The dark truth of gay history

Added: 2026-05-06

[00:00:00]What was it like to be gay across human history? This question was a whole lot harder to answer than I thought it'd be because I first kept hitting the same story. Ancient Greece and Rome were relatively tolerant. Even the Islamic world celebrated same-sex love and its greatest poetry. And with the exception of the rise of Christianity, history has largely moved towards acceptance. But the more I dug into it, the more that story fell apart. The ancient world had quite different values and often brutal punishments for those who disobeyed. If you were the wrong kind of gay man, your life could go very bad, like you just got tortured to death bad. And I also saw forces that were much more horrific towards gays than religions could ever manage. I'm Ken Laort. At Elephants in Rooms, I do my best to give you a balanced presentation of what I found.

[00:00:50]And this one threw me some curveballs that weren't easy to understand or sometimes just to personally accept.

[00:00:56]It's a complicated world. We'll largely go through history chronologically, starting with the ancient world where gay sex wasn't about being homosexual, but had a completely different framing.

[00:01:06]Then we'll look at the medieval times which really lived up to its name before turning to the urban age and how population differences reshaped the entire landscape. Then we'll look at the modern era ending up just before the gay rights revolution that changed it all.

[00:01:21]Two things to note before I get going.

[00:01:23]First, I'm not going to talk much about lesbians because they just don't show up that often in historical records, which is also something that holds pretty true for women in general. Secondly, this is really a look at Western culture. I just couldn't include the whole world in a 20-minute piece and do it justice. Okay, so it seems counterintuitive, but we actually know quite a bit about homosexuality in the ancient world.

[00:01:45]Mainly because the Greeks and Romans left us with a solid written record. And one thing that's clear from that record is that sexual orientation or being quote unquote gay really wasn't on anyone's mind. Something else that's counterintuitive about the era, the Bible. It says a lot less than most people think about homosexuality, especially given how much it's called in arguments for and against it in the modern era. There are only a few passages in the entire Bible that directly address same-sex relations. Two verses in Leviticus refer to men lying with other men as with a woman as being an abomination and prescribed death for it. Some today make the case that that's part of a larger body of law, a so-called holiness code that also forbids eating shellfish and wearing mixed fabric, rules that virtually no one enforces anymore. And also the sins of Sodom and Gomorrah. They're highly debated as well. But this video really isn't about those debates. But know that overall the Bible offers little explanation or attention to homosexuality. So let's turn to the Greeks and Romans who wrote about it a lot. But we need to be especially careful here not to project our current values backwards in time. Most people assume that these societies had something like our concept of gay, a sexual identity that society either accepted or condemned. Scholars say though that that framework really didn't exist and that the people of the time wouldn't really understood our modern distinction between being homosexual or being heterosexual. In classical antiquity, people really didn't seem to care if you were attracted to men or women. So there was a tolerance on that part of the equation. But what really mattered was whether you were the dominant or submissive partner. And there was very little tolerance for those on the bottom. So it's wrong to think of it as a more enlightened system. Instead, it was one that crushed a different group of people. In Greece, for those on the receptive end of gay relations, it was social annihilation.

[00:03:38]If a man was known to have been sexually passive or a prostitute, he essentially ceased to be a citizen. No public participation like voting or bringing a lawsuit or even entering certain temples. And if they tried to participate, nonetheless, they could be executed. What was allowed? Sex between adult men and boys. It was actually institutionalized and framed as an educational arrangement between men in their 20s and boys usually between 12 and 18 years old. There was a formal ritual abduction where they would take the boys into the wilderness for 2 months hunting and feasting with friends and more. It wasn't a free-for-all.

[00:04:16]There were rules around it. The boy's father had to approve of the man. The boy needed to initially resist to avoid shame. And the older man wasn't just getting pleasure, but was expected to serve as a mentor to the boy, helping him learn things like philosophy, hunting, and civic life. Rome was similar, but more explicit about the hierarchy of sex. They knew about and mocked that Greek tradition, and they viewed it as a sign of weakness. For the Romans, the lines weren't about age.

