No. Rome did not fall because of homosexuality.

Moralists love to claim that it did. I don’t know why Christians hold the fall of pagan Rome as a bad thing, given it was Christianity that triumphed, but they certainly do. They see the fall of Rome as historical proof that homosexuality undermines civilizations.

Emperor Caligula

The truth is that Rome fell for complex reasons, but thrived when homosexuality was common and its most sexually perverse emperors ruled. Theories for the fall of Rome’s Empire vary from lead poising in the water pipes to the dubious loyalty of an all-mercenary non-Roman army. Wikipedia has a nice long article outlying the various factors behind how Rome’s magnificent empire slowly collapsed over hundreds of years. Homosexuality is not on the list.

The truth is Rome fell over 300 years after its peak when Christian emperors forced their new religion on the Roman citizens. Emperor Constantine implemented anti-religious laws banning the Roman people’s traditional beliefs, along with Christian anti-sexuality laws. Denied the right to worship their traditional Gods and persecuted for being sexual, the citizens of Rome grew increasingly disenfranchised from their moralistic government. It is no exaggeration to say that homophobia was a greater cause of the fall of Rome than the gay.

With the fall of Rome, Christianity triumphed over the pagan Roman gods, and so began 1,000 years of Dark Ages, where the power of the church suppressed human knowledge, arts, and understanding. Only with the rise of a different kind of thinking, lead by Martin Luther, did the possibility of humanity grounding itself in secular knowledge begin to reassert itself in the West, opening the doors for a renaissance in human thought most prominently by the ultimate Renaissance men, both profoundly gay, Leonardo Da Vinci and Michelangelo!

Not only was Renaissance Florence a hotbed of homosexuality, so was ancient Greece. And Paris. And Berlin. And London. And New York. And of course, Rome. And that is just the West. With so many examples to choose from, its obvious that gay people are the source of cultural thriving, not decline, although that won’t stop the homophobes from repeating this tired canard.