particular of queer history, and you are the author of The Queer Thing About Sin: Why the West Came to Hate Queer Love. The first question I normally ask people is how did you come to study this subject? But you have a particularly interesting story to tell here.
5:18 Speaker 02 Well, you're very kind. I don't know about interesting. Basically, I came to this because when I was a teenager, I was an evangelical Christian. I was part of a prayer group. And I was really, I suppose, seduced by all of those ideas, by the idea that, you know, there was a God, particularly a God that really hated queer lives and gay lives. And it led me down a very dark path, which I talk about in the beginning of the book. And the only thing that really rescued me from that was ancient history and being able to read the Bible in its sort of original languages, which got me thinking about how all of this stuff came to be. When you read the Bible as in a prayer group,
6:03 Speaker 02 you think that you're reading the literal word of God, or at least you're encouraged to believe that. And a critical reading of an ancient text shows just how long it has taken for us to receive all of this information and how many questions there are about its interpretation. So I did my PhD in... Greek linguistics, which is the language of the latter part of the Bible and some of the early translations of the Old Testament as well. It was really fun. I really enjoyed doing it. And the most important thing for me was I got to actually read texts critically kind of for the first time and really understand the problem of translating ancient texts. And I got to the end of my PhD and the PhD that I was wanted to write was an ancient
6:47 Speaker 02 Greek sexual vocabulary and kind of the sort of sexuality in the ancient world. But my supervisor encouraged me not to do that. He encouraged me instead to write sort of more a technical thesis, which I love doing, about sort of the history of words and the history of translation. But I finished my PhD and I did want to write a book that really addressed not the history of sexuality, but the history of homophobia in the ancient world. How did we come to invent this this concept and this idea of homophobia and queerphobia generally? And I ended up, I was in the very early stages of this manuscript and I didn't have a clue at all how to proceed with it. And I was quite drunk one night in a bar in Soho
7:29 Speaker 02 in London. I'm going to get killed for telling this story. When who should come up to me but Nigella Lawson?
7:37 Kate Lister? No.
7:39 Speaker 02 Yes. And she, we sat down, we were having some drinks and I was telling her about it. And she said, well, she said, what you need to do is you need to write up three chapters and then you need to send it out to literary agents. And this is sort of how you do it. So that's what I did. I have Nigella Lawson to thank for that, that top tip.
8:05 Kate Lister? That, Harry, that is incredible. I mean, how many academic stories start with, I was drunk in Soho and Nigella Lawson was talking to me. That's just, what an origin story.
8:16 Speaker 02 Yeah. So that's how we got to the really pink book, the queer thing about sin. But we, we have Nigella to thank for that.
8:25 Kate Lister? Thanks, Nigella.
8:26 Speaker 02 Thank you, Nigella.
8:27 Kate Lister? Thank you for that. Love her, love her, love her brownies.
8:29 Speaker 02 Oh, my goodness. That was the first thing I ever learned to cook, by the way. Nigella's
8:33 Kate Lister? Was it?
8:33 Speaker 02 Flowerless chocolate brownies. Absolutely incredible.
8:36 Kate Lister? We love that. We're gonna have a side quest now about Nigella loss and we need to behave ourselves. Right? So, homophobia is really interesting, especially when we're thinking about the ancient Greeks, because there is this sort of narrative in the modern world that the Greeks were fine with it, that everyone in ancient Greece was gay. In fact, it was weird to be straight, quite frankly. It's a miracle anybody reproduced at all. That is a kind of, sort of a weird assumption that's permeated into modern society. And you're gonna tell me that that's not quite right?
9:07 Speaker 02 I don't think it is quite right. The first reason I don't think it's quite right is because there just isn't enough textual evidence. So, the textual evidence that we have about lots of gay Greeks behaving in all of these inappropriate, lascivious ways comes from ancient comedies and from lawsuits, neither of which I think we would probably trust in the modern world. So, you don't actually hear any of the serious historians or tragedy writers or anybody really talking about it for a very, very long time. So, I think there's some reason to pause and to ask ourselves, well, when we have these stories told of these kind of lascivious, older gay men seducing these, these young handsome
9:52 Speaker 02 boys, are we looking at something that's real or are we looking at a homophobic trope? And I have leant more towards the latter reading. I do think that there were periods of tolerance of homosexuality in different times in ancient Greece. I think that there is good evidence of that. But there is also good evidence that, at least by the end of the 5th century BCE, what we call classical Athens, that there were laws against being gay. I think also, the other thing is, there's been this whole tradition of wanting to see bisexuality in the ancient world, sort of around Oscar Wilde's time. It's a major part
10:34 Speaker 02 of his trial. How does he paint himself as being normal? Well, to, to the Victorians, if you've got the cultural authority of the ancient Greeks behind you, well, you can claim that your activities, which are going against the norms of that society... Actually should be something we should praise, something we should eulogize. That's where a lot of these ideas come from, I think. The other problem that we've had is a lot of historians looking into the ancient world have read accounts which are of soldiers, accounts where soldiers attack sexually their enemies in battle, or indeed accounts of male slave owners attacking sexually their
11:19 Speaker 02 male slaves. And they've got quite excited about this, and they think, well, here is example of sort of tolerance of homosexuality in the ancient world. I think we can be a bit more nuanced about that now. I think we can realise that when we look at modern conflicts and we see, say, Russian soldiers being accused in international criminal courts of sexually attacking Ukrainian male soldiers, I think we can see that that doesn't make the Russian soldiers gay.
