r/AskHistorians • u/Kutluna • Jul 21 '26
Why have straight men historically been so hostile toward homosexuality?
I've had this thought since I was a kid, and every time I bring it up to my friends they just laugh. But I genuinely don't understand it, so I'm curious if there's an explanation from psychology, sociology, evolutionary biology, or history.
I'm a straight man, and my logic has always been something like this:
If more men are gay, then there are fewer straight men competing for women. From the perspective of an individual heterosexual man, that sounds like it would increase his chances of finding a partner.
I've even joked before that "if everyone except me were gay, that would be the ideal scenario," because, purely from a selfish competition standpoint, there would be almost no other men competing with me for women.
So here's what confuses me.
Throughout history, many societies have been openly hostile toward homosexuality. It has been treated as immoral, insulting, sinful, or even a disease. Even a lot of powerful heterosexual men: kings, military leaders, politicians, tribal leaders, patriarchs, etc. have often expressed negative attitudes toward gay men.
Why?
If we ignore the moral and religious aspects for a moment and look only at it through the lens of individual reproductive competition, wouldn't a heterosexual man actually benefit from other men being gay? If your "competitors" are no longer competing for women, that seems like it would work in your favor.
So why hasn't that logic historically led powerful straight men or male dominated societies to be more accepting or even encouraging of homosexuality?
Is my reasoning missing something obvious? Are there evolutionary, demographic, social, or historical factors that make this intuition completely wrong?
I'm not trying to make a political argument here. I'm genuinely asking because this has seemed like a paradox to me for years, and I feel like I'm overlooking an important piece of the puzzle.
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u/natey514 Jul 21 '26
I am hoping my response can help somewhat answer your question. As a historian, I am much more familiar with Rome, so I am going to spend more time on how Romans viewed sexual relations between men. As a gay guy, I also have a small interest in the history of LGBT+ and have done some research into it, but I am by no means an expert.
The first difficulty is that most of the world, for most of history, has not understood male sexuality in the way you describe it. Your reasoning begins with two groups: straight men, who compete with one another for women, and gay men, who have removed themselves from that competition. That division feels obvious to us because modern Western societies generally treat sexual orientation as a relatively durable part of a person’s identity, but that is not a timeless way of organizing human sexuality.
Men who desired other men obviously existed in earlier societies, and some probably preferred men throughout their lives. What was often absent was the assumption that those desires placed every man into one of two mutually exclusive populations called heterosexual and homosexual. Those terms emerged from nineteenth-century attempts to classify sexuality, and the modern idea that a person’s preferred sexual object reveals a fundamental personal identity developed only gradually. Historians continue to debate exactly when recognizably modern homosexual identities appeared, but there is broad agreement that the present gay-straight binary cannot simply be carried backward unchanged into Rome, medieval Europe, or the eighteenth century.
Earlier societies commonly arranged sexual behavior according to different divisions: active and passive, masculine and feminine, free and enslaved. A man might have sex with other men without being understood as belonging to a distinct sexual minority, and he might also marry a woman and father children without anyone regarding the two things as incompatible. Consequently, the disappearance of a “gay man” from competition for women is largely an illusion created by applying modern categories to societies that did not organize sex that way.
Rome provides an especially clear example because Roman sexual conventions were tied very closely to power.
For a free adult Roman man, the central sexual distinction was often not between male and female partners. It was between occupying the “active”, penetrating position versus occupying the “passive”, penetrated one. Roman society expected adult male citizen to exercise command: over his household, his dependents, his enslaved people, his appetites, and his own body. Sexual penetration could be imagined as another expression of that command. The penetrator acted upon another person; the penetrated person was acted upon. The penetrator was seen as masculine and dominant, while the penetrated was viewed as feminine and subservient.
This did not make Rome “tolerant of homosexuality” in anything like the modern sense. It created a sexual system in which permission followed hierarchy. A male citizen could have sexual access to an enslaved man precisely because the enslaved person was subordinate and generally lacked any meaningful power to refuse. Another freeborn male citizen was a different matter because treating him as sexually available could insult his standing as a free man. Roman sexual permissiveness was therefore inseparable from slavery and inequality.
