Augustine was born in Thagaste, Numidia (now Algeria), to a Romanized family of Berber origins. Much of his youth and early adulthood was dominated by his mother Monica, a pious and spirited Christian. Having received a traditional literary education, he embarked on the career of a Roman rhetorician.

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At about nineteen, he was converted to the "love of wisdom" by reading Cicero's Hortensius. Henceforth the promotion of a career would be balanced by intellectual and spiritual pursuits. Being repelled by the Bible's apparent "barbarity," Augustine drifted into Manichaeism. After nine years' involvement with this religion, he became disillusioned of its truth-claims. He traveled to Rome and, after a brief liaison with academic skepticism, was appointed imperial rhetorician at Milan. There he was introduced to Bishop Ambrose, a man whose spiritual intensity was matched only by his political ability.

Ambrose's allegorical method of interpretation largely reconciled Augustine to the Christian Scriptures. In addition, he became deeply influenced by the philosophy of Plotinus and Porphyry, and also began an attentive reading of St. Paul's letters. It was in this intellectual-religious context that Augustine committed himself to Christianity.

Although he proposed to himself an ideal of the Christian life conceived in terms of retirement, prayer, and study, and even established a monastic community at Thagaste, in 391 Augustine was press-ganged into the priesthood at Hippo Regius on the North African coast. Within five years, he was made Bishop. His experience in pastoral ministry, as well as his conflicts with the Donatists, appear to have extinguished the humanism of his youth. His later writings are grimly pessimistic.

Augustine's influence on the Western church has been incalculable, especially during the Middle Ages and the Reformation.

Augustine's condemnation of homosexuality should be evaluated within the larger context of his general hostility to all forms of nonprocreative sexuality, including heterosexual eroticism, which he finds almost as, if not equally, reprehensible. "Passive" homosexuality receives special censure on misogynistic grounds: Men should not degrade their bodies by using them as women do. He rarely, if ever, conceives of natural libido in a favorable sense.

In his youth, Augustine may have shared the easy bisexuality common in the ancient Mediterranean, as is suggested in Confessions 3.1. Again, as was common in his culture, his same-sex friendships appear to have played a more important role in his emotional and personal life than his relationships with women, except his mother. He denied the heterosexual companionate marriage, arguing that, if marriage were intended for companionship, men would marry other men.

Augustine's lamentation for the death of an unnamed friend (Confessions 4:4-6) is among the most moving examples of this sort of writing to be found in antiquity. Although it is debatable to what extent, if any, these passionate friendships were , they express a sensibility that today is probably to be found, at least in Western industrial societies, only among gay men.

In its first century of existence, gay male autobiography has become increasingly more open, frank, and unapologetic.

In ancient Rome, the galli were castrated priests of Cybele, the Asian Mother Goddess, and of the Syrian goddess Atagartis; they were widely riducled for their effeminacy, cross-dressing, and sexual passivity.

Roman writers on homosexual or bisexual themes generally followed Greek models; but unlike the Greeks, Romans condoned sex with slaves.

Patristic Writers, also known as the Church Fathers, appropriated currents of hostility to homoeroticism in pagan thought and used them to strengthen the prohibitions of Leviticus and Paul, while also expressing their own hostile interpretations.