11:48 Kate Lister? Yes.
11:49 Speaker 02 There's a third element to this, which is, we understand now better than we did, say, when Michel Foucault was writing, we understand now the biology of sexuality in a much more nuanced way. It's still not deeply nuanced, but we understand it better. We understand it well enough to know that there is a mechanism, an epigenetic mechanism, by which mammals tend to be more likely to express homosexual acts or desires, and we understand the epigenetics of that now. So I think in the light of that, it seems quite difficult to say that the ancient Greeks and the Romans were somehow this unique exception in all of mammalian biology, that all of them were sort of bisexual.
12:34 Speaker 02 I think it becomes quite difficult to argue that. That said, would the ancient Greeks and the Romans have understood the label queer? Would they have understood the LGBT rainbow? I think if you'd explained it to them, probably. But they certainly understood the idea of having desires for one sex or for another sex. They tell us about that. But the sort of cultural extra baggage that's come on top of that, the rainbow, the sort of the queer baggage with all of that, that they might have found slightly harder to understand.
13:05 Kate Lister? Can I just pick you up on the epigenetics thing there? Because you said that and you said, oh, we know that now. And then you moved past it. I'm going to have to ask you, what have we found out about epigenetics then? I need to know.
13:17 Speaker 02 OK, so the, there's a book on this by, I think it's Dean Hamer, and this was published in the 90s, which discusses how in the second trimester of pregnancy, a nominally male zygote fetus, I forget which one it is at that stage, but it's sort of that bundle of cells. When exposed to higher levels of androgens, higher levels of testosterone, comes out as heterosexual. If those testosterone levels drop.
13:50 Kate Lister? Shut the front door.
13:51 Speaker 02 In the second trimester of pregnancy, you are much more likely to have a homosexual male. It works the other way with female embryos and zygotes. I'm being quite careful with those terms. It works so well to the extent that you, in laboratory conditions, you can increase the probability of making rats gay, making rodents gay. I think it's rats or it's mice they did these studies on.
14:14 Kate Lister? Harry, do other people know this? I've never heard this before.
14:17 Speaker 02 I think so. Actually, completely coincidentally, there was a whole podcast about this. Andrew Huberman did a whole podcast about this on the genetics and neuroscience of sexuality. That was a couple of weeks ago. But for me, because I read a lot of queer theory in advance of writing this book and I love a lot of it. I think a lot of it's some really, really great ideas. But my, my first question about all of that was, can we really say that sexuality is wholly performed? And I had an anxiety about that because I did, well, I did conversion therapy and the whole concept of that, I'm afraid, is. Being told that your sexuality is performed and that you you can sort of deperform
15:00 Speaker 02 being gay. And I think I was deeply uncomfortable reading a lot of that material. So I then went down the science avenue and I sort of started looking at that stuff. And to be clear, I don't want to be reductive about this. I don't want to say that it is only down to genetics. There's a whole lot of other cultural stuff that comes in as well. But it certainly seems that there is a very strong biological component to this. There is a site, I think, a genetic site is called XQ28, which responds quite particularly to testosterone levels. And its expression seems to predict sexuality in later life. In the rodent studies, the really fun thing is what they look
15:41 Speaker 02 for in some of the rodents in, as it were, the bottom rats, is they look for something they call lordosis, which is an arching of the back. This this rat tends to arch its back in front of other male rats.
15:53 Kate Lister? Oh, no. Do they dress up in leather as well and go on a little pride march around the cage?
