The Queer Thing about Sin | Harry Tanner

In The Queer Thing About Sin (Bloomsbury 2025), Harry Tanner reveals the ancient origins of homophobia. By the end of the 5th century BCE, Greek plays were being staged which ridiculed homosexuality, by the end of the next century Athenians were being tried for homosexuality and Plato had explicitly condemned it in his Laws. In Rome, the legal situation was hardly better and in the law codes of Leviticus same-sex sex is condemned. Why did this come to happen, and what warnings does it hold for us now?

Tanner will explore some of his findings in this talk and then turn his attention to how to write and research academic research for a trade audience — he will argue that trade publishers have unfairly received a reputation for simplifying research, and his method for going from a PhD to a book proposal and an internationally published trade book. His talk will address the need to adapt scholarly writing and research and work with Artificial Intelligence to build new, more human insights. He will also talk briefly about his own experience of conversion therapy and how it shaped his research in Classics.

Harry Tanner earned a PhD in Classics at the University of Galway, Ireland (2023). He has published on Greek Linguistics, specifically on semantic change in Ancient Greek, appeared on SiriusXM and a variety of podcasts including The Guilty Feminist, and written for The New York Sun. His book The Queer Thing About Sin was shortlisted for Book of the Year in the UK by Foyles. He is now working on a book called How to Talk to the Dead about how studying the ancient world forms its own kind of therapy for grief.

This event is hosted by the Stanford Humanities Center and the 'American Studies from the Inside Out' Research Workshop, with support from the Program for Feminist, Gender, and Sexuality Studies, the Clayman Institute for Gender Research and Stanford Public Humanities.