Not to discourage the question or replies, but it may be difficult to find a concrete historical answer to this question, because the prohibition is so ancient. This may be a better question for /r/asksocialscience or /r/askanthropology.

Edit: the question is also seriously muddled by the fact that the nature of homosexual relationships, homosexual identity, sexual consent, gender roles, and taboos on pederasty have all shifted radically over the course of recorded history.

For example, when we say that Ancient Rome, Greece, or Central Asia were accepting of "homosexuality", we are emphatically not referring to homosexuality in the modern sense (egalitarian, companionate sexual relations between mutually-consenting same-sex adults). Nor should we imply broad acceptance of homosexual identity, which was not even presumed to exist in the cultures you mentioned.

TL;DR It's very difficult to compare ancient homosexual practices with modern ones; hence, ancient opposition to those practices is correspondingly difficult to trace to the present day.

In this book Jeffery S. Silker claims that Leviticus 18:22

Do not have sexual relations with a man as one does with a woman; that is detestable.

was part of the "Holiness Code". This code was full of rules designed to differentiate the Israelite people from the Canaanite people. The early Jews, he claims, avoided homosexuality for the same reasons they avoided sowing two kinds of seed in one field, in order to stand out and prove that they were the chosen people and different from the surrounding tribes.

Additionally clearly avoiding homosexual activity falls under the same category as avoiding contraception in order to maximize procreation. This argument only applies to Roman Catholics however as the Catechism of the church states that all sexual acts must be procreative.

What is often missed in these kinds of debates is that the Bible, as understood within Christianity, is not a piecemeal collection, but is treated as a unitive whole. And from within that unitive whole, there is a cohesive understanding of sexuality that is more than just a list of prohibitions.

So, Genesis 1-3 is taken as a initial blueprint that has a lot of theological data. It constructs human sex as a binary reality of male/female. It treats Adam and Eve as the prototypical pairing, and seems to establish marriage as the primary societal bond.

This is the context in which Biblical understandings of sexuality operate. Sex is linked, in a foundational text, with binary complements and with marriage as lifelong pairing.

I think Silker is underplaying the complexity of the Holiness Code in Leviticus. Leviticus provides a complex set of Laws that are designed, yes, to show the Israelites distinction. But that distinction is not always arbitrary. In this sense "holiness" operates with a dual meaning. One, "set apart", "distinct" from the other nations, but the other is "morally excellent" in parallel to God's holiness.

So some of the Holiness Code is working with a symbolic portrayal of reality - rules about mixing fabrics, rules about certain types of animals as food, etc. However, I would argue that it is a mistake to conflate "unclean" and "morally detestable".

The Levitical code includes a large range of prohibited sexual activity, including homosexual activity. All of these can be read as the negation of that foundational idea of heterosexual union paired with marriage.

The New Testament inherits most of this Old Testament ideology. The only major difference in regards to homosexuality would be that the NT is written (partly) in a Graeco-Roman context in which "homosexuality" wasn't a "thing", the primary axis for configuring sexual activity was active/passive (penetrator/penetrated), and the shamefulness of being the penetratee. However, within Paul's writings he treats both partners of homosexual activities as engaged in something wrong. I would argue that this is because the same cohesive view is in operation.

Only within the Roman Catholic church, and only very recently, has procreation been violently propelled as the prime reason for sex. That was in reaction to contraception. While some early church writers view the purpose of sex as only procreative, I would be loathe to represent that as a majority view. There are more complex developments going on within Christian history over the question of sexuality.

I am loathe to speculate on socio-psychological reasons which seek to "explain" why the Bible presents such a position, I don't think it's a very fruitful exercise. I am happy to follow up further questions in this area though.

Isn't this the million dollar question? Consider that many non-Christian cultures are or have been anti-gay; even many non-Judeo-Christian cultures as well. My experience is with Medieval Europe, so I'll give my two cents from that perspective.

Authority, political power, and economics in the pre-industrial world centered around units of kinship, whether this be an entire patriarchal/matriarchal house, or a small nuclear family unit. Civic life was the world of males, home life the world of females. Businesses, whether they be small rural farms or urban trade and banking operations, were run within the family. Because there were few laws and even fewer ways of enforcing them, no bureaucratic arms of governments, weak police forces, etc., much of what held a civilization together rested in the hands of individuals, and individuals were connected through kinship. Civilization could thus only function with harmony between these the two spheres of civic and home life.

So, you can see how much of civilization depended heavily on the family unit and thus marriage and reproduction. Gay relationships couldn't produce families and thus were basically seen as having little use other than satisfying physical cravings. Insofar as they satisfied male cravings, they were generally seen as playing the same role as mistresses and prostitutes--valid in their own right.