[00:04:43]They were about social class. Freeborn Roman boys were untouchable, with violators subject from fines to the death penalty. But slaves, they were fair game regardless of age or sex and no mentoring. Also, gay sex in the military had harsh penalties. For the dominant partner, that could mean flogging and expulsion. For the submissive, it could include being stoned or beaten to death with clubs by the entire unit. Historian and biographer Plutarch wrote about a handsome young soldier who'd been sexually harassed over a period of time by his superior officer, who was also the nephew of the unit's general. One night, after fending off multiple advances, the young soldier was summoned to his officer's tent. And when that turned towards a sexual assault, the young soldier drew his sword and killed the officer. Now, that would normally mean death. But instead, he was praised and given a crown for bravery by the general, the uncle of the dead officer.

[00:05:40]But as always, there were exceptions for people in power. Emperor Hadrien deified his male lover, Inuis. He founded a city in his name, erected at least 28 temples, and commissioned so many statutes that the cult of Antinuis briefly rivaled early Christianity.

[00:05:57]Emperor Nero had two public marriages to men and had a boy castrated who resembled his dead wife. But later in the empire, the shift against homosexuality increased. At first, it was driven by Roman politics. There was a worry about passive homosexual behavior and the loss of masculine virtue that in some ways seemed to symbolize the empire's political submission. The first ban on male prostitution was enacted in 248 AD. But the rise of Christianity would supercharge that. When it became the empire's official religion, leaders enacted increasingly harsh laws like being burned alive for male prostitution to eventually outlawing all male homosexual activity. It wasn't just homosexuality that the church was changing, but a broad rewriting of Rome's moral framework, including laws on marriage, infanticide, and child abandonment. The concept of charity for the poor became a tradition. The gladiator era ended. Rome shifted from a land most concerned with status and dominance into the new Christian emphasis on moral law and sin. And for sexual behavior, that meant shifting from who was having sex to what act was being committed. Before we go on though, I want to talk about Mint Mobile, sponsor of today's video. You might think that the big wireless carriers are just how things have to work. You walk into a store, deal with a salesperson, sign up for some plan that might not make sense, and end up paying way more than you need to. Mint Mobile reimagined all of that. Easy and online. No stores, no salespeople. You choose the data amount that's right for you. 5, 15, 20 gigabytes or unlimited. All plans include unlimited talk and text on the nation's largest 5G network, plus free calling to Mexico, Canada, and the UK.

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[00:08:12]Okay, so now let's turn to the later part of the Roman Empire, the medieval times. Let's broadly say 500 to 1500 AD, where the violence against homosexuality accelerated throughout. Now, the laws in theology were more about sex without procreation than than going after homosexuality per se. They condemned masturbation, oral sex, other things. In reality, though, the punishments for homosexuality were far more severe. In the 1200s France, castration for a first offense, penis dismemberment for a second, and for the third, being burned alive. In Spain, the law decreed public castration, after which the convicted men were hung with their legs until dead and their bodies left to rot in public permanently. English law recommended that they be buried alive or drawn and quartered. Of course, laws weren't applied universally, and none of this applied if you were royalty. The courts of the English monarchs were famously full of same-sex relationships. Edward II, who ruled in the early 1300s and his favorite knight were described by contemporary writers in unmistakably romantic terms. They wrote that Edward bound himself to him before all other mortals. And they said he caused a scandal by giving the knight the place of honor at his coronation and even wearing the man's jewelry and colors rather than those of his new queen, Isabella of France. King James I, the man who commissioned the King James Bible, he wrote letters to the Duke of Buckingham, addressing him as my sweet child and wife and signing them, "My dear dad and husband." He also had a secret passageway to the Duke's bedroom, although their relationship is still debated by historians. So in 1533, Henry VIII transferred sodomy from church courts to secular law with the Buggery Act, saying that it was for moral reasons, but the truer purpose was political, stripping the clergy of legal protections as part of his campaign to dissolve the monasteries. A priest could now be executed for sodomy, although ironically not for murder. And that law's overall language, it became the template for anti-gay laws exported across the British Empire. Some are still on the books in dozens of countries today. By the 1700s, things started loosening up, but certainly not completely. The public executions of out of gay men that marked the earlier centuries, they lessened, but they continued well into the 1800s in Europe.

[00:10:35]Public records show that 82 men were executed for sodomy in the Netherlands alone in 1730 and 31. They were killed by strangling, burning, or drowning them in barrels of water. The British were still executing gay men as late as 1835 with the hanging of two men caught together in a rented room. And across the ocean in America in 1776, male homosexual acts were punishable by death in all 13 colonies. But there aren't any records of execution for that in the new United States. If I screwed up any of these facts, tell me in the comments and I'll address it in the description box, where you can also find my script and research notes. This is a field that's dominated by really more anecdotes than data. So there's a million ways to present it. The urban age, let's say starting in the late 1700s, saw two trends that affected homosexuality. One that was liberating and the other that was a birth of a new way to go after gays. For most of human history, men attracted to men lived in isolation from each other. They might find partners, but they had no community or sense of how many others like them even existed.