15:59 Speaker 02 I see. There is a whole literature on gender expression and the XQ28 site and and its role in gender expression as well. So this seems to to move into gender expression. There are also, there are small scale studies, there are very small N numbers, but but small scale studies into the brain structure of both gay men, gay women, and trans people as well. These are like only 100 or so participants. So you couldn't call them clinical trials or clinical level studies. But I think anybody who has lived through being told that their sexuality is a sin, it is evil,
16:37 Speaker 02 and who has fought really hard to try and bring their body in line, to the point, at least to me, and I think, I think many people maybe may know someone that this was this was true of as well, where it drove me to, as I've written in the book, to suicidality. When you're at that point, you really have confronted, I think, that this stuff is not constructed or built by society. And so you might start to question those things a bit more. So that that's sort of my third big pillar, big reason for why I think sexuality in the ancient world probably wasn't this sort of universal form of bisexuality, because you'd have to get over that.
17:19 Speaker 02 That whole mammalian biology hurdle first, you'd have to jump over that.
17:24 Kate Lister? So just taking it back to the ancient Greeks then, they didn't know anything about gay lab rats or about genetics or anything like that. But have you got a sense from your research of what they thought same-sex attraction was? Or do we just not have the sources to try and understand this? Like, did they view it as something natural? Did they view it as like, tell me what you've found.
17:46 Speaker 02 So there is a source, there is Xenophon, who's like a fourth-century BCE Greek writer. He was a friend of Socrates. And he tells us, he uses the Greek word a tropos, which sort of means a turning point, as it were. He says that some people have this tropos towards male-male desire, is what he says in the text. Now, tropos means a turning point. So naturally, in one's head, I think orientation, right? So they do have brief discussions of this kind of thing. The most interesting thing for me is that most of the sources are very anti same-sex desire. There is this fascinating idea that
18:22 Kate Lister? Really?
18:22 Speaker 02 that this great fear that men could turn somehow into women, which would be terrible, right? Because you imagine that.
18:29 Kate Lister? The horror.
18:30 Speaker 02 And there's very little discussion of lesbians, although of course, we get the word lesbian from Sappho of the Isle of Lesbos. And she seems to have been writing same-sex erotic songs for other women. But most of the material from the ancient world, from Rome, from Greece, from ancient Mesopotamia, most of the material is actually anti-queer. And that's why I wanted to study homophobia, because we do this really difficult thing as historians. We're looking at the past and we're sort of going, was this person gay? Were they bi? Was Alexander the Great gay? Was he bi? Was he straight? A lot of these people, maybe with the exception of Alexander the Great, we could talk about that, but a lot of these people are trying to hide
19:09 Speaker 02 their sexuality from their contemporaries. So the idea that we would be able, thousands of years later, to work it out is tricky. What we can do, though, is we can say that there were laws on the statute books at the time that were anti-gay, and we can work out when those arose, and we can work out why. And we could start to try and understand the pattern behind homophobia, queerphobia, transphobia.
19:36 Speaker 02 The trans stuff is also really interesting to me because there's a lot of right wing stuff that goes out at the moment, sort of, you know, well, we understand LGB, that makes sense to us, but the trans thing, this is all new. That's not true at all. There are lots of ancient sources essentially deriding and attacking men who present as women. And we could have the discussion there about is that trans or is that cross-dressing, which is a potentially difficult thing. But the discussion we can absolutely have is that there were people who were opposed to this for a very, very long time. And they're opposed to it for a very modern reason, one we think of as being very modern, which is conservatism. They believe in self-control. They believe in restraining their desires
20:20 Speaker 02 and their emotions. And so they believe in attacking gender identity and queer behaviour. And I was really interested in that because I hadn't been able to find any academic literature or any substantial academic works that discuss homophobia or the history of queerphobia or transphobia. It's always the history of trans people in ancient Byzantium. It's always the history of lesbians in ancient Greece. It's always the history of Greek homosexuality, it's a famous book by an academic called Kenneth Dover in the 1970s with a fantastic moustache. It's never, okay, how did this idea of homophobia come to be? And that's
21:02 Speaker 02 what really gripped me because I used to read those haunting passages from Leviticus 1822, which said that if you lie with another man as with a woman, you are an abomination and you are to be stoned to death, as it says a couple of verses later. And so I had a particular, maybe you might accuse me of morbidity, but a particular sort of morbid fascination, as it were, with how is it that this homophobia, this queerphobia emerged?
21:30 Speaker 02 And it turns out that that's actually an easy history to write.
21:32 Kate Lister? Yeah, like drilling down into it. What is it? What is homophobia? What's the objection? Like when you try and drill down underneath all of the huffing and puffing and the wah wah wah wah wah. It's like, what? What is it that's being objected to here?
