Then comes the change. With the introduction of  'Christianity which was born when Rome was stood at the peak of its power and Greek culture still dominated the Mediterranean world.' The single most destructive concept of homosexuality as an abomination and a crime worthy of (and receiving) the death penalty is the brief story of Sodom and Gomorrah. Even though Crompton demonstrates that the inception of the hate campaign resulting from this Judaic story may have originated from an incorrect translation from the Bible, this Levitical evidence was the reference used to torture, imprison, slaughter, and burn at the stake countless men and women who were even suspect of same sex love or who engaged in the act of sodomy. The Story marches forward like a pestilence through the Middle Ages and the Renaissance with the Inquisition only an example of the fury that the Church used to destroy sodomites, considered to be the cause of all misfortune in battles, disease, and civic unrest because of God's fury at peoples who allowed this crime.

Make no mistake; Crompton does not march against the Church as the source of all evil in telling the story of the homosexuals' plight. He writes lyrically of the wonders of the Renaissance and the Papal patronage of the great master works of art in the history of Western Civilization. He quietly continues to demonstrate that these holy works were from the minds and hands of homosexual artists such as Michelangelo, da Vinci, Caravaggio, Botticelli, and Donatello. He talks about the Popes, the kings, the emperors, the famous men and women of the political and religious and artistic world who were known to be homosexual.

Crompton does not exclude Eastern Civilization in his massive book. As a matter of fact his beautifully written accounts of Chinese and later, of Japanese histories provide a welcome breath of dignity to the ongoing slaughter and genocide of the homosexuals in Western Civilization. Because the Judaic Bible was not part of the culture of these civilizations, there was no rule or law against same sex relationships. Influenced by the Oriental mind being at one with nature include being at one with all beings in nature, and while it was accepted that unions between man and woman were necessary for the proliferation of their civilizations, more often than not the purer 'love and passion' stories were those between men. The Samurai are shown to be deeply involved with male lovers who were the driving force for valor on the battlefield.

Once the atrocities of the Inquisition began to fade and the Age of Enlightenment and Reason altered man's view of the law as at least equal to the dogma of both the Papal authority and the Protestant Reformation, Crompton writes of the gradual decriminalization of homosexuality, examining the differences between the timelines of France, Spain, the Netherlands, England and the United States and leaves his thorough investigation in the Supreme Court ruling of June 26, 2003. "Our story concludes here, at the moment when executions finally cease in Europe. Looking back over twenty-four centuries, what pattern can we see in the dozen societies we have examined? Most striking, certainly, is the divide between those that called themselves Christian and those that flourished before or independently of Christianity. In the first we find laws and preaching which promoted hatred, contempt, and death; in the second, varying attitudes, all of them (barring Islam, which, like Christianity, inherited the lethal tradition of the Hebrew scriptures) to a radical degree more tolerant."

This book is not a light read; reading one chapter a day is about all we can fully absorb and relate to our own knowledge of history. But Crompton is both knowledgeable and a thoughtful writer. His book is generously illustrated with examples of paintings, sculptures, images of the people under discussion, and extant documents. One could comfortably use this book as a text for the general study of Civilization. The fact that Louis Crompton has added the parallel history of homosexuality to his intellectual tracing is a welcome addition to scholars and to all readers who long for an understanding of a topic that has rarely been more relevant than it is today. This is a brilliant book and an extraordinary achievement. Highly recommended!!!