Free Sex and Punishment: Four Thousand Years of Judging Desire by Eric Berkowitz Page A

scholars decided to recast the old Genesis story about the destruction of Sodom and Gomorrah. The effort was forced, to say the least—there is no evidence that either of those cities was a hotbed of homosexual sex—but it was very successful in the end. The tale of these two accursed cities became history’s single most influential myth to transmit antihomosexual prejudice.
    Abraham’s nephew Lot was a resident of Sodom, a locale known, along with Gomorrah, as one of the evil “Cities of the Plain.” News of the cities’ wickedness reached God, who sent two angels in the guise of foreign travelers to investigate. Lot offered them lodging for the night, but their presence in his house agitated the townspeople. Before the angels retired for the night, a mob of men gathered outside Lot’s house. They demanded to see the travelers “that we may know them.” Lot refused, which enraged the mob even more. The key to this part of the story is the meaning of the word “know” ( ve’nida’ah in the original Hebrew text). Did the word mean simply “to become acquainted with,” as many scholars argue? Or did it directly imply sex? Were the townspeople demanding only to look the visitors over, or did they want to rape them? It is impossible to say, especially given Lot’s response: “I have two daughters who have never slept with a man. Let me bring them out to you, and you can do what you like with them. But don’t do anything to these men, for they have come under the protection of my roof.” The crowd was not interested in deflowering Lot’s daughters; they wanted to “know” his guests. As they surged forward to break down Lot’s door, the angels struck them all with blindness. The next morning, Lot fled with his family, and God rained down fire and brimstone on Sodom and Gomorrah, destroying these cities forever.
    There is general agreement today that the Sodom mob’s crime was to ignore the custom of providing hospitality to strangers. By housing and protecting the two angels, Lot was doing what any decent Bronze Age Near Eastern host would do. The mob’s unruly demands to “know” the disguised angels were worse than rude, even if they had no intention of “knowing” the strangers carnally. But truth has never gotten in the way of a good story, and it did not take people long to turn this passage into a cautionary tale against homosexuality. The Jews themselves seem to have been the first to do so when, in the first century AD, they were horrified at all the homosexual sex going on among the Greeks and Romans. The reinterpreted story was soon swallowed whole by the Christian church, and thereafter became the basis of history’s most virulent antihomosexual laws. As early as the sixth century AD, the (Christian) Byzantine emperor Justinian pointed to Sodom and Gomorrah as the reason for his persecution of homosexuals. “Because of such offenses,” went one of Justinian’s laws, “famine, earthquakes, and pestilence occur.”
     
    BY THE MIDDLE Ages, the word “sodomy” had come to encompass not only male-male sex, but also an ever-shifting list of forbidden sexual practices. Occasionally, lesbian sex was included in the definition, and when it was, lawmakers made sure to tie it back to the supposed debauchery of Sodom and Gomorrah: The “mothers of lust,” as the women of those cities were called, could not be satisfied with men, so they turned to other women. While sodomy was defined differently everywhere, the example of God’s wrath against the two cities was viewed as justifying the cruelest possible treatment of sodomites. “[I]t is well known how much the sin of sodomy is detested by Our God,” said Venice’s ruling Council of Ten in 1407, “since it was the reason that he destroyed and ruined by his last judgment cities and peoples in which they [sodomites] lived.”
LOT AND HIS DAUGHTERS
     
 
     
The biblical story of Lot, who tried to protect two angels from the bad people of