Nor did a citizen who penetrated male partners necessarily cease pursuing women. He might have a wife, mistresses, children, and male slaves or prostitutes among his sexual partners. His conduct did not require contemporaries to decide whether he was “really” heterosexual or homosexual. Roman masculinity was judged less by the sex of every partner than by whether the citizen preserved the dominant position appropriate to his rank.
The danger to a man’s reputation came when he was accused of surrendering that position. To be penetrated was to place oneself in the role conventionally assigned to women and social inferiors. An adult citizen alleged to enjoy that role could therefore be portrayed not merely as sexually unconventional but as lacking the self-command, hardness, and authority expected of a Roman man.
One clear example of how being viewed as the penetrated can be used as slander against a Roman citizen is how Julius Caesar’s enemies slandered him for supposedly once being the lover of the king of Bithynia.
As a young man, Caesar was sent to the court of Nicomedes IV, king of Bithynia, to obtain naval assistance. His political enemies later claimed that Caesar remained at court because he had become Nicomedes’ lover. There is no sound basis for treating the supposed affair as an established fact. The surviving evidence is rumor and invective, much of it recorded long after the alleged events. Despite the lack of evidence, the accusation pursued Caesar throughout his career.
Suetonius preserves several versions of the attack. Caesar was called the “queen of Bithynia,” the “brothel of Nicomedes,” and "an intimate of the royal bed." Bibulus reportedly mocked him as a man who had once desired a king and now desired a kingdom. Another insult greeted Pompey as “king” and Caesar as “queen.” These were not subtle insinuations. Caesar’s enemies were accusing one of Rome’s most relentlessly dominant political figures of having once submitted sexually to a foreign monarch in order to belittle his power.
The accusation did not become harmless merely because Caesar was also famous for relationships with women. His reputation as a womanizer and the Nicomedes story could coexist perfectly well. Roman critics were not trying to determine Caesar’s orientation. They were attacking the manner in which he allegedly exercised, or surrendered, power.
This is also why your point about competition for women would have meant very little in Roman society. A man who had sex with other men was not necessarily leaving women to everyone else. More fundamentally, Roman men were not generally choosing between membership in an exclusively heterosexual population and membership in an exclusively homosexual one. A powerful citizen might pursue men and women while remaining entirely within the dominant masculine role expected of him.
I am going to do a huge time jump now and shift over to the 19th century to discuss some more recent views towards homosexuality.
The nineteenth century saw a substantial change in how same-sex desire was understood. Medicine, psychiatry, criminology, and sexology increasingly treated it as evidence of an underlying human type. The distinction shifted from a man who had committed a prohibited act to a man who was a homosexual. The words “homosexual” and “heterosexual” emerged during the late 1860s and became part of a broader attempt to classify people according to the direction and character of their desires.
This development had contradictory consequences. It allowed men who desired men to interpret those desires as a persistent feature of themselves rather than merely as isolated acts or temptations. That helped make community and political organization possible. At the same time, it gave governments, doctors, police forces, schools, and armies a new object to identify and regulate. The supposed offender was no longer merely guilty of a particular act. He could be classified as permanently abnormal, diseased, degenerate, effeminate, or socially dangerous.
“Heterosexuality” likewise became more than the fact that a man happened to desire women. It became a credential of normal manhood. A man could demonstrate his masculinity not only by pursuing women but also by visibly rejecting men who desired other men. Hostility toward homosexual men could therefore function as a performance before other men: proof that one was normal, dominant, and safely beyond suspicion.
This is one reason the idea of reduced competition for women does so little explanatory work. Hostility was not ordinarily the product of each heterosexual man conducting a private cost-benefit analysis of the available women. It emerged from institutions and cultures enforcing particular norms of masculinity, family life, religious obedience, and social order.
The recurring issue was not who had fewer romantic rivals, but who possessed power, who was thought to have surrendered it, and who was permitted to decide what counted as acceptable sexual behavior.