[00:11:39]Cities changed that. London hit 600,000 people by 1700, large enough that anonymity became possible for the first time in human history. You could disappear into a crowd. And for the first time, that anonymity and concentration made it much easier for gays to find one another. And they did in greater numbers. By the mid 1800s, underground networks were forming in London, Paris, Berlin, and New York.

[00:12:04]Specific taverns, meeting places, and social rituals began to take shape. At the same time, the church's grip on public life was loosening. Now, you might think that that was a good thing for gays. But pretty quickly, something stepped in to fill that void. Science.

[00:12:21]And that took over the old condemnation with new language. Right around this time, the words homosexual and heterosexual came into being. It was by a Hungarian writer. Now, his motivation was to create a neutral sounding word to defend gay men since the normal language was sodomite. A friend of his had been blackmailed over his sexuality and killed himself as a result. But not long after the concept of homosexual identity was created. Science labeled it a disease. The influential psychopath sexualis categorized sexual deviation with homosexuality listed as a pathology rooted in hereditary degeneration. The recommended treatment institutionalization, which was pretty progressive by the day.

[00:13:05]Other popular science theories were that gay men were evolutionary throwbacks, essentially biologically closer to primitive man, and you could identify those traits through skull shape and ear size. As an aside, 100 years later, researchers tried to bolster gay protections using similar tactics, searching for a gay gene that might be identifiable through things like finger sizes. But in the 1800s, while the church told gay men that what they were doing was wrong, medicine told them that there was something wrong with them. It framed homosexuality as an illness rather than a sin. So they went from being someone who choose doing something wrong to being a defective human being.

[00:13:45]And that classification opened the door to so-called treatments like electroshock therapy, chemical castration, and institutionalization that were used for nearly a century.

[00:13:56]That century also ended with the world's really first celebrity trial. In 1895, Oscar Wild was arguably the most celebrated writer in the English-speaking world. He had fame for his outsized personality as well as novels and poetry. That year, he had two simultaneous plays running in London's West End. But then, the Marquees of Queensberry left a misspelled card at his club reading for Oscar Wild posing sodomite. Wild's lover, Lord Alfred Douglas, who was also Queensberry's own son, urged him to sue for liel, and he did. And it was a catastrophic mistake.

[00:14:33]The liel trial collapsed when a detective produced testimony from male prostitutes, and Wild found himself the defendant as he was charged with 25 counts of gross indecency. After a hung jury the first time, he was convicted in a second trial. He got two years hard labor, the maximum allowed. He died three years later from cerebral menitis at the age of 46. Historians say that before wild, most people didn't really have a mental category for homosexual as a type of person. The trial created that and it also sent a chill through gay men across the western world. But in Germany, almost simultaneously, something else was taking shape. Magnus Hersshfield, a gay Jewish physician, founded the world's first gay rights organization and eventually opened a sex research institute in Berlin. By the late 1920s, Berlin had roughly 100 gay and lesbian bars. It was the most visible gay culture in the world and quickly became a target of the rising Nazi party. Here's a part that I hadn't really thought about when I started looking into this topic. Some of the world's worst prosecutions in the 20th century, they didn't come from the church. They came from explicitly anti-church regimes. 4 months after Hitler took power in 1933, Nazi students ransacked the institute and burned its contents in the street. About 100,000 men were arrested on homosexuality charges during the Nazi period and up to 15,000 of them ended up in concentration camps. There they had the highest mortality rate of any non-Jewish prisoner group. And after liberation, some were transferred directly to regular prisons to finish their sentences since the laws they've been convicted under were still in force. In Russia, Stalin recriminalized homosexuality in 1933. A conviction carried 5 years of hard labor in the goolog. Cuba's Fidel Castro. He rounded up gay men in the 1960s and sent them to force labor camps, calling homosexuality incompatible with revolutionary masculinity, something he later called a great injustice years after the fact.

[00:16:36]During China's cultural revolution, exposed homosexuals faced public denunciation and in some cases were beaten to death. Pineset's Chile, it imposed criminal penalty for male same-sex relations. And in the 70s, Argentina's military hunter would often just make gay people disappear.