21:47 Speaker 02 In, in the book, the answer that I've advanced is when societies come under extreme pressure, and that is often wealth inequality, that wealth inequality is one of the best predictors of this. And you may look to the modern world to see that now. And when those societies come under this extreme pressure, a political group emerges, which starts saying, the answer is self-control. The answer is self-restraint. It is to control your desires, because then you won't want too many things. And then you're sort of focused on the things that are necessary. You're going to be able to survive. You're going to be able to get through this. And that any form of desire or excess is actually going to endanger the community as a whole.
22:33 Speaker 02 That leads to people starting to say, right, so that there is a correct way to be. There is a necessary way to be. Sex must be only for procreation, because that is the only necessary thought process around sex. Any concept of sex for desire or sex because you want it goes out the window. And not only does it go out the window, but it gets actively attacked with all the vehemence and hatred that is boiling over from the injustice and the pain of the world. So it comes to the point when you have two women walking down a street, holding hands and kissing each other and falling in love.
23:15 Speaker 02 And the people who attack them and hit them and assault them violently and even kill them are expressing their rage at the disorder, inequality and, and, and pain of the world.
23:31 Speaker 02 They believe that by controlling themselves and sort of living these ordered lives, they would then get to a place of safety. Now, why, we might then ask, would it be that they don't attack sort of the wealthy? Why don't they attack the causes of these problems sort of more productively? And the answer to that is aspiration, because everybody wants to believe that they could one day have a Lamborghini and a brilliant house, where the manosphere kind of stuff. Everybody wants to believe that stuff is possible for them. And so they have to maintain that fantasy in their head, but 98% of the population,
24:13 Speaker 02 maybe slightly lower than that, can go along perfectly happily without expressing their queer desire. There's only that very small percentage that absolutely need to. It is their only means of expressing desire. So you attack that group of people, that minority of people, and you attack gay men as well, because you are afraid, in a very misogynistic society, those gay men are turning into women, that they're becoming women.
24:39 Kate Lister? Just about to ask you that, is whenever I've read those sources.
24:43 Speaker 02 Was it you?
24:44 Kate Lister? Go on.
24:45 Speaker 02 Was it? I think I saw you doing an Instagram about, was it coro?
24:49 Kate Lister? Yes, that was me about the psychiatric condition that they thought penises were disappearing, a recognized psychiatric condition called coro.
24:58 Speaker 02 That exists in the ancient Greek sources. I watched that and I was like, okay, that's.
25:03 Kate Lister? No.
25:04 Speaker 02 Yeah, so Hippocrates tells us about that. So the father of modern medicine opines on his fears that the male penis is going to shrink inside and become a vagina if you behave in certain effeminate ways. And it's not just him, I think Aristotle talks about it as well.
25:38 Kate Lister? Hello Betwixters, I am jumping in here because I have some very exciting news. Betwixt the Sheets has set up camp on YouTube. That's right, it took us a while, but we are there now. So if you are the kind of person who likes to see your podcasts as well as hear your podcasts, you can now go and find us right there, and the link is in the show notes. And please remember to like and subscribe because the people in charge of the money really do like that. Right, let's get on with it.
26:19 Kate Lister? It underpins so much of the homophobic sources. It's interesting to hear you say that, like, it's even there right at the beginning, is it's this sort of fear of basically becoming women, and that women and femininity are so, are associated with a lack of control and a sort of a decadent, like, it's not masculine. And that's what, I have heard some people argue that really what underpins homophobia is misogyny, which I think is an interesting argument.
26:47 Speaker 02 Male homophobia, yes.
26:48 Kate Lister? Yes, yes, male homophobia.
26:50 Speaker 02 A lot of it is misogyny, but I think it's also about economics. I would pin it squarely down onto, onto economics. It's about what's going on in the, in the scarcity principles of a society. If a society is experiencing scarce resources, for whatever reason, it is going to attack these communities because they are decadent, because they are excessive, because they are all of these things. Women's sexuality is also attacked in the same terms. Women wearing lipstick, makeup, all of those kinds of things. You could look at the history of makeup. I don't know if it's ever been done, actually, I'd love to see it. Look at the history of makeup and chart it with a Gini coefficient, see what's going on in terms of movements in economic inequality.
27:31 Speaker 02 Most students of GCSE history know about the Weimar Republic, and they know then about the Wall Street Crash, and they know then about what happened under Nazism to both women and to queer people. This is, I suppose, a textbook case of, of what I'm discussing there about economic shocks. And then the final answer for me... Which really moved me when I sort of understood this was those passages from Leviticus 1822 that terrified me as a child and as a teenager, reading that we think that they were written shortly after the Babylonian destruction of the city of Jerusalem, when the Jewish people at the time
28:14 Speaker 02 were fleeing out into the desert and were disordered when their entire society was destroyed. And their response to that is to create these very uniform law codes that give some semblance of order and structure to the world. And I was reading all of that material and I had this real sort of sense, I don't know if you have, have you ever been in the library and you have that sense of euphoria when you just read something, you go, ah.
