Introduction: The last acceptable prejudice
pt. 1: Before homophobia?: "Homosexuality and "homophobia" in antiquity
1. Inventing Eros: Imagining Eros ; Legitimating Eros ; Greek homosexuality and homophobia
2. Against nature: Imagining Effeminacy ; Unnatural crimes ; Indicting effeminacy
3. Making monsters: Imperial desire ; Naming perverts ; Diagnosing deviance
4. The end of antiquity: Affairs of the heart ; The triumph of Charicles
pt. 2: Inventing Sodom: Sodom and homosexual behavior in the Old and New Testaments
5. The Sodom story: Fire from Heaven ; Sodom and homosexuality in other Old Testament texts ; Interpreting Sodom ; Sodom and sexual deviance
6. Gospel sodomy: The unnameable sin ; Testifying to perversion ; Paul on punishment ; Reinventing Sodom
pt. 3: A thousand years of sodomy: defining sodomy, 500-1400
7. Avenging flames: Avenging flames ; Rooting out depravity in the West ; Repenting for pleasure ; Something shameful
8. The plague of sodomy: Theorizing sin ; Criminalizing sodomy ; Identifying sodomites ; Sodomite and Heretic ; The trial of Arnald of Verniolle ; Is it a sin to love? ; The plague of sodomy ; The burning question
pt. 4: Lighting bonfires: sodomy and anxiety in the Renaissance
9. Reinventing sodomy: Sodomy and friendship ; Sodomy and satire ; Sodomy and the Black Death ; Sodomy and religious factionalism ; Sodomy and treason
10. A continental epidemic: The Italian panic ; Spanish sodomy ; A Portuguese sodomite ; Effeminacy in France ; Counting sodomites in Geneva
11. England's abominable vice: Sodomy and criminal law ; Redefining sodomy ; Literary sodomites ; Inventing homophobia
pt. 5: Sodomy and the Enlightenment: unmasking and punishing sodomites, 1700-1860
12. Societies of sodomites: Effeminate weaklings ; Persecution in the Dutch Republic ; Imagining sodomites ; A detestable race ; A cry for reform ; Risking their necks ; The end of sodomy?
pt. 6: Victorian secrets: Uranians, inverts, perverts, and homosexuals, 1850-1910
13. Inverting perversion: The invention of abnormality ; A flourishing literature ; Fictive strategies
14. Modern ethics: The social value of homosexuality ; The panic terror that prevails ; Sexual inversion ; Symbolic sodomite ; Outlaws
pt. 7: New world homophobia: sodomy and persecution in America, 1500-1900
15. Colonizing Sodom: Eliminating Sodom ; New English sodomy
16. The discord young men feel: Friendship and anxiety ; Sexual comrades ; Unmanly passions
17. In fear of fairies: Natural objects of disgust ; Colonies of perverts ; Policing perverts
pt. 8: Normal homosexuals: homophobia and resistance in the twentieth century
18. The riddle of homosexuality: Oswald's story ; The intersexes ; Introducing Jennie June
19. Hit them! Hit back!: Strike ; Counterstrike ; Disgusting performances ; Rights and cults ; Inferior human beings
20. American masculinity: Sinister decadence ; Cataloguing sex ; Gardens of pansies ; Demand our rights!
21. A panic close to madness: Narrow sensibilities ; Good gay poets ; Drama queens ; Pride and prejudice
Epilogue: The last acceptable prejudice: Homophobia ; Prancing activists ; From tolerance to acceptance?
