Edward Gibbon’s The History of the Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire, the eighteenth-century text that tied Rome’s collapse to sexual decadence. Camille Paglia’s work, greatly admired by Milo, is preoccupied with this same causal link between homosexuality, promiscuity, gender fluidity and civilizational decline. Neocon Gertrude Himmelfarb also used her scholarship of Victorian Britain to suggest that Western civilization had weathered the storm of modernity only because of its Victorian values, which had collapsed in the 60s owing to gay liberation and the sexual revolution.
