Its okay to be gay in ancient times

In classical antiquity, writers such as Herodotus, [2] Plato, [3] Xenophon, [4] Athenaeus [5] and many others explored aspects of homosexuality in Greek society. Conservatives pretend homophobia and enforced heteronormativity are deeply rooted human traditions. These ancient civilizations where it was okay to be gay prove otherwise. There’s no doubt that same-sex activity existed in ancient Greece, just like it always existed in every corner of the planet – in men, women, and even animals.

What’s critical to understand though, is that homosexuality never flourished in Greece as so many people falsely believe today. Historians working on the queer past often contend with naïve assertions questioning whether gay, lesbian, bi, trans people, or non-binary people even existed in the past. My answer to this is always ‘of course they did’.

Ancient Greece featured at least five different varieties of same-sex relations: (a) pederastic relations, typically between adolescent boys and adult men who were not yet married; (b) relations between male youths of approximately the same age; less frequently (c) homosexual relations between fully adult men; (d) age-differentiated relations. It is grotesque that, years later, Fascism would punish homosexuals by sending them to confinement in nearby destinations, often extremely poor islands in the middle of nowhere.

There's room for improvement. Speaking of which, among the over 2, Italian professional footballers, I am not aware of anyone who has come out of the closet. Homosexual relationships the way we intend them today—between two free adults—were rarely allowed. Partly because of this new legal system, during the late 19th and early 20th centuries, Italy turned into a refuge for homosexuals from northern Europe and the U.

For many this was an act of pilgrimage arising from a desire to visit the home of Sappho, the archaic poet whose passionate, lyrical evocations of female same-sex desire became so famous in antiquity and beyond that women who were sexually attracted to other women came to be named after her island home - a nomenclature that not even a legal action by outraged inhabitants of the island can stop. We know very little about the lives of same-sex attracted women in Greece.

Back in Mykonos, on that first visit two decades ago, I remember being thrilled to discover its genesis as a queer haven also dated back to the '70s, the result of Jackie Onassis' patronage lending it a certain glamour.

Out of the blood that was spilt grew the first hyacinth. Freeborn male Romans had the civil liberty to do as they pleased when it came to sexual activity, and as such, the concept of a Roman man engaging in homosexual sex was in no way controversial or taboo to the Romans, as long as it fell within certain parameters. As early as the 8th Century BC, the ancient lawmaker Philolaus of Corinth, who himself had a male lover, created laws in support of same-sex male unions.

Frescoes, vessels and other artefacts of courting same-sex couples have been recovered throughout Ancient Greece Credit: Alamy. It is intellectual, and it repeatedly exists between an elder and a younger man, when the elder man has intellect, and the younger man has all the joy, hope and glamour of life before him. It goes without saying that the arguments offered by Justice Alito and his followers are deeply flawed.

And millennia after writers and philosophers such as Plato were busy contemplating same-sex love, many vessels and statues on display in museums and sites in illustrate aspects of homosexuality in Ancient Greece. He rewrote straight history and offered a different version of the past in which his own 19th-century passion joined a continuous tradition that stretched back to the very foundation of European civilization.

According to Greece's Prime Minister Kyriakos Mitsotakis, the new law, which also allows same-sex couples to adopt children, will "boldly abolish a serious inequality". These myths point to an ambivalence that runs through Greek society about same-sex attraction. Sign up to our newsletter to always be in the know!

Homosexuality in ancient rome

Indeed, he was so successful in proselytising for homosexuality that he upset the local female followers of Dionysus, the god of wine and drama. News Features. It translates so directly to displays of power that Roman men were even known to orally rape their rivals to express their superiority over them whilst ridiculing the victim, although laws were put in place to prosecute the offender and protect the status of the victim.

Every time that the legal rights of gays and lesbians have been discussed, somebody will evoke the Greeks. It is high time to do the same for the hyacinth and rescue the bulb from its dowdy fusty retirement-home image and make it fabulous again. Our best evidence remains the fragments of poems of Sappho that have come down to us.

When talking about Italian history and homosexuality, people often spontaneously invoke the rainbow triad: Leonardo da Vinci, Michelangelo, and Caravaggio. Not a single one. In the warmth and light of the Mediterranean, numerous 19th- and early 20th-century gays and lesbians sought to fleetingly recapture visions of this lost paradise and recreate it amongst its ruins. At other points, such as in his Laws, Plato is dismissive of same-sex relations, regarding them as unnatural and not fit for proper society.

There are lessons to be learnt, but they do not come from imitation.