Harry Tanner on 'The Queer Thing About Sin'

In this episode of The Queer Love Podcast, we tackled one of the topics that continues to confuse and trouble so many people: religion. Our guest, Dr. Harry Tanner, has written a fantastic scholarly book, The Queer Thing About Sin, that will get you thinking differently about so many of the myths and misconceptions that persist—from ancient Greek and Roman beliefs to Christianity and our current debates.As always, thanks to all who are supporting The Queer Love Project, which helps make the podcast available. We’re keeping it free for all since it offers valuable teachings. If you have the ability to upgrade to a Catalyst Member level, not only will you support this podcast and the rest of our mission, I’ll send you a copy of the QLP Quarterly zine and a T-shirt with our logo!Harry’s personal history is the emotional core of his search for meaning. In it, he details his transition from a devout teenager seeking to cure his sexuality to a scholar of ancient Greek, which provided the lens through which he examines historical homophobia.For those who’ve read Jeanette Winterson’s trailblazing memoir, Oranges Are Not the Only Fruit, you may already be aware that England has its own evangelical religious environment. But many others may be unaware of the power of Christianity in the UK. As Harry helpfully explained:“So the UK does have an established church. It does not have separation of church and states as the United States does. The King of England is also the head of the Church of England. And although it’s a smaller group of people, you do have spots of evangelical Christianity throughout the Church of England. It kind of depends church to church where you are. They’re slightly better at hiding in Britain, I would say, than they are in the US because they have considerably less power. Despite officially being the Church of England, the church in Britain has much, much less power than it does in the United States. That’s probably a function of it being an official part of everybody’s lives and therefore essentially forced on the people rather than being something that people opt into, which you have in the US.”As Harry details in his book, he entered a conversion therapy as a kid hoping to “cultivate a numbness,” something I think a great many young people may still experience to this day. As he detailed:“When I was very young, I lost my dad and that made Christianity really, really appealing to me. And I spent a lot of time at prayer groups, which are essentially unregulated in the UK. So you can get pastors and you can get lay preachers who come in under the guise of looking after children and they will come in and they will seed their ideas. And I was particularly seduced by an evangelical group I was a part of.“As I started realizing that I was gay, I felt sufficiently safe that I could talk about this and explore this privately with certain senior members of the group. And it was not quite fire and brimstone, as I think it can be in the US, but the response to me was very clearly: ‘It is a mortal, grave sin. It is not something that you can ever practice in your life and you will have to do things to stop yourself feeling these emotions and these desires, or you will go to hell.’“And it was said in that very calm, matter-of-fact tone, I think if they had shouted it from a pulpit, I might have been inclined to disbelieve it. There’s something about a very calm tone of voice which really made it seem incredibly final. It took me not too long to become really very mentally unwell following some of the practices that had been suggested to me and also following a lot of literature online as well, which was also suggested to me. These are sort of in the days before internet filters came in for teenage kids. And I wanted to end my life, which I think a lot of your listeners may have similar experiences of in dealing with evangelism. Fortunately, I had a very good support network around me. I think one of the terrible things about evangelism in the US, as I see it anyway, is it tends to be your whole community, and that was not true of me in Britain.“So there were plenty of people who I was able to turn to, who when they found out what was happening, thought that it was not only ridiculous, but actively egregious. And I was saved by those people, but also by the real privilege of being able to study the ancient world, of being able to study the languages of the Bible, Greek and Hebrew and later Latin. And though that turned me into a very angry atheist for a period, I devoted the next few years of my life to the study of the ancient world such that I could do something about this, which that is the substance of the queer thing about sin, which is, I mean, you all go ... I went looking for a book that I couldn’t find and that book was why is it that St. Paul is so vehemently anti-gay? I wanted to know why. What was the reason? If I knew the reason, I felt those calm, voiced evangelicals would lose their power over me. And I have advanced a reason in the queer thing about sin, which I could not find. I could not find that book, so I wrote it.I’ll let you listen in on this fascinating conversation to learn more about why The Queer Thing About Sin is such a vital new text that I think a great many people will benefit from.Harry’s path to healing came from learning ancient Greek and learning how to read the Bible and reinterpret it in a more, let’s just say, “correct way.” It reminded me of a book that was very popular in the ‘90s when I was a teenager. What the Bible Really Says about Homosexuality was a bestseller at many a gay bookstore I visited. Everybody talked about it because they were searching for some empirical framework to help them rationalize the pain they were facing. I feel Harry’s book is better on a great many counts, and it’s certainly important for our current debates in the 21st century. But Harry is also pretty blunt about one thing: “We do have to accept that these biblical texts are really homophobic. The question is why?” As he explains, once you understand the reason it’s homophobic, “you understand the societal pattern that caused it.” For him, that's the real “cure.” “If you can understand why something is, you can rationalize it, you can make sense of it, you can put it into a box and it stops being that thing that you are so frightened of every day because in moments of doubt otherwise, at least this was true of me, you'll be thinking to yourself, ‘Well, what if they were right?’”Harry then shared a personal story about when he was hooking up with a lot of guys and feeling unhappy and wondering if he’d ever find a sustainable, happy relationship. As he explained, he kept thinking: “This is making me miserable. Were they right? Now I can say to myself, ‘No, they were not right.’ But without that clear answer of why homophobia emerges, why it’s in the Bible, you’ll always have that ghost over your shoulder, wondering in the dark times, ‘Were they right? Did they get it right?’ We have to separate out those fears and the only way to do that is a rational explanation of what they were doing.”I had also just finished reading Peter Ackroyd’s Queer City—a popular history that details London from Roman to contemporary times—and it also gets into similar themes that Harry’s book does, so I asked him what he thought. In particular, I was curious about Harry views on the idea of self-restraint and that framing queer love as “excessive” or “lacking control” is part of the issue. As both Peter Ackroyd and Harry Tanner point out: Whenever people feel that there’s too much excessiveness, then a certain segment of the population (primarily, straight cisgender men) feel like they have to restrain it. It’s one reason why so many people who are into the Stoics, and they are promoting the teachings of Marcus Aurelius and saying, “Oh, we need to have more self-control.” Harry agreed that this concept of “self-restraint” is at the basis of much of homophobia and also much of the misogyny and hatred of women. But he reminded me that our next question has to be: “Why. Why do humans do that? And why is it that conservatism—which is essentially the politics of self-restraint and stoicism and all of that stuff—why is that so popular in the times we’re living in?”“There are some very good answers to that. The primary answer is that when things get really complicated, we want simple answers. The second answer to that is that when people get poorer, their sex drives go down. This is well established in the cognitive neuroscience literature and anybody who is seen to be having deviant sex or having sex for the purposes of desire rather than merely for procreation under those circumstances becomes a real outlet for the hatred of the rest of society, which is poor and angry. And particularly so because you would have thought that that poor and angry society would be really, really against the super rich, right?“No, because to be angry against those people is to remove aspiration. Everybody wants to have the supercar. Everybody wants to have the island and the yacht, but not everybody wants to have sex with another man or with another woman. So it becomes that perfect outlet for that rage. There’s a lot that we talk about in the media where we seem to think that this anger is set up as a sort of scapegoating exercise. People aren’t that stupid. This is really important to underline: People are not that stupid. You don’t just sort of set up a scapegoat and then everyone goes running at it. It’s not like that. There has to be a foundational reason why it works. The foundational reason why it works, why the attacks on queer people work is, again, people are poor, people are poorer than they felt before, people feel they have no hope. So they cling to self-restraint as their means to preserve themselves in these hard times. “And anyone who they see as not exhibiting self-restraint, they are going to attack—and violently. And that is the only possible reason why someone would attack a person wearing a dress or doing something as harmless as kissing another man or another woman. That is the only reason why that would take place, because there is an underlying envy and hatred about something else which is coming out.”We went on to discuss how transphobia existed throughout history, and that there is more evidence of trans people in antiquity than homosexual desire. We also talked about the need to “nobilize” homosexuality (the way Oscar Wilde did during his infamous trial) and much more before we eventually got the “how do you define love question.” Harry gave a very in-depth explanation to this. “I think that you have two types of romantic love, and this is often talked about in the venue of Plato's Symposium, but this is not the two types of romantic love that I mean. … I think that you get very ‘idealistic love,’ which is based on fragments of a person, little snippets of things that you hear… It's sort of, if you ever listen to Taylor Swift's Red album, [that kind of love]… And I think queer people are very prone to that kind of love, and it becomes unrequited and it becomes painful and awful.”So what about the other type of love? Let’s call it “real love”?“Real love is much less potent, but much more powerful—if that distinction can be made. Real love is about acceptance of who a person is and all they are in all of their facets. It is a much more sitting back form of support and the one can transform into the other, but with a great deal of humility and patience. “And I think that I have only quite recently, in my gay life, come to understand that the first type—idealistic love—is pretty melancholy and quite dangerous because it will always be the shadow of something that doesn’t really exist. And you’ll always really know that deep down and you’ll always be quite frightened of that. I think that we are more prone to that because we are more desperate for love, I think. And so we want to sort of create it and conjure it, but if we can, we have to try and do the other form of love, which is a sort of acceptance, a sort of going, “Oh, you’re pretty amazing in so many regards and I want to make a life with you and maybe with other people. “ I also think the sex is better and that kind of love.”It was such a powerful time I spent together discussing these topics with Harry. And I’m thrilled to share it with everyone. I hope you’ll pick up a copy of The Queer Thing About Sin, so you can dive into this rich history. Also, ask your local library to order a copy so that others might be able to find it in their community if they don’t have access otherwise.Thanks again for listening. And get ready for our next episode of the Queer Love Podcast, when I’ll be chatting with Benoit Denizet-Lewis about his new book, You’ve Changed. You can also like and follow the podcast on other platforms, including YouTube, Spotify, and Apple Podcasts (as well as other podcast platforms). We also have an Etsy page where you can find some of our merch!The Queer Love Project is a reader-supported publication. To receive new posts and support my work, consider becoming a free or paid subscriber. Get full access to The Queer Love Project at queerloveproject.substack.com/subscribe