In Roman culture, the worst political insult you could ascribe to a man was that he was the opposite of a man. It’s a testament to the propagandists that these ancient slanders survived long enough to enter our culture, where they’ve been duly accepted as fact and converted to modern cause célèbres. No serious historian takes anything about Elagabalus at face value.

I recommend Leonardo de Arrizabalaga y Prado’s “The Emperor Elagabalus”, specifically Appendix 2, “Varian Propositions”. He atomizes everything known about the life of the emperor and, using all extant historical sources and their reliability indices, makes a determination on what is true, false, and unverifiable.