Now, even the ideas of "gay" and "Anti-Gay" is are misnomers; it's a modern idea with its origins in the late 18th and early 19th centuries. For millenia men have fallen in love and/or had sex with other men with little trouble; the big question was whether or not they were fulfilling their role in civic society. Thus, Roman Citizens were allowed to "give" in their gay relationships, but couldn't "take". The idea of Roman masculinity wouldn't permit it. In any case, if a man already had a wife and had sired children, and ran his household well, few people would have drawn attention to his preferences for his flings.

In ancient Greece, gay relationships were part of civic life at the same time hetero relationship were part of home life. Boys "received" from older men until they came of age; then they "gave" to younger men; all the while they might marry and have kids and further their own household.

tl;dr: It's more complicated than you'd think.

Read John Boswell's book; it's controversial but it's got a lot of basic information on homosexuality in the early Christian world.

Is there a good paper/book about the treatment of homosexuality across major cultures throughout history. I know there are a lot of historians who have covered as it touches upon their period of specialty, but I'd assume someone has attempted something that is more comprehensive.

TLDR: Homosexuality identity is a modern Western construction, which has developed thanks to capitalism/wage labor. Anti-homosexuality has also arose due the weakening of domestic bonds. The spread of both homosexuality and anti-homosexuality has been spread thanks to globalization. However, there cannot be an accurate or one-answer to anti-homosexuality because the definition of "homosexuality" has changed and mutated over time.

I think I can help answer this in terms of more modern retaliation and anthropological view to homosexuality.

What we think of homosexuality (and heterosexuality) now is a fairly recent modern and Western/white social/cultural construction. In other societies, people might not even see themselves as "gay." Different cultures across time have different ideas of gender, sex, and sexuality. Ex: In the Middle ages, “sodomite” distinguished not by certain sexual acts, but by sexual subjectivity. The following paragraph is to give you an idea of how we can differ.

To start, the Greek model of sexuality (as touched on by /u/dolan0) was not based on sex as an act between two people, but sex as an action performed by one upon another. There were "active" and "passive" partners, where phallic penetration was performed by one partner only. Sexual acts were not based between two sexes, but on social status. For example: In same sex acts, it was proper for an adult male to be the active partner for a submissive adolescent. Once the adolescent becomes an adult, it was no longer proper for him to be submissive. Notice that I leave out sexual acts between women. This is because the Greeks believed women's sexuality was more of a somatic need (reproduction not pleasure) and of a reactive nature (pleasure felt when given by male stimulus) -- that women had no specific desire/drive on own. The lack of general social status by women across several histories and cultures is problematic in records of the history of women.

Now we move over to modern day.

Prior to 1892, "homosexuality" as a term did not exist in the English language. There was no homosexuality as we know it, just the idea of "sexual inversion," which included deviant gender behavior. That is not to say that homosexual behavior did not exist; it's that homosexual identities are modern products. In fact, "heterosexuality" is also a pretty modern idea, and the original definition treated it as a perversion: "morbid sexual passion for one of the opposite sex".

The emergence of homosexual identity as opposed to behavior has been attributed to the emergence of capitalism in the Western world. Previously, families were more dependent on each person's work (harvest foods, create clothes, etc), and bearing children for labor was more of a prime reason for copulation. However, with a rise in wage labor, the household was divested of its economic function and made it able for people to organize a personal life around sexuality.

Even though capitalism helped create homosexual identity, it also created backlash against it as people strove to find a scapegoat for the lessening importance of the family as a unit. This helped lead to more anti-homosexuality in recent times.

Increasing globalization means that anti-homosexuality is also being spread (though it is also means that the idea of a homosexual identity is also spreading).

I posted most of what I understood from my homosexualities class (of which I have a midterm for in several hours), and I suggest reading through the below sources to get more of a feel of the creation of homosexuality as an identity and construction.

Sources: Muriel Vernon - professor on homosexualities at UCLA; One Hundred Years of Homosexuality - David Halperin; Lesbian/Gay Studies in the House of Anthropology - Kath Weston; Capitalism and Gay Identity - John D'Emilio; Breaking the Mirror: The Construction of Lesbianism and the Anthropological Discourse on Homosexuality - Evelyn Blackwood

A large source of Western scorn on the topic of homosexuality comes from theologians' interpretations of sexual ethics.

A good primary source, if you're interested, would be Aquinas's work on sexual ethics. He considers homosexuality to be an unnatural vice. To contextualize his objections to sexual actions, he felt masturbation was perhaps one of the worst sins someone could commit sexually. The paradigm that led him to this belief was considering sex as a means of procreation. Any sexual act undertaken that knowingly didn't lead to a child was considered sinful, which explains lasting opposition to means of sexual contraception and homosexuality.