28:42 Kate Lister? Many times.
28:44 Speaker 02 Yeah.
28:44 Kate Lister? Let's talk about the Bible though, because that, the Old Testament has got some things to say and it's fascinating now that you're saying that actually that it's linked to far wider things than just we're gonna hate on men lying with other men. Jesus doesn't actually have an awful lot to say about same-sex desire. In fact, if memory serves, he doesn't say anything about it at all. He says something about eunuchs and then nothing else.
29:07 Speaker 02 He may say one thing about eunuchs. Yeah, we could, we could talk about the.
29:11 Kate Lister? Oh, may he. Right, okay.
29:11 Speaker 02 We could talk about, we could talk about that passage. He doesn't say anything negative. And that's not just in the bits of the Gospels that we have inherited as part of the canonical New Testament, as it were. It's also in the non-canonical Gospels, the sort of, the lost Gospels, as it were, which are really fun to read, by the way, if you ever have a spare moment. It's not in any of those either. So there is, it's not just that it's not in the New Testament. There is no historical reason to believe that Jesus was opposed to it at all. And, and why might that be? Because Jesus was deeply concerned in all of his philosophy with wealth inequality,
29:52 Speaker 02 with poverty, with debt. That's what all his stories are about, right? And his answer to that is that self-restraint is not the answer. The answer is love. That's his whole philosophy.
30:05 Speaker 02 So if you take this model that you've got queer phobia versus queer acceptance and queer love, and queer phobia is about self restraint in the face of adversity, and queer love is about embrace, love and joy in the face of adversity, if that is your model, then which one of those bins, as it was, does Jesus fit in? Well, it's pretty clear he fits in the love bin. He tells us this himself. He tells us that the solution to societal chaos is to love your neighbour, to distribute your wealth. That's what he says. So it seems vanishingly unlikely to me that Jesus would have been opposed to this. It certainly wouldn't
30:46 Speaker 02 have been on his priority list. He's asked many times, which of the mosaic laws would he keep to? And he gives us this very trimmed down list, and the Leviticus 1822 stuff is not in it. So, very clear. There is a long history of people, I want to be really careful about this, because we'll get an academic pile on if I'm not careful in my phrases, but there's a long history of people from Kit Marlowe to King James claiming that Jesus might have been gay.
31:18 Kate Lister? I have heard that said, you know, a guy who hung out with 12 other guys and a bunch of hookers, possibly?
31:25 Speaker 02 Yeah.
31:26 Kate Lister? Just saying.
31:27 Speaker 02 I was particularly upset the other day to find Russell Brand was saying this on his podcast.
31:34 Kate Lister? Oh, no. Oh, dear. Tell me about this history then.
31:39 Speaker 02 Could we reclaim this from Russell Brand, please, Kate? That would be great.
31:42 Kate Lister? Please, yes, please. And from me being flippant and ridiculous, where is this argument? Where does this come from?
31:49 Speaker 02 Okay, so the modern scholarly perspective on this, there's a great book by a guy called Theodore Jennings called The Man Jesus Loved. It's very controversial work, but it goes into a lot of detail on the arguments for why we might consider Jesus to have been gay. I have grave problems with bits of it, and I've discussed that in the book. But what I would say is, when you look at that passage about the eunuchs, when Jesus is asked, what about marriage?
32:28 Speaker 02 Because Jesus very unusually didn't get married, and we cannot stress how unusual that is in that time period, in that place, incredibly unusual. And Jesus is asked, well, what about marriage? And he says, he talks about that there's an exception to marriage for people who are, what he describes in Greek as eunuchoi. We translate this as eunuchs. And the reason we translate it as eunuchs is because when that Greek phrase was translated into Latin in the Vulgate by Saint Jerome, he translated it as people who've been castrated. He uses the Latin word castrer. However, the phrase eunuchoi, which is much older than the Saint Jerome phrase, it's hundreds of years older, that text is hundreds of years older.
33:13 Speaker 02 Up until that point, if you pull a search of every term that word is used, it gets used of queer people at the Persian court, it gets used of essentially anyone who is somehow sexually deviant. So it's a much vaguer term. When we say eunuch, we think of someone whose testicles have been cut off. That's what we think. We think of a castrated individual. The Greek term is much vaguer. So in invoking that term, what I've rather, sort of, I suppose, in the rather cowardly academic way in which I was trained, I've written in the book that if the writers of the Gospels had wanted to give the impression that Jesus was homophobic, this is a very strange word to have used.