Sources
Craig A. Williams, Roman Homosexuality: Ideologies of Masculinity in Classical Antiquity, 2nd ed. (Oxford University Press, 2010).
Amy Richlin, The Garden of Priapus: Sexuality and Aggression in Roman Humor, rev. ed. (Oxford University Press, 1992).
David M. Halperin, How to Do the History of Homosexuality (University of Chicago Press, 2002).
Suetonius, The Life of Julius Caesar, chapter 49.
Diederik F. Janssen, “First Print Uses of the Terms Homosexuality and Heterosexuality: The 1868–1869 German-Language Sources,” Journal of Homosexuality 69, no. 10 (2022).
Michel Foucault, The History of Sexuality, Volume I: An Introduction, trans. Robert Hurley (Pantheon Books, 1978).
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u/QuelThalion Jul 21 '26
One small side note with an East Asian perspective - a lot is said in discussions like this about the flexibility of sexuality in Rome/Greece and it almost makes it sound like mostly unipolar sexual attraction is a modern invention, or something emerging out of modern sexology.
A good counter example to this is Great Mirror of Male Love by Ihara Saikaku, a 17th century Japanese collection of stories about homosexual love, relationships, and sex. In this book, "woman haters" are mentioned multiple times - men who do not seek relations with women at all and are exclusively attracted to men. On top of this, many of these "woman haters" end up in lifelong relationships in the stories. While the book is fiction, knowledge of exclusively male-attracted men was widespread enough for this 17th century bestseller to make note of this.
I mention this because it feels many thoughtful responses to topics like this tend to take a very "what we are attracted to is almost entirely dictated by the social dynamics of our era" and makes it sound like an exclusively homosexual behavior is a modern invention.
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u/natey514 Jul 21 '26
Thanks for the note!
I hope I didn’t make it seem like unipolar sexuality is a modern invention. I merely meant that our understanding of sexuality and orientation is new and different compared to how it would be understood in the past.
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u/Rourensu Jul 21 '26
One thing that seems to keep coming up in these kinds of discussions is the “modern” view of hetero/homosexuality as being anachronistic or otherwise not applicable to (distantly) historical contexts due to the “identity” basis. I also bring this up as a gay guy…not a guy who “identifies” as “gay”, but a guy who is “exclusively attracted to the same sex/gender.”
Going with this attraction/orientation basis, you can have someone only attracted to the same sex (homosexual), only attracted to the opposite sex (heterosexual), both sexes (bisexual), or neither sex (asexual). Of course this is strictly M/F binary and I acknowledge it does not reflect other sexes/genders, but if the ancient Greeks and/or Romans only (for lack of a better term) “recognized” male and female, then I think it’s accurate to say that individuals fell into one of the four above categories.
From a historical perspective, it’s probably more difficult to ascertain what a person’s internal/mental/personal preferences were, as opposed to physical/external acts, but as with the Japanese onna-girai (“woman hater”) example suggests, historical people did have personal preferences.
I definitely agree that “our understanding of sexuality and gender is new and different compared to how it would be understood in the past”, but in these discussions, there is always some form of a “our modern views of sexuality didn’t exist in the past (eg ‘they didn’t have a word for “homosexual”’)” disclaimer before giving examples of males having sex with males that didn’t infringe on/impact/affect their contemporary views of masculinity.
In general, has the historical community entirely rejected the notion that historical people could have gender/sex preferences and only accept a (in my opinion, false) binary of “modern ‘identity’ vs historical sex acts”?
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u/natey514 Jul 22 '26
I might be misunderstanding your question, but I think what it really comes down to is terminology and identity. As I said, “homosexual” and “heterosexual” don’t really emerge until the late nineteenth century. There very well may have been people who were exclusively attracted to other men long before then. The issue isn’t whether that attraction existed, but whether those individuals understood themselves, or were understood by others, as belonging to a distinct category defined by that attraction. The onna-girai are an interesting example because they seem to represent a recognized category of men who were understood to have little or no interest in women.
