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When Societies Get Frightened, They Police Desire: Ancient Greece, Renaissance Florence, and why LGBTQIA+ rights still matter

Ancient Greece, Renaissance Florence, and why LGBTQIA+ rights still matter
Ancient Greece, Renaissance Florence, and why LGBTQIA+ rights still matter
Every so often, history taps us on the shoulder and says, “You may want to look at this again.”
Not because history repeats itself neatly. It rarely does. The past is not a photocopier. It is more like a family pattern: recognisable, recurring, shaped by different people and different circumstances, but carrying a familiar emotional logic.

As we come to the end of another Pride Month, I have been reflecting a lot about LGBTQIA+ rights in 2026. Social historians often suggest that when societies become economically anxious, politically unstable, or more unequal, attitudes toward difference often hardens and queer lives tend to get caught in the firing line. This line has appeared across history from ancient Athens to Renaissance Florence, and then again in our present moment.

As is often the case history is messy, and comparative arguments between windows of time in the past can be a little too neat for comfort. For example, ancient Greece was not a modern liberal paradise, although had very liberating teachings. Renaissance Florence was not a queer utopia interrupted by one cranky monk with a bonfire and a poor attitude toward joy. However, underneath the simplification is a serious and important question.

Why do societies so often respond to uncertainty by policing desire? Why, when economies become strained or politics becomes brittle, do public anxieties so often land on sexuality, gender, family, and the bodies of minorities? And why, in 2026, after decades of legal progress, do LGBTQIA+ communities still find themselves needing to defend rights that should no longer be up for debate?

These are not abstract questions. They shape lives. They shape whether young people feel safe at school. Whether families are recognised in law. Whether trans people can access healthcare. Whether same-sex couples can hold hands without calculating risk. Whether religious or political movements are allowed to turn whole communities into symbols of decline.

So perhaps we should begin where this discussion begun: not in the present, but in the ancient world.

Ancient Greece was more complicated than our nostalgia

Ancient Greece occupies a strange place in modern imagination. We tend to use it as a mirror for whatever argument we are currently having. Democracy? Greece. Philosophy? Greece. Gym bodies? Greece with less sunscreen. Same-sex desire? Again, Greece is summoned to the witness stand.

There is truth in this, but it needs careful handling.

Classical Athens did include forms of male same-sex intimacy that were publicly visible and culturally recognised. Vase paintings, poetry, and philosophical texts give evidence of relationships between men, especially structured relationships between older and younger males. These relationships existed within a highly gendered and status-conscious society, and they do not map neatly onto modern ideas of sexual orientation or LGBTQIA+ identity.

In other words, we should not pretend ancient Athens had a Pride parade with better pottery.
What it did have was a social world in which certain forms of male-male desire were not automatically treated as pathological or sinful. They could be admired, represented, idealised, mocked, regulated, or debated. They were part of the cultural conversation.

That alone matters, because it reminds us that the intense medical, religious, and legal condemnation of homosexuality in later Western history was not inevitable. It emerged in particular contexts. It was built. And what is built can be questioned.

The classicist Harry Tanner, whose recent work argues that Western homophobia may have deeper links with social and economic conditions than we often acknowledge. In interviews discussing his book, Tanner suggests that moments of economic pressure and rising inequality can produce a moral turn toward restraint, discipline, and suspicion of pleasure.

This is an intriguing argument because it shifts the question from “Why do people hate queer love?” to “What social conditions make queer love useful as a target?” That is a much sharper question.

The politics of self-restraint

When societies feel secure, they often have more room for complexity. They can tolerate ambiguity, pleasure, difference, eccentricity, art, experimentation, and those inconvenient people who keep asking whether the rules are as sacred as everyone claims.

But when societies feel threatened, the mood changes. The public imagination becomes more interested in order. Boundaries become important. Roles become rigid. Family becomes symbolic. Gender becomes a battleground. Desire becomes suspicious.

The language of moral restoration enters the room.

We hear calls to return to tradition, protect children, defend civilisation, restore discipline, recover lost values, and resist decadence. These phrases can sound noble, but they often carry a hidden demand: someone must become the example of what went wrong.

Queer communities have often been made to serve that role. Not because LGBTQIA+ people caused economic instability, political corruption, collapsing trust, housing crises, loneliness, or declining institutional confidence. Of course not. But minority groups are often easier to blame than systems. They are visible, emotionally charged, and politically useful.

