Part 2: The Roman Empire Starts to Turn Against Homosexuality

The second part of the series A Queer History that looks back to Early Greece and forward to the way we live now. The Roman Empire turns against homosexuality.

“From 323 BCE, the Roman empire absorbed Greece, but it did so selectively. Although homosexuality was acknowledged, it had no place within the social structure, as it had in Greece.”

Part 1: From The First Written Words About Homosexuality to Alexander the Great.

The first part of the series A Queer History that looks back to Early Greece and forward to the way we live now.

“In Early and Classical Greece, homosexuality was part of the culture. The following is a snapshot of that world, and a snapshot of the fragments that are left of it.”

The significance of the pan-sexual conqueror.

2335 years ago Alexander the Great, King Alexander III of Macedon, died having forged an empire that extended from Greece to Asia Minor, Egypt, Persia and northwestern India.

“The subject of Alexander’s sexuality is unavoidable. In the Classical and Hellenistic Ages, sexuality was far more fluid than it is in Judaeo-Christian culture, to riot in understatement.”

Timeline of 2009 LGBT Anniversaries, Part 1 of 4

In the forty years since the Stonewall riots, and the emergence of the gay liberation movement, a process of historical archaeology has been underway. Its aim has been to make the hidden past visible. This timeline of anniversaries is a look into what we now know of this hidden past, and also the revealed present.

529 AD, Justinian decreed that persons who engaged in homosexual sex were to be executed. He believed that homosexual activity was the chief cause of earthquakes.