The Florentine experience of sodomy as part of the functioning social system and the rise of both cultures of sodomy and its persecution in the early modern world suggest, in Chitty’s reading, an intimate relationship between homosexual sex, class struggle, and the development of capitalism. It also puts paid to many contemporary liberal readings of the persecution of sodomy and homosexuality as some kind of primitive urge that exists in superstitious societies or ‘lower classes’, with the idea that we are progressing in a straight line through education towards tolerance.