A society anxious about its own future may find it easier to argue about drag queens than wage stagnation. Easier to panic about pronouns than concentrated wealth. Easier to demonise trans healthcare than confront why so many people feel powerless, precarious, and unheard.

I would argue… Moral panic is often politics with a mask on.

Athens, war, and the hardening of values

A quick read of history often suggests that around the time of Athens’ decline and the pressures surrounding the Peloponnesian War, attitudes toward same-sex male desire hardened. This is a contested historical argument, and one should not reduce a vast cultural shift to a single war or a sudden end of “gay pots.” Pottery production, artistic convention, patronage, trade, taste, and political conditions all influence what survives and what is made.

But the broader point is plausible enough to consider carefully: prolonged conflict and economic strain can change what societies celebrate, tolerate, or condemn.

The Peloponnesian War placed Athens under immense pressure. It strained finances, intensified factional conflict, and destabilised civic confidence. In such conditions, societies often become less patient with ambiguity. They look for discipline. They glorify sacrifice. They become suspicious of pleasure, softness, excess, and anything framed as indulgence.

This does not mean queer desire disappears. Desire rarely asks permission before existing. It simply becomes more vulnerable to being reinterpreted. What was once visible can become shameful. What was once aesthetic can become dangerous. What was once part of civic culture can become evidence of moral decay.

This is one of history’s more unsettling lessons: rights and freedoms do not only disappear when people change their minds about minorities. They often disappear when broader fear changes what society thinks it can afford to tolerate.

Florence: beauty, pleasure, and the bonfire


Renaissance Florence offers another compelling example, though again, not a simple one.

Florence in the fifteenth century was a city of extraordinary artistic achievement and complex sexual culture. Historians have documented that same-sex relations between men were widespread enough to draw civic attention, regulation, and punishment. The very existence of enforcement records tells us two things at once: such relations were common, and they were also contested.

Then came Girolamo Savonarola, the Dominican preacher whose rise in the 1490s brought a fierce moral reform movement into the heart of Florence. His famous “bonfire of the vanities” in 1497 targeted objects associated with luxury, beauty, sensuality, and worldly pleasure. Cosmetics, art, books, fine clothing, and other symbols of excess were thrown into public flames.

It is difficult to imagine a more theatrical politics of purification.

Savonarola’s Florence reminds us that moral crackdowns rarely limit themselves to one behaviour. They often move across culture broadly, targeting pleasure, art, sexuality, fashion, women’s autonomy, intellectual freedom, and minority expression. The issue is not only sex. It is control.

When beauty becomes suspect, when pleasure becomes decadence, when desire becomes disorder, queer lives often become early targets. Not because they are the only concern, but because they are symbolically useful. They can be made to stand for excess, softness, corruption, foreignness, modernity, decadence, or whatever else a frightened political movement needs them to represent.

The details change. The mechanism is familiar.

Economic anxiety needs a story


In general, human beings do not tolerate uncertainty well. When life feels unstable, we search for explanation. We want a story that tells us why things feel wrong and who is responsible.

The problem is that the most accurate explanations are often complex. Economic inequality, technological disruption, housing insecurity, declining trust, political polarisation, climate anxiety, loneliness, and institutional failure do not fit easily on a protest sign.

So simpler stories emerge.
Someone is corrupting the children.
Someone is destroying the family.
Someone is weakening the nation.
Someone is pushing an agenda.
Someone is enjoying too much freedom.

This is where LGBTQIA+ communities become politically vulnerable. They can be positioned as symbols of social change, even when the actual drivers of insecurity sit elsewhere.

We see this pattern clearly in modern “anti-gender” politics. Across multiple countries, campaigns against LGBTQIA+ rights are often tied to broader nationalist, authoritarian, religious, or populist movements. The rhetoric tends to frame queer and trans rights not as matters of dignity or equality, but as threats to children, tradition, women, faith, sovereignty, or civilisation itself.

That framing does powerful emotional work. It converts anxiety into anger. It converts uncertainty into moral certainty; while it gives people a target, and once a target exists, politics becomes much easier.

The present moment is not imaginary


It would be comforting to believe that LGBTQIA+ rights are now secure across the Western world. Comforting, but inaccurate.

International monitoring groups continue to document legal and political backlash. ILGA-Europe’s recent Rainbow Map work shows uneven progress across Europe, with some countries advancing protections while others stagnate or regress. ILGA World continues to document state barriers to LGBTI people exercising basic rights globally. Outright International has reported an intensifying global backlash, including restrictions on trans rights, gender recognition, gender-affirming care, and LGBTQIA+ expression. In the United States, civil liberties organisations continue tracking hundreds of legislative attacks on LGBTQ rights, particularly against trans and gender-diverse people.