33:57 Kate Lister? Ha.
33:58 Speaker 02 He says that they're exempt from marriage to a woman. And he says, there are three different classes of eunuch. He says, there are people who are born eunuchs. As he says, there are people, we're using that term.
34:10 Kate Lister? Yeah, but there's not, are there, though, Jesus? That's, you're not a born, a eunuch, eunuch, are you?
34:16 Speaker 02 This, again, people who are born queer, could we read that? There are academics, if they listen to this, who are going to literally be up in arms about me using the phrase queer for eunuch. But I've tried to explain why, can I go on a side quest about that, just for one second?
34:31 Kate Lister? Please.
34:32 Speaker 02 Okay, side quest about this, because this drives me nuts, Kate, okay? Is when academics will come in and they'll say, and it's not just academics as well, it's people on TikTok, they will come in and they'll say, you can't say that, you can't say that, that's not a correct translation of this ancient Greek word, because the ancient Greeks didn't have queer identities. You can't say gay, you can't say queer.
34:54 Kate Lister? Yep.
34:55 Speaker 02 May I introduce you to the ancient Greek word "beblos", which is a book. We say a book. What do you think of when you think of a book? Think of this, you think of something like this, right? The ancient Greeks would not have thought of that. If you'd said "beblos" to them, they would have thought of a sort of rolled up scroll, and it would have been much shorter, much more compact than these modern books. It would have run to about 800 lines of poetry or something like that. If you went into Waterstones and bought one of those, you would feel you had been ripped off. Okay? What I am saying in this sort of long side rant is that every time we take an ancient Greek word, or a word in Hebrew, or a Latin word that was from thousands of years ago,
35:39 Speaker 02 we are always doing anachronisms. We are always importing our modern ideas onto it. And yet, the only time you will hear cries of objection from the gallery about this is when you are doing it with words like "elnokos" and "queer", or "gay". That's the only time.
35:56 Kate Lister? Yeah.
35:57 Speaker 02 They're not bothered the rest of the time. They don't care if you translate "beblos" as "book", they don't care if you translate "edene" as "peace", they don't care if you translate "dictator" in all of these different ways. That doesn't matter. They're not bothered about anachronisms then, but they are bothered if you're talking about women's sexuality, or queer sexuality, or queer identities. They're very bothered then.
36:17 Kate Lister? And then it becomes a problem.
36:19 Speaker 02 Yes, but it's not a problem up until that point, you see. So, there's always an anachronism. So, that having been said, let's come back to this "elnokos" thing. He does seem, Jesus does seem to be giving a valid exemption there from the concept of traditional heterosexual marriage. He does also talk about people who were elnokoi for the sake of the Kingdom of God, and that seems to mean a kind of celibacy, a kind of asexuality maybe. What he's describing is all forms of non-traditional, non-heterosexual sexuality and gender identity. That seems to be what he is describing.
37:01 Speaker 02 And the fact that we have that and not all the homophobic stuff is, I think, worthy of, worthy of note. Now, every reader who's read their Bible is going to come in at me and say, St. Paul, St. Paul, St. Paul, St. Paul, St. Paul. May I have a moment of your time to talk about St. Paul?
37:21 Kate Lister? Please.
37:22 Speaker 02 So St. Paul, he says there will be the arseno coito, he says, which is a great phrase, the men who lie with other men, arseno coito is the phrase, and lots of people find that quite funny. He says that these men shall not enter the kingdom of God. He puts them along the classes of thieves and adulterers and all of these other terrible people. The trouble is, is there is a whole scholarly discourse at the moment about how much of St. Paul did St. Paul actually write? And were they actually supposed to be dialogues? So were the letters that St. Paul wrote, were they supposed to be sort of Socratic dialogues between one person and another? We can't tell because of the way that ancient
38:06 Speaker 02 sources are handed down to us. So we think when we open the Bible that you're just reading St. Paul's uniform letter, as his letter to the Corinthians, his letter to the Romans, you think it's just St. Paul talking. And if you read the whole thing, you may well start to think there are a lot of contradictions here. Anyway, in the 1990s, lots of scholars started looking at these contradictions. And they suggested that it might actually, in several of these letters, have been dialogues in the original text between St. Paul and an interlocutor. So probably a stoic, so someone who really believes in self-restraint and self-control, which would make much more sense for Jesus's message. So St. Paul says this thing about the men who lie with other men will not enter the kingdom of God. He then goes on and he says essentially, but for the grace of Jesus Christ, but but for
38:51 Speaker 02 the salvation of Jesus Christ. That's the bit that all the homophobes forget. So are we actually looking at this situation where you've got a dialogue, where St. Paul is not actually being homophobic at all? You don't have to believe that we are. This is the big thing that I want to say to any teenager suffering under evangelism. You don't have to believe that they are. What you have to be aware of is that there are scholarly debates about this. You don't have to believe Jesus is gay. You don't have to believe that St Paul wrote that or that he didn't. You don't have to make your mind up, but you do have to understand that there are people who've spent their lives studying this stuff, who are debating
39:29 Speaker 02 it. And anybody, any pastor, any evangelical who is telling you not to love or not to express who you truly are and the authority of an ancient text, which is so slippery. We need to have conversations about such people. This stuff is the subject to extensive academic debate, and this is the power of academia. It is there to question rigid authority. It is there to loosen the categories that we are taught about the world, and it is there to set us all free in that process. Sorry, I got a bit emotional there.