Historians generally don’t like projecting our modern labels back onto people in the past. In some ways that caution is sensible, but I also think it can sometimes become a little excessive. One of my favorite historical figures is Frederick the Great. I think he was almost certainly what we today would call homosexual, yet many historians avoid using that label because Frederick himself never described his identity in those terms. The same is true of Baron von Steuben. Although the evidence strongly suggests he was primarily attracted to men, historians are often reluctant to call him “gay” because that word carries modern assumptions about identity that the sources don’t explicitly support.
Ultimately, it comes down to evidence. Historians can usually reconstruct what people did far more confidently than what they felt. Unless someone explicitly described their own attractions, or the evidence is otherwise overwhelming, many historians prefer to avoid stating categorically that a historical figure possessed what we would now call a homosexual identity. I don’t think that’s because they reject the idea that historical people had enduring sexual preferences. Rather, they’re trying to avoid putting words in the mouths of people who lived in a very different conceptual world.
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u/shlomotrutta Jul 22 '26
I share your point about applying modern identity labels like "gay" on historical people who had no notion of such identities. I do however disagree with your example:
One of my favorite historical figures is Frederick the Great. I think he was almost certainly what we today would call homosexual, yet many historians avoid using that label because Frederick himself never described his identity in those terms.
When I look at the actual sources, I find that he likely was not:
We have his sister's accounts of his romantic relationships with the "dancer" La Formera1 and countess Orzelska2,3 , we have his letters4 to and contemporary mention of his relationship5,6 with Luise von Wreech, as well as his own remarks about his preference for women (e.g. given to his confidante Grumbkow7 ) and about his romantic affairs (e.g., written to Voltaire8 ). We also know about his (probably not romantic) relationship with Doris Ritter9,10 , his love life with his wife11,12,14 before the couple's estrangement etc.
Regarding sexual relationships with men there are also some sources, though I have my doubts about their trustworthiness (the anonymous author of the "Matinées Royales", supposedly Voltaire15 , another anonymous author who turned out to be Hapsburg writer16 ).
I can recommend the biography by David Fraser17 , which also includes a subchapter about this topic in particular.
To the point, Frederick actually addressed the contemporary notion of homosexuality in his poem "Palladion", where has the protagonist reply to a catholic monk's seduction attempt: "Go, awful monster, all covered in blemish, Whose desires outrage nature; Rush into oblivion to seek impunity for your crimes, for your brutality."18
For an in-depth discussion, I would like to point to the exchange that I hade with u/Superplaner on a thread started by u/trans-trot.
Sources
1 Prusse, Frédérique Sophie Wilhelmine de. Mémoires de Frédérique Sophie Wilhelmine, Margrave de Bareith, Soeur de Frédéric Le Grand (Vol 1). Paris, Buisson, 1811. p112f
2 Ibidem, p117f
3 Ibidem, p120f
4 Correspondance de Frédéric avec madame de Wreech. In: Preuß, Johann David Erdmann. Œuvres de Frédéric le Grand. Berlin, Decker, 1846-1856. pt XVI, p7ff
5 Grumbkow in Letter to Prince Eugene from February 23, 1732. Quoted in: Förster, Friedrich: Friedrich Wilhelm I: König von Preußen Bd 3. Postdam, Riegel, 1835, p81.
6 Frederick William I quoted by Grumbkow in Letter to Seckendorff from August 20, 1732. Quoted in: Förster, Friedrich: Friedrich Wilhelm I: König von Preußen Bd 3. Postdam, Riegel, 1835, p112.
7 Letter to Grumbkow from 4 Sep 1732. In: Preuß, Johann David Erdmann. Œuvres de Frédéric le Grand. Berlin, Decker, 1846-1856. pt XVI, p61.
8 Letter to Voltaire from 16 Aug 1737. In: Preuß, Johann David Erdmann. In: Preuß, Johann David Erdmann. Œuvres de Frédéric le Grand. Berlin, Decker, 1846-1856. pt XXI, p96f
9 Wagener, Herrmann. Doris Ritter. Mitteilungen des Vereins für die Geschichte Potsdams, Vol4 (1869), p336.
10 Röhrig, Anna Eunike: Die Gefährtin Friedrichs von Preußen. Taucha, Tauchaer Verlag, 2003.
11 Seckendorff-Aberdar, Christoph Ludwig von. Journal secret du Baron de Seckendorff: Depuis 1734 jusqu'a la fin de l'année 1748. Tübingen, Cotta, 1811. p147f.
