As he contrasts the Christian West with the societies of ancient Greece and Rome, Arab Spain, imperial China, and pre-Meiji Japan, Louis Crompton recalls the lives and accomplishments of homosexual men and women amid a darker history of persecution.
In history, literature, and art, the ancient Greeks praised same-sex relationships and extolled their moral effect. Contrarily, Jewish religious authorities condemned male homosexuality as a deadly charge in the sixth century B.C.E. and later attributed Sodom’s destruction to it. Tragic consequences resulted from the collision of these two traditions in late-empire Christian Rome, which affected both Europe and the New World.
Louis Crompton chronicles the use of “sodomites” as human sacrifices in Byzantium in the sixth century, medieval France, Renaissance Italy, and Spain during the Inquisition. However, Protestant authorities in the Netherlands, Calvin’s Geneva, and Georgian England were equally devoted to the execution of homosexuals.
Religious superstition was the primary factor, and it was aided by political ambition and unbridled greed. But from this boiling pot of anxieties and aspirations, homoerotic themes emerged in the works of the Renaissance masters, including Donatello, Leonardo, Michelangelo, Sodoma, Cellini, and Caravaggio, frequently entwined with Christian themes. In the court intrigues of King Henry III of France, Queen Christina of Sweden, James I and William III of England, Queen Anne, and Frederick the Great, homosexuality also flourished.
As shown in poetry, fiction, and art as well as in the lives of emperors, shoguns, Buddhist priests, intellectuals, and actors, the anti-homosexual atrocities performed in the West contrast sharply with the more tolerant traditions of pre-modern China and Japan. According to Crompton, the celebration of same-sex love was on par with that of ancient Greece in the Japanese samurai tradition
