In 1066 a scribe and illustrator at the Stoudios Monastery named Theodore worked on a psalter, now in the British Library. Next to a verse about God raining down destruction from Psalm 20, he painted Sodom and Gomorrah engulfed in flames while Lot and his daughters flee and Lot’s wife is turns into a pillar of salt. Theodore had fled the sinful world to enter the monastery, like Lot leaving Sodom. But the monastery turned out to be riskier than he thought, no freer of the threat of male-male love. In the same scriptorium, not so many desks away, Niketas had edited Symeon’s works and composed his life. Theodore and his work were products of a monastic culture that held celibacy, homoeroticism, and the love God in a nearly untenable tension.