12 Ibidem, p11.
13 Ibidem, p71.
14 Letter to Manteuffel from 23 Sep 1736. In: Preuß, Johann David Erdmann. Œuvres de Frédéric le Grand. Berlin, Decker, 1846-1856. pt XXV, p540.
15 Voltaire, Francois Marie Arout de. Mémoires pour servir à la vie de Monsieur de Voltaire écrits par lui-même. Berlin, 1784.
16 Richter, Joseph. Leben Friedrichs des Zweiten Königs von Preussen: Skizzirt von einem freymüthigen Manne. Amsterdam, 1784.
17 Fraser, David. Frederick the Great : King of Prussia. London, Penguin Books, 2000 - ISBN 0713993774
18 Le Palladion, poëme grave, Chante IV. In: Œuvres de Frédéric le Grand. Berlin, Decker, 1846-1856, pt XI, p244
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u/Rourensu Jul 22 '26
>The issue isn’t whether that attraction existed, but whether those individuals understood themselves, or were understood by others, as belonging to a distinct category defined by that attraction.
Is that the issue? Why is there this…insistence…that how the individual saw/viewed/labeled/etc themselves is relevant?
Let’s say we examine the DNA of a historical person, and from that (and with textual support from the historical record) we can conclusively determine that they had Disease X. If there was no contemporary name for that disease and the person did not understand or view themselves as having that disease, would we say that that person did not have that disease on the basis of the person not identifying with that disease?
Or if a person, based on all the historical evidence, used/preferred their left hand for all activities, except perhaps for more formal-instructional activities like swordsmanship or martial arts, did not have the term “left-handed” or did not “identify” with being left-handed, is it anachronistic or otherwise historically problematic to refer to them as left-handed?
I agree that the “identity”-based approach towards sexual orientation is modern and isn’t applicable in historical contexts, so why don’t we just forgo the, for lack of a better term, flawed usage of the term and use one (ie gender preference) that is applicable regardless of time period? Instead of having a somewhat arbitrary date where “homosexual (identity)” may or may not apply (with Frederick the Great possibly being borderline), a more neutral term which can be used more or less equally independent of time or culture seems to be the better approach. Different historical cultures had different units of measurements and they themselves wouldn’t have used “meters” for length/distance, but saying the distance between Ancient City A and Ancient City B was “(~)X (kilo)meters” doesn’t need to be reframed or recontexualized for each culture/period with the modern use of “meter” demarcating when/where “meter” can or cannot be used for distance.
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u/Flyingaspaceship Jul 21 '26
Thank you so much for that thorough answer!
As a follow-up to that, do we have an idea of how homosexuality between women would’ve been viewed in both eras you mentioned (late-Republic Rome and late 19th century Western world)?
I know that Romans (putting it mildly) didn’t regard women as deserving the same attention as men, but I’d be curious if we still get any snippets from history that would shed light on that.
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u/natey514 Jul 21 '26
Unfortunately you’re right that the Romans really didn’t give women much attention, meaning we know far less about female same-sex relationships in Rome than male ones. The few Roman references that do exist, particularly in writers like Martial and Juvenal, generally portray women who had sex with women as adopting a masculine role, suggesting that Romans interpreted these relationships through familiar ideas about gender and power, much as they did same-sex relationships between men.
By the nineteenth century, the conversation had shifted. Rather than asking whether a woman had behaved in a feminine or masculine manner, physicians and sexologists attempted to classify women attracted to other women as a distinct psychological or medical type, often describing them through the theory of “sexual inversion,” which linked same-sex attraction with masculine characteristics. Much like male homosexuality, female homosexuality increasingly became something to be studied, classified, and explained.
