Queerying Harry Tanner's book

Dr Harry Tanner published something in a London press, on hate versus love. Tanner is on the side of love (just ask him); if you disagree that homosexuality counts, you are hate.

Lest you think I am being harsh: here is (or, yesterday... was) a published review, from one Eleni Avdoulou at the University of Pisa. That reviewer is on Tanner's side such that I really can't see her misinterpreting Tanner's point. Avdoulou's publisher? - Bryn Mawr, an semi-femme university in the US (they bundle up with Haverford). I see today the whole site is down, so uh. I'll be adding links to other reviews.

I find failures up and down this entire asânid chain. Tanner has a bias, against basic biology and the need for a society - British in his case - to propagate itself. His publisher Bloomsbury did not call him on this bias. His reviewer Avdoulou didn't either; and by extension neither did Bryn Mawr. So now we gotta do it.

Just look at all this cant from the review: The chapter concludes by arguing that Cleon’s anti-gay agenda and the increasingly homophobic climate in Athens prompted prominent queers such as Euripides and Agathon to seek refuge.... We can accept this from, oh, Bent Spines (or from Lobo or whatever). From a purported university press all three words need flagging as ingroup-jargon. Especially since Tanner trades on his PhD.

More: 'phobia medicalises an opposition likely political in nature (even then). As Donald Kagan reports, Cleon was a leader of Athens (we'll leave aside how effective for now). It is likely that Cleon from 450 BC to his death in battle had specific targets in mind. And Cleon wasn't acting alone, given that Pericles was hardly a "queer" (Tanner and Avdoulou demand we use this term) himself.

Tanner is a midwit who does not understand, say, Judaism outside his Christian filter. I suspect his dim view of Cleon likewise depends upon university (read: midwit) acceptance of Thucydides in the canon. Thucydides - writing after the war, as something of a revisionist - made Cleon out as the great villain. It happens that after Pericles' death, Thucydides and Cleon fell into rival factions. Even then I don't see Thucydides objecting to Cleon's social programme; only to his military grand-strategy (Kagan would interject here, Cleon was winning until his death). Neither, I think, did Pericles object.

Tanner and Avdoulou read like Christian apologists finding a figure that their caste hates because their professor told them they need to be hated. For Tapscott it's Darwin; for Ravi Zacharias it was Nietzsche. This makes further difficult to take Tanner seriously that opposition to homosexuality be an outgrowth of the Gini Coëfficient. Tanner doesn't buck the midwit wisdom that Greek homosexuality was an aristocratic pastime with clear Top and Bottom roles - rather undercutting that chapter of his thesis. I doubt that Tanner even knows what Gini is.

Tanner, I get. He wants to keep chasing after cute young boys like when he was a young boy (the Kirkus reviewer makes this clear... citing Tanner's own book). Avdoulou seems less like a natural ally than like a university drone. Can't risk tenure.