If we're to take Roman history at face value, an unusually large number of Caesars were degenerates of some sort.

According to this history, many of the Caesars weren't heterosexual (e.g. Galba, Hadrian, Elagabalus), were incestuous (e.g. Nero), were outright insane (e.g. Tiberius, Caligula), were drug addicts (e.g. Marcus Aurelius), &c.

Consider how suspicious this is in light of, say, United States history. The United States is now on President #46, and yet it is not a widely accepted fact that a single one of these men was any of those things. Yet I'm supposed to believe that, of the first eighteen emperors, at least eight were overt degenerates and madmen of some kind? Almost half? One is tempted to believe that much of this is simply historical misinformation spread by Christians and others with an axe to grind against the Caesars.

But all this is something of an aside. The thing with Elagabalus is that he's the one and only Caesar who seems to have nothing positive about him whatsoever. Tiberius governed well for the first part of his rule, but his heart was never in it and he abandoned himself to pleasures of the flesh on something rather like Epstein's island for the rest of it; Caligula governed well for the first year or so, until he became insane. Nero would have turned out well were it not for the bad influences surrounding and corrupting him.

Elagabalus, however, was just plain evil. History has it, for instance, that he considered himself the 'wife' of at least one 'husband' and had at least two other male partners, prostituted himself in taverns, and promised great rewards to anyone who could turn him into a woman.

Eventually his own female family members (for whom he was practically a figurehead) betrayed him and he was assassinated at the age of 18, his corpse thrown into the river Tiber (a fate common for the corpses of disgraced persons), and replaced as emperor with his less degenerate adoptive cousin, Severus Alexander.