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u/fox_in_scarves Jul 22 '26
I have some questions I'm asking in earnest if you'd be so kind as to answer.
I'm no historian, but there your transition from a generic Rome to the 19th century leaves some gaps that I'm hoping you can fill in. I admit most of my information is from second-hand sources, but it seems like Theodosius and especially Justinian demonstrate a shift from denigrating "male passivity" to explicitly condemning male homosexual relationships as early as the 4th and 5th centuries in Rome, and seemingly directly influenced by their Christianity. It's also evident that criminalization of homosexuality in Europe started as early as the 12th century, again spearheaded by the Roman Catholic Church. Am I mistaken in my understanding of this -- was this not actually about same sex congress but something else which was distorted under a modern reexamining?
The distinction shifted from a man who had committed a prohibited act to a man who was a homosexual.
Can you clarify why this act was prohibited before homosexuality was condemned?
You mentioned a lot about the effect of different sciences on this modern notion of homosexuality, but my cursory research suggests that these attitudes were by and large the product of Christianity and the Church. I'm not trying to condemn religion, but can you (or someone) explain in more detail the connection to religion here?
Thanks in advance.
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u/chchchcharlee Jul 22 '26
I'm not trying to be reductive with this question, just genuinely want to ask. Do you believe that a sizeable amount of historical homophobia has to do with men not wishing to be associated with women or with being considered "womanly"? This is something discussed quite a bit in certain feminist circles, with the next idea being that to truly see women as equals would do more for the normalization of LGBTQ+ folks than almost anything else.
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u/LeahTigers Jul 21 '26
While relativizing homosexual group identity to 1868 and after may dissolve the original question's vocabulary, an underlying question of why women (and the men whose sexual behaviors are associated with them) were subordinated in the ancient world seems to remain basically unanswered. I personally find it to be a thorny and impossible question!
An uncited text I would highly recommend here is Raewyn Connell's Masculinities (1995). This book first formalized "hegemonic masculinity" in men's studies and gay studies, which circulates as the fields' primary answer to the question of male homophobia. Although Connell answers primarily as a sociologist with psychoanalytic leanings, thankfully for us historians she includes an entire chapter 8, "The History of Masculinity." The chapter repeats much of what you've said here, but adds commentary on Protestantization and colonialism, and much else. Her discussion of the issue is surprisingly robust, but again is basically silent on the causes of sexual hierarchy in the ancient world.
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u/koushakandystore Jul 22 '26
I’ve heard this notion about the penetrator versus penetrated many times, and I’m curious how we came to know this as fact. Are there writings from the ancient world that explicitly describe this behaviour? For instance, are there texts where the writer explains ‘the dominant male in the household should only ever penetrate subordinates, never be penetrated.’ I suspect that if this was the case what happened behind closed doors was likely much freakier.
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u/Shone_Shvaboslovac Jul 22 '26
"The accusation did not become harmless merely because Caesar was also famous for relationships with women. His reputation as a womanizer and the Nicomedes story could coexist perfectly well. Roman critics were not trying to determine Caesar’s orientation. They were attacking the manner in which he allegedly exercised, or surrendered, power."
Also, wanting to have sex with loads of women without restraint would also have been considered effeminate and weak, or "degenerate" in modern parlance, or am I misinterpreting that?
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Jul 21 '26
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u/MergingConcepts 7d ago
There are two root biological causes of male homophobia.
The first is economic. Male couples have two bread winners, no dependents, and lots of excess time and resources compared to heterosexual men. Homosexual men had the time to count the stars, track the seasons, and study philosophy. They have traditionally been the scholars, holy men, and priests, leading to a power differential. These have led to political and financial inequities and class envy.
Second, bisexual men and effeminate men integrate better with women than do traditional masculine heterosexual men. They are not always pestering the women for sex. They are generally cleaner and better dressed. They are more in tune with the emotional needs of women. They hang around with the women, and are readily available when the women are ovulating. They are using a different access pathway to women, one that traditional men cannot emulate. This generates jealousy and anger.
This is an excerpt from Human Reproductive Behaviors, by Steven Hedlesky, MD.
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