"the increasingly theocratic despotism...led to intervention in...private sexual expression....In 342 gay marriages...were outlawed"

"Even under the Republic, as has been noted, Cicero regarded the younger Curio's relationship with another man as a marriage, and by the time of the early Empire references to gay marriages abound....But profound changes in the traditional values of the city had begun centuries before the barbarians breached the city walls....As the upper echelons of the Roman government---civil and ecclesiastical---became increasingly dominated by rural outlooks, official attitudes toward Roman social mores were considerably altered. Traditional Roman ideas of sexual propriety, based on marital fidelity, the protection of minors, and the nuclear family, gave way to much more rigid categorization of legitimate sexual outlets, the exclusion of sexual pleasure as a positive good, and general intolerance of sexual deviation....Public aspects of religion and morals had always been the object of some governmental supervision, but the increasingly theocratic despotism of the later Empire often led to intervention in matters such as personal religious conviction or private sexual expression which would have been considered individual under the early emperors....In 342 gay marriages, which had hitherto been legal (at least de facto) and well known, were outlawed in a curiously phrased statute which some authors have regarded as entirely facetious. The highly propagandistic nature of the law and lack of any penalty for noncompliance probably indicate that its imperial drafter(s) expected it to meet with popular opposition or neglect. The first corporal penalty for an act related to homosexuality was imposed in 390....In response to the rising tide of intolerance, gay people began to defend their preferences and criticize their opponents in various literary genres....

Since Christianity was the official religion of the Roman Empire from the fourth century on and was the only organized force to survive the final disintegration of Roman institutions in the West after the barbarian invasions of the fifth century, it became the conduit through which the narrower morality of the later Empire reached Europe. It was not, however, the author of this morality. The dissolution of the urban society of Rome and the ascendance of less tolerant political and ethical leadership occasioned a steady restriction of sexual freedom which transcended credal boundaries....it is misleading to characterize Christianity as somehow peculiarly liable to antigay feelings or doctrines....."

----John Boswell, Christianity, Social Tolerance, and Homosexuality
(University of Chicago Press, 1980), pp. 82, 120-1, 123-4, 127-8