History
Five thousand years of doing it, banning it, and filing it
Sodomy is never just sex in the archive. It is a story about who got to define nature, and who got punished when the definition changed.
If you look for “sodomy” in the ancient world you will mostly find translators
cheating. The Hebrew, Greek, and Latin vocabularies of sex and status do not map onto
a Victorian felony. What you can find are rules about who may penetrate whom, which
bodies were civic, which were slavish, and which acts were jokes on pottery. That is
history. It is not a permission slip, and it is not a condemnation imported from 1533.
The useful through-line is this: societies police sex when they are nervous about
inheritance, empire, purity, or the next generation’s labor. The nervousness changes
costume. The paperwork accumulates. These chapters follow the paperwork.
If you want a book, not a tab
history
The Invention of Sodomy in Christian Theology
Mark D. Jordan
How a medieval coinage picked up more moral freight than a freight train. Saints, penitentials, and the occasional bonfire — the book to read if you want to know why the word still makes legislators twitch.
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Christianity, Social Tolerance, and Homosexuality: Gay People in Western Europe from the Beginning of the Christian Era to the Fourteenth Century
John Boswell
The book that made medievalists argue at dinner parties. National Book Award winner, still fiercely cited, and the doorway into the archive — even when later scholars spend chapters arguing with it.
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Sodomy: A History of a Christian Biblical Myth
Michael Carden
Genesis 19 as a story people kept rewriting. Carden tracks Jewish and Christian readings from antiquity to the Reformation and argues the homophobic Sodom is a later Christian invention — hospitality, not a bedroom, was the older charge.
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