40:10 Kate Lister? No, Harry, it's amazing to hear you talk about it. I can see that it's been a really powerful and personal journey for you.
40:21 Kate Lister? I'll be back with Harry after this short break.
40:33 Kate Lister? Hello, Betwixters. I am jumping in here because I have some very exciting news. Betwixt the Sheets has set up camp on YouTube. That's right, it took us a while, but we are there now. So if you are the kind of person who likes to see your podcasts as well as hear your podcasts, you can now go and find us right there. And the link is in the show notes. And please remember to like and subscribe because the people in charge of the money really do like that. Right, let's get on with it.
41:15 Kate Lister? So as someone that's studied the history of homophobia, it's something that I get asked a lot, actually, as a sex historian as well, is was there ever a period in history where we'd cracked it, where we got it, where we got it right, where everyone was just cavorting around in sexual freedom and having an absolute whale of a time? Have we ever existed without homophobia?
41:34 Speaker 02 I kind of think that if there were a period I'd point to, it would be Boston, Massachusetts in the late 18th century. I love.
41:41 Kate Lister? I wasn't expecting you to say that. Why Boston, Massachusetts?
41:45 Speaker 02 I love, I love this history. So this is Boston, Massachusetts in the late 18th century and the early 19th century. There were queer couples, both gay men and gay women, who were cohabiting and living together and having what they called Boston marriages. This was in the sort of idealistic days of Boston as it was never going to be a sort of a completely utopian state, but there were people writing about the idea that it could be this egalitarian paradise. And Boston, Massachusetts in the history of economics is always the society that economic historians look at for a control of wealth equality. It's considered a pretty good control of wealth equality.
42:29 Speaker 02 So naturally, I went straight there to have a look. I was like, okay, let's, when I sort of thought economics might have something to do with this economic inequality, debt crisis, this might have something to do with queerphobia, I went straight there and I had a look. And yeah, they had what they called Boston marriages. We have love letters preserved from, between two men and between two women. They were pretty open about it. We know where they lived. So that might have been a time when we got it right. I think another time when we have been getting it right, actually largely thanks to the internet, is the modern world. I think we've been getting a lot of things right and we should talk about why that is. The first reason, I think, is because...
43:09 Speaker 02 Of the unprecedented levels of wealth that were generated by the other half of every household being allowed to actually work, right?
43:19 Kate Lister? You are welcome.
43:21 Speaker 02 Yeah, thanks, guys. And or not guys, as the case of thanks, gals. That's the first thing. The second thing is changes in attitudes to debt. So it's now completely normalized in the modern world that we would all have a credit card. We might use it to different degrees, but it's completely normalized. That is not the case for most of history. For most of history, the idea of being in debt is this really frightening thing.
43:43 Kate Lister? Yeah, I remember my grandparents being freaked out when they found out that I had a credit card.
43:48 Speaker 02 Yep. And now I think I don't remember the precise figures, but the average credit card debt in the United States is in the tens of thousands of dollars or something like that. We're also living in societies that are indebted societies. So we run a deficit. The United States runs a deficit. You'll notice, by the way, on that, the political wings who are opposed to that are usually the same ones that are opposed to women's sexuality and queerness. So I think it runs deep in the psyche there. So we're changing attitudes to debt and then also changing attitudes to information, which is our ability to disseminate, share information, to connect as communities has never been more powerful. I'm always really moved by that scene in, I don't know if anyone's seen it, in Russell
44:31 Speaker 02 T Davies' Years and Years, when they start the revolution. And what they do is basically they've got these, as it were, concentration camps that immigrants are being kept in. The government is keeping these camps, which they call erstwhile sites. And these activists come and they take down the towers that are blocking all of the signal. And the internet is then free. And so they can show the world exactly what is happening. And that is what we have seen. In the Middle East recently, that is what we saw. And what was the response of the Iranian state to the women's protests? Shut down the internet, shut down Starlink, shut it down. Because they are terrified that the rest of the world will see.
