Women are given in marriage, taken in battle, exchanged for favors, sent as tribute, traded, bought, and sold. … Men are of course also trafficked – but as slaves, hustlers, athletic stars, serfs, or as some other catastrophic social status, rather than as men.

Our own historical accounts, insofar as they replicate and support the dominant view of a Middle Ages that is “naturally,” effortlessly, monolithically Christian, masculinist, and heterosexual, erase the particular sites of struggle at which the female, Jewish, “heretical,” queer resisted silencing even as they were brought to silence. … We can intervene … to hear, in however muted and distorted a fashion, the queer presences against which that homophobia was anxiously erected.

In truth those who have such [same-sex] inclinations and desires are half-beast. They have shed the desirable element, their humanity, and in the sphere of conduct are made themselves like unto monsters. From levity to lewdness, from lewdness to lust, and finally, when hardened, they are drawn into every type of infamy and lawlessness.