🏳️🌈🏺Rome was good when gay
🏳️🌈🏺2-Gay in History🏺🏳️🌈
Alt-right Christian fascists online love the Roman Empire—especially the salute—and often warn that acceptance of LGBTQ+ people led to its decline and fall and will now lead to America’s.
That couldn’t be more wrong.
In 380 CE, Emperor Theodosius made Orthodox Christianity the state religion of the empire. Influenced by Jewish law, Christian doctrine began to criminalize homosexuality. Don’t get me wrong—Rome was the blueprint for toxic masculinity and patriarchy—but for over a thousand years before that, same-sex relationships were tolerated and even celebrated (as long as the citizen or social superior was the top). And no, they didn’t “import” homosexuality from Carthage, as the Proud Boys claim—and even if they had, Rome’s rise began with that contact.
Rome’s height, in fact, coincided with some of its most openly queer leaders: from Tiberius and same-sex-married Nero, to trans-feminine Elagabalus, to possibly even Julius Caesar and Augustus themselves, founders of the Empire. Two of the “Five Good(best) Emperors” had exclusively male lovers. That phrase—“Five Good Emperors”—was coined by Edward Gibbon, the influential historian who did, in fact, suggest a major contributing cause to Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire: Christianity. (He was doxed hard for it)
But within a century of mandating Christian morality, the Western Empire fell. A new clergy and monastic class rivaled the size of the army, and exempted service. Church coffers outweighed the imperial treasury. Religious pluralism was outlawed. Pagan libraries, healing temples, and universities were shut down, their knowledge and technological edge lost. Civil wars broke out over obscure points of theology and purity tests. The once-gradual cultural exchange of “Romanization” became convert or die, and citizenship was denied to non-Christians. The army, once diverse and loyal, became underpaid, fractured, and increasingly reliant on mercenaries.
So sorry, Charlie Kirk and fascists everywhere: it wasn’t gay rights that brought down Rome, the opposite in fact. It was the criminalization of queerness and the death of pluralism that weakened the empire from within.
