In The Queer Thing About Sin, the classicist argues that ancient history reveals a connection between homophobia and wealth inequality.

How did you first notice the link between homophobia and economic precarity?

When I started to try to work out the origins of homophobia, I started with my area of expertise, ancient Greece. I found that classical Greece’s tolerance for same-sex relationships ended earlier than is commonly realized, during a period of extraordinary social crisis. The language they used to attack gay men called them gamblers and excessive people, which led me to ask, could homophobia have been related to economics? Athens at the time was the beginning of a rise in wealth inequality. So then I thought, perhaps we can expect to see societies that are more equal being more tolerant of same-sex desire. And sure enough, I found evidence of that in a number of historical times and places with greater equality, like Florence after the Black Death, when there was a 50-year drop in wealth inequality.

You show that some claims about gay Roman emperors were probably propaganda. How can researchers sort truth from fiction in such cases?

One of the joys of researching homophobia—not to sound too oxymoronic—is I don’t have to weigh in on whether Nero was actually gay, because we can’t really know. What I can say is that the people writing about emperors were using homophobic tropes in a clearly negative way. The same goes for the Hebrew Bible and New Testament—I found that a lot of that writing against gay sex tells us more about homophobia itself, what’s motivating it, than it does about an era’s gay people.

What similarities do you see between ancient homophobia and the West’s current backlash against sexual minorities?

Before writing this book, I thought of the right’s hatred of queer people as a sort of odd quirk unrelated to the rest of their political philosophy. But now I’ve come to see that there’s a deeply rooted belief in Western history that you can navigate economic crisis by withholding your desires, as well as a clear link in the West between the value of economic self-restraint and a hatred of identities that are perceived to be rooted in desire and, thus, excessiveness.

In your research, did you find any successful models for pushing against rising anti-queer sentiments?

Other than reducing economic inequality, no. But we can control our own perspective, at least. If you have ever wondered, as I have, whether homosexuality is a sin, because all these ancient texts say so, I really hope this book puts that question to bed for you. I really hope that you can see that there were economic levers at work and can be at peace with your queer identity.