The conventional story says societies grow more tolerant as they grow richer—but this comforting Enlightenment idea now looks distinctly old-fashioned. Nowhere is this clearer than in attitudes towards sexuality, where classicist and historian Harry Tanner argues the real driver of homophobia is neither wealth nor mere bigotry, but something stranger: a politics of self-restraint that takes hold when economies come under stress. In ancient Athens, plague, war and rising inequality bred a cult of discipline in which acting on desire became a mark of the untrustworthy and the unfit-to-govern. Queer citizens, once celebrated, were suddenly prosecuted. The same logic, Tanner suggests, recurs from Renaissance Florence to the populist right today.

Why wasn’t there more shock when Nigel Farage very publicly disagreed with same-sex marriage on LBC? Homophobia has long been an odd quirk of right-wing parties. All over the world, a populist movement is gaining momentum that places LGBT+ people’s rights under attack. In Japan, a new hard-right Prime Minister has voiced her opposition to same-sex marriage; in Hungary, a far-right government banned Pride; in Poland, the MEP Grzegorz Braun has attacked LGBT+ exhibitions; Giorgia Meloni is attacking queer parents and so-called “gender ideology.” Donald Trump has urged Republicans to deploy anti-trans messaging during the mid-term elections, and the Republican campaign has spent $200 million on anti-trans ads. Trump himself has previously expressed support for trans people, having supported them in the past, but sees transphobia as a political tool. The question is: why does this work? It’s easy to say it’s about “scapegoating” or the politics of distraction. But there’s a pattern linking society’s attitudes to wealth and sexuality that better explains the Right’s position.

As a classicist studying the ancient world, I’m all too aware that queer love has flourished and been destroyed by puritanical zealots throughout history. Ancient Greece, Rome, and Mesopotamia were known, perhaps even notorious, for their tales of same-sex love, but that tolerance didn’t last. How was it that civilizations turned against the queer citizens they’d once celebrated? A new way of thinking emerged in societies which faced sustained economic and societal pressures—an increasingly frightening and uncontrollable world led people to police themselves. An intense politics of self-control emerges in these pressurized societies. Women’s sexuality becomes more fiercely policed and queer identities are erased.

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When we look closely we can see a repeating pattern throughout history—a sudden rise in inequality is often followed by a period of rampant homophobia.

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There is good evidence that gay men could live openly with their partners in archaic Greece, particularly in Boeotia where archaeologists have discovered depictions of what look like same-sex marriage ceremonies. Achilles and Patroclus have been said to have been lovers, in a tale widely popularized by both the contemporary novelist Madeline Miller and by the ancient Athenian playwright Aeschylus. The Athenians in particular manufactured vast quantities of what I call “porn pots,” which often depict graphic sex between people of the same sex. But, for some mysterious reason, by 450 BCE they stopped making them. And only a couple of decades later, things had taken an abrupt turn for the worse. Not only had Athenians turned away from artistic depictions of gay sex, but they’d started prosecuting gay men.

We know about this because in 424 BCE, a comic play called The Knights was staged which satirized contemporary politics in Athens. In it, the politician Cleon—something of a Farage of his day, and a demagogue whom ancient sources describe (perhaps not entirely accurately) as obsessed with eating his own poo—boasts about “wiping out” a group of people imaginatively named “the men who are fucked.” If you’re demurring as to whether these are homosexual bottoms or just heterosexual men who like being pegged, another ancient Greek has helpfully scrawled an explanation in the margins of the play. “Of those men accused of gay sex,” he writes, “One was Gryttus… Cleon the demagogue sentenced him to death”. Whether Gryttus was expelled from the city or put to death, ancient historians aren’t absolutely certain, but it is clear why he was punished.

On closer inspection this isn’t just a story about one tyrant’s abuse of power; when we look at the context we see there’s a broader economic story at play. When Cleon rose to power, the Athenians had just emerged from a devastating pandemic, were engaged in a protracted and badly fought war, and suffering from increasing wealth inequality—which the Athenians tell us about in their speeches and which we can see in the archaeological record: the people of Athens were remarking on the extraordinary wealth being amassed by their elites and the archaeological record shows that, as the centuries continued, the rich continued to enjoy a varied and healthy diet while the poor experienced food insecurity and decline in nutritional value.

These insights about the classical world reveal an emerging pattern. In the West, there have been many examples since the classical period of how societies tolerated and even celebrated same-sex desire. This frequently coincides with times of increased wealth equality, even if they also faced disease and conflict. For instance, historians often look to Boston, Massachusetts at the end of the eighteenth century as an example of a more egalitarian society. In the gorgeously named book Improper Bostonians, compiled by the Boston History Project, the evidence is laid out that queer men and women cohabited and the book even suggests the existence of “Boston Marriages” (forerunners of same-sex marriage today). Florence, just after the Black Death (1348), is another good example of a society which experienced a sudden drop in wealth inequality, as a result of the death of the richest and most powerful and an increase in prices for labor. With no little hint of melodrama, Pope Gregory XI complained loudly in 1376 of how widespread homosexuality was in Florence at the time; the Germans even used the word Florenzer for “homosexual.” When wealth inequality rose again in the 1400s and the state encountered a debt crisis, a crackdown on homosexuality ensued. When we look closely we can see a repeating pattern throughout history—a sudden rise in inequality is often followed by a period of rampant homophobia.

It’s evident that there’s a clear link between economic factors and homophobia. A psychological politics underpins this ominous connection. Even back in Ancient Greece, the populist rhetoric against queer people is hard to untangle from economic anxieties. In one of Cleon the Demagogue’s speeches, recorded by the historian Thucydides, he opined on what good governance in a crisis looks like. “It is better to be ignorant and conduct oneself with a stiff upper lip than to be clever and poorly disciplined,” he said. For Cleon, a stiff upper lip and financial discipline were far more important than fancy intellect. A person with poor self-discipline, who cannot control their desires, is unfit to run the state—he concludes. Such a person would become too emotional and would fail to do what—in Cleon’s view—the state required. Perhaps it’s telling that in that particular speech, Cleon believes the state is required to commit genocide against their former ally.

Cleon used this same logic to attack queer people. The fact that we act on our desires and we do not seek to control them—in his eyes—makes us dangerous and untrustworthy. Homosexuality became symbolic of pursuing what you love and what you want, rather than what you need. It was for this reason that it came under attack. Such a move was less about scapegoating and more about the widespread, populist demonization of choice, luxury, desire, and love. Perhaps for similar reasons, other ancient thinkers turned on women, who were feared for their emotional intelligence.

If the history of homophobia has a lesson for us, it is that economic inequality fuels populist homophobia because societies turn against love and desire, and towards necessity. Self-restraint becomes valued and desire is seen as silly, excessive. None of these right-wing attacks are a coincidence—it is all part of a pattern that history has been warning us about for thousands of years.