45:16 Speaker 02 So all of these things, we're getting it pretty right now, I think. We have that freedom and access to information which they never had before. And I think one of the reasons as well that I was able to be freed of a lot of what I'd grown up with and what I'd been taught was the internet and libraries and being able to go and search for information, to go and read, to go and understand. So you've got all of those different reasons why we're living in a pretty good time. But despite all of that, we're still seeing record levels of wealth inequality, very scarily high record levels of wealth inequality.
45:56 Speaker 02 I would go so far as to say that we are entering a new feudal era. When you look at just what's happening and the amassing of wealth and certain groups and the changing of allegiances and the new age of evangelism. And also climate breakdown, which some people have suggested was associated with the last feudal era. There's been some niche historical suggestion, that's true. So all of that is very, very frightening. And who are they attacking? They're attacking trans people as these disordered individuals. Homophobia is rising in countries where we'd sort of thought we'd nailed it, where we thought it was safe.
46:36 Speaker 02 Obviously, there are attacks on women's sexuality as well, the repealing of women's abortion rights across the world. So I think this is all fitting into that same pattern, but we've got some things that are really, really sort of clenching the brakes, as it were, on this cart that's going downhill. And those things are the internet. The internet and also our personal attitudes to debt. I think these are the sort of brakes that are really hard on this. This is why we haven't now tumbled downhill. As history might have suggested that we would by this point into a full-blown iliad. I have hope. That sounds really pessimistic, but I do have hope.
47:15 Kate Lister? Do you think, as a final question then, do you think that, I mean, I don't know if we'll see it in our lifetime, but do you think there will be a world without homophobia?
47:23 Speaker 02 No, I don't think so.
47:24 Kate Lister? It'll always be there, bubbling away.
47:26 Speaker 02 Yeah, you'll get little pockets of it. But it's too convenient a political argument to disappear completely. What we should have is a world where people have access to other communities and other information and places to go. And I don't really see an immediate world where we're going to slide right back to where we were in the 1950s or the 1960s. I think that's exceedingly unlikely at the moment. Huge progress has been made, but the main point I sort of would make is, we believe, when we read the media, I think, the traditional media, that we're living in a society where activism has a serious impact, has a serious effect.
48:07 Speaker 02 And I wonder how much that is true and how much you have broader societal effects which are coming to bear on people's attitudes. And I suppose what I might have believed in my sort of early twenties was that the freedom to be queer had kind of been guaranteed by these generations of activists. And really, it actually had nothing to do with the wider economic background. It had nothing to do with the fact that households were getting richer. It had nothing to do with the fact attitudes to debt were changing. It had nothing to do with the fact that the world was getting more and more interconnected. It had nothing to do with the fact that we had antibiotics which are capable of dealing with STIs. It was solely to do with people like Harvey Milk, these activists, wonderful, incredible
48:52 Speaker 02 activists, but it was solely to do with them. And now I would, having written a queer thing about sin, I would come to question that. And I think we need to start looking at the whole of society, particularly its economics, and see how those things are affecting us all. But as I say, we're well protected, we have the internet, we have freedom of information at the moment, and we also have our attitudes to debt, which are historically Extraordinary.
49:16 Kate Lister? Harry, you have been absolutely marvellous. Thank you so much for coming by. And if people want to know more about you and your work, where can they find you?
49:25 Speaker 02 I'm on Instagram at Harry James Tanner. And if you do feel like reading my book, The Queer Thing About Sin, we've just released it in paperback and it's really pink and really fun.
49:38 Kate Lister? Thank you so much for coming by. You've been marvellous.
49:41 Speaker 02 Thank you, Kate. You are an icon.
49:46 Kate Lister? Thank you for listening and thank you so much to Harry for joining us. And if you like what you heard, don't forget to like, review and follow along, whatever it is you get your podcasts. Coming up, we are finding out how you might get counselled if you were a king's mistress. Hmm. And if you'd like us to explore a subject or if you just wanted to say hello, then you can email us at [email protected] . This podcast was edited by Tim Arstall and produced by Sophie G. The senior producer was Freddy Chick and none of them are homophobic. Join me again, Betwixt and Sheats, The History of Sex Scandal in Society, a podcast by History Hit. This podcast contains music from Epidemic Sound.
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