Its funny that as gay Christians we have to go through gymnastics to try to prove that God loves and accepts us, that our love is blessed and our bodies uncursed, when if you go back to the Didache and other Christian writings from the earliest, apostolic age, you find a lot of condemnations of things like magic and astrology but nothing against gay love. Yet no modern, conservative Christians are lobbying their local paper to remove the horoscopes!!
“Well such sinful lifestyles were unknown in those times, or at most very uncommon” dude this was the first century eastern Mediterranean. People wrote so much gay love poetry in this time period that enough survived for us to fill books with today, and the words to describe gay men and lesbians were widely known and available. And yet! And yet none of these words were used to describe sin!!
Early Christians hated magic and astrology because they asserted that God and nothing else has the final say on matters of nature and fate, and had to compete with other ways of understanding the world and its meaning. They were not spending any time antagonizing gay people.
That practice has its roots much later, in the late 4th century context, when the church was 300 years removed from the ministry of Christ and had become a Roman state institution rather than a persecuted underground community of believers. By this period of antiquity the Greco-Roman obsession with masculinity had morphed from the cocksure posture of previous more prosperous years, where sexual assault was valorized as a sign of virility and strength (Im not a big fan of greco-roman culture tbh), to the tropes more common of a time when authority is in crisis, when all the powerful men become fixated on preserving their power by 1) not cumming and 2) beating homosexuals – sound familiar?
In that context, the later church fathers who were beholden to temporal power structures and educated by these customs authored the first condemnations of homosexuality in Christian doctrine, and not without some controversy.
Spiritual authorities based farther away fron the centers of power in Rome and Constantinople remained ambivalent toward homosexuality, and when the Roman empire collapsed and the middle ages began there was a period of general permissiveness toward gays including the inauguration of “brother-making” and “sister-making” ceremonies that bonded two people of the same sex together for life and allowed them to jointly own property and raise children. This ended with the renaissance, however, and the gradual return of (late) greco-roman law and philosophy prompted a return to the old condemnation of homosexuality.
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