"For most of history, the really dangerous philosophical ideas were those that touched on religion and political power. But the Platonic text censored at Texas A&M is not about these subjects, at least not directly. Rather, the Symposium deals with sex and love. Peterson intended to assign the passage in which Plato elaborates on a myth about the origin of erotic love, proposing that human beings were originally created as bodies joined together. Some of these pairs included two men, some two women, and some a man and a woman. But Zeus cut these doubles in half, and ever since our souls have longed to reunite with their lost mate. This explains why some people are what we now call homosexual: Their souls were originally part of a same-sex pair. Plato writes that if Hephaestus, the Greek god of the forge, appeared to a male couple and offered “to melt you into one and let you grow together, so that being two you shall become one, and while you live, live a common life as if you were a single man,” the lovers would certainly agree: “This meeting and melting into one another, this becoming one instead of two, was the very expression of his ancient need.” The Symposium’s sympathetic depiction of same-sex desire—at least between men; no female characters take part in the discussion—has long made Plato what we’d now call “queer-coded.” The Victorian writer John Addington Symonds spoke for many a gay reader when he described the thrill of reading Plato for the first time: “Here in the Phaedrus and the Symposium, I discovered the true Liber Amoris [Book of Love] at last, the revelation I had been waiting for.” Yet the Symposium insists that erotic desire is not really about sex. What we yearn for is not this or that beautiful body, but the beautiful itself, an ideal that can be found only in the spiritual realm. Plato suggests that this is especially true of love between men, which transcends biology because it doesn’t lead to procreation. Symonds said he found in the Symposium “the consecration of a long-cherished idealism.”"