[00:16:53]Revolutionary movements tore down religious authority, but they didn't replace it with tolerance. They replaced it with a different set of demands about what a proper man looked like. And gay men, they failed that test just as badly under Markx as they had under the church. So, at the beginning of the modern era, the Cold War had as much influence on public attitudes towards same-sex relations as anything else. In 1953, President Eisenhower signed an executive order adding so-called sexual perversion to the list of federal security disqualifiers. Between 5 and 10,000 federal workers lost their jobs or resigned under the new rules. The official argument wasn't moral, but a practical argument that gay employees were blackmail risks. Their secret made them vulnerable to foreign intelligence, and vulnerable people couldn't be trusted with state secrets. Outside government, daily life meant navigating a different kind of constant threat.

[00:17:47]Police raided bars routinely. Entrament was standard practice. Plain clothes officers would approach men, wait for any kind of suggestion of interest, then make an arrest. Getting identified, it meant immediate job loss, and often worse, institutionalization, electroshock therapy, chemical castration. But before that, during World War II, the US military released an estimated 9,000 service members suspected of being gay, handing them blue discharges named for the color of the paper. The paperwork didn't say homosexual. It said undesirable habits and traits of character. But employers recognized the code. The VA used it to deny GI benefits, and hometown neighbors would eventually figure it out. So many of these men, they never went home. They stayed in port cities, San Francisco, New York, Los Angeles. The military had purged them, but it also helped creating a concentrated community in multiple cities. Now, flash forward a few decades, the 60s and the 70s, where all sorts of social norms went through complete upheavalss. The civil rights movement, the women's liberation movement, a sexual revolution, and gay rights. I mean, in my lifetime, being gay could get you fired from any federal job or lose your teaching credential or just being arrested in a bar and having your name published in the newspaper.

[00:19:05]Today, their public lives are radically different. The politics and social changes of that era also helps explain the question I raised at the very top of this video. Why is there a popular notion that homosexuality was often treated with a lot more tolerance throughout history than it actually was?

[00:19:22]Now, some of that notion came from reading about the high-profile gay relationships in ancient times or snapshots of art or poetry. But I also found that much of the impetus came from scholars who weren't just writing about the past, but were trying to change the future. Gay history as a legitimate academic field is relatively new, really arising in the 70s. And the pioneers in this field, they were mostly gay men themselves. and and many were upfront that they weren't just documenting history, they had an agenda. They thought historians had neglected them and they wanted to fix that. Starting in the 70s and accelerating through the next decades, in that era, gay rights advocates wanted to counter the notion that homosexuality was unnatural and historically rare. And it was an effective counterargument to point to Greece and Rome, foundational civilizations, and say it was pretty normal. Then Martin Dubberman founded the first university-based LGBT study in the US. He said that his goal was to test and in almost all cases destroy prevailing myths about gay history. He saw himself as correcting what he considered distortions and silences in mainstream history. And in fairness, a prior narrative that homosexuality was universally condemned would be just as false, biased from a different point of view. that often led more recent scholars to see history through a lens of more tolerance and more homosexuality itself. For instance, historians have long noted that Abraham Lincoln shared a bed with another man for a couple of years when he first moved to Springfield, Illinois. Some historians hear that and say Lincoln was gay. I mean, look, if you're gay, you want Lincoln on your team. But bed sharing was a common practice among heterosexual men of the era. And most historians say saving money was the reason. And many of the things are just too ambiguous to know for certain. One example of many, in the 1960s, archaeologists working in Egypt came on a tomb with images of two men in a sort of nose ton-nose embrace normally reserved for married couples.

[00:21:22]Now, if you're inclined to see homosexuality, that might be enough. But others point to equally compelling possibilities that had nothing to do with sexuality. History is revealed in bits and pieces, so much of that is just ambiguous. And like so many of the videos I do here, it's hard to completely trust the data and the underlying evidence, especially when it's given by people with skin in the game, because the truth is always more complicated than either side wants. So, since you hopefully just enjoyed 20 minutes of gay history, you may also be interested in something related but more modern. The gay voice. Why do some gay men sound gay? Is it biology, culture, or something else entirely? I produced this video that tried to get to the bottom of it. So, I did my best to give you a fair look at a topic that people usually approach with an agenda. I hope that I did it justice and that it was a worthwhile use of your time. See you again.