These are not symbolic debates for those affected. They shape whether people can access healthcare, update identification documents, participate in sport, read books reflecting their lives, discuss identity safely at school, or move through public space without fear.

In Australia, we are not immune. We have our own histories of criminalisation, pathologisation, conversion practices, religious exemptions, school controversies, and public debates that place LGBTQIA+ lives under repeated scrutiny. Even where legal protections exist, cultural safety is not evenly distributed.

Rights written into law matter. But so does the climate in which people live, a right that exists on paper but is surrounded by hostility still requires courage to use.

Why Pride remains necessary


This is why Pride Month returns each year, and why it should.

Pride is often misunderstood by those who only see the colour and not the context. It is dismissed as excessive, performative, corporate, sexualised, unnecessary, or divisive. Sometimes, to be fair, Pride events themselves can be messy, commercialised, inconsistent, and imperfect. Welcome to humanity; we have rarely organised anything without complications.

But at its core, Pride is not a party in search of attention. It is a public refusal of shame.
It emerged because LGBTQIA+ people were criminalised, medicalised, pathologized, beaten, fired, rejected, silenced, and told to disappear. Pride said: no.

No to invisibility.
No to being treated as disease.
No to the idea that love, identity, gender, or desire must be hidden to be respectable.

And perhaps most importantly, Pride creates public memory. It reminds us that rights did not arrive through politeness alone. They were fought for by people who risked family, employment, safety, and reputation so that future generations might breathe more freely.

When rights come under attack, Pride becomes not less important, but more important. It becomes a reminder that visibility itself is protective. Not because visibility solves everything, but because invisibility has always been one of oppression’s favourite tools.

What history asks of us


The lesson from Athens and Florence is not that every economic crisis automatically produces homophobia, or that every moral reform movement is secretly about sex. History is far more complicated than that, and anyone who says otherwise is probably trying to sell a very confident book.

But history does show us that when societies become anxious, they often become more controlling. When inequality rises, when political trust declines, when people feel their status slipping or their future narrowing, public morality can harden. Desire becomes suspect. Difference becomes dangerous. Minorities become symbols. And when that happens, LGBTQIA+ communities are often among the first to feel the shift.

This should concern everyone, not only those directly targeted, because a society that begins by policing queer desire rarely stops there. The same impulse can move toward controlling women’s bodies, restricting speech, censoring education, narrowing art, punishing dissent, and defining citizenship through obedience rather than dignity.

The question is never only, “What happens to queer people?” The question is, “What kind of society are we becoming when freedom makes us anxious?”

The temptation to call it protection


Modern attacks on LGBTQIA+ rights are rarely framed as hatred. They are usually framed as protection.

Protecting children.
Protecting women.
Protecting fairness.
Protecting faith.
Protecting tradition.
Protecting free speech.

Some of these concerns deserve good-faith discussion in democratic societies. Not every disagreement is bigotry. Not every policy debate is violence. Serious societies need room for complexity.

But we should be alert when “protection” consistently requires one minority group to become less visible, less free, less safe, or less human. We should be alert when children are invoked as symbols, but LGBTQIA+ children themselves are ignored. We should be alert when the defence of tradition becomes an excuse to deny the existence of people who have always existed. And we should be alert when economic fear is redirected toward moral scapegoating, because history suggests this move is not new.

A final reflection


I acknowledge, the summery shared here is not complete, but it is useful. It asks us to notice a pattern: societies under strain often look for a body to discipline, a desire to condemn, a minority to blame, a freedom to roll back.

In ancient Athens, the record of male-male desire sits beside later philosophical and political anxieties about morality, discipline, and nature. In Renaissance Florence, a city of beauty and complexity became, for a time, a stage for moral purification. In our own era, concentrated wealth, economic anxiety, and political polarisation are again producing movements that frame LGBTQIA+ rights as threats rather than protections.

The details differ. The emotional logic echoes. So, Pride matters, not because LGBTQIA+ people are fragile, because rights are. Not because visibility is vanity, because invisibility has consequences. Not because history repeats itself exactly, because human fear has a very old habit of reaching for familiar targets.

If we are wise, we will not wait for the bonfires before we recognise the smoke.

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