I don’t really see a contradiction with what I said and what you’ve laid out here. What I’m trying to get at is that there is always an incongruence between societally accepted and recognized relationships, so we should take interpretations that rely on law or philosophy from the time with a grain of salt, especially when they seem to contradict primary sources from day to day life.

I’m aware of the Roman’s high levels of bottom shame, and, as I said above, it persist in modern culture. As you said, it would be a source of shame to be the bottom, and I will admit to a bit of purposeful omission regarding sex between soldiers. Most of the depictions we have of that are soldiers engaged in frottage, no one is “playing Juliet”, so to speak. But that’s the official party line, if we went off official attitudes in the military from the 70s in the same way we would have to say there were no gay military relationships at the time, and we know that’s just not true.

But to expand out on what you are saying, yeah it does seem to be a common theme in other cultures too, with variations, many of which also persist today. Some cultures it was seen as childish for a man to enjoy receptive sex, some controls conflated it with transsexuality and would only accept gay men who presented as women (usually in areas where the population has less sexual dimorphism). One of the big problems in my opinion is that we see just in recent times how quickly attitudes can change and fluctuate, and we know that cultures that rely heavily on persecution of out groups are more likely to destroy media and historical records, and given that homosexuality is a persistent out group, there is probably a lot of queer history that’s been destroyed. Like the works of sapho have been lost and found 3 times, and I think it’s telling that her work deals with love and lust outside of social institutions.

Just by the by, this is also why I think that the women’s liberation movement really kicked off the gay rights movement. The last 100 years have seen tons of pushback from subalterns of one sort or another, and I see that as being the “moral arc of history” and all that Jazz. But we see pockets of it throughout history. Like I had a professor get mad at me once for writing an essay arguing that Diogenes was the “ earliest recorded punk rocker” lol, but I really do think it has some merit. And there is a weird connection between being the receptive partner and rebelliousness, the term punk originally had an association with being a male receptive partner.

I found your point interesting.

Achilles is still gay then? Or no? Like canonically I guess what would be your guess?

So the origins are a little more loosely Goosey, but I’ll spell out how I see it. So around a thousand years ago chattel slavery really started its decline, it took a long time though. We see the start of it’s decline with the moral philosophers of the dark ages, and really even earlier than that, the late Roman Empire did not see slavery as moral, it was just a fact of life. It would be like asking if war is moral. As less and less of the labor force was legally compelled yo work, either by being owned directly or being serfs that came packaged with the land they were on. If people aren’t legally obligated to work for you, how do you keep them working? One effective way is to control access to sex. It wasn’t just homosexuality that was less repressed, like I was saying in the other comment Roman’s did not consider having sex with a prostitute to be adultery. By disenfranchising women and making it illegal for them to own property, you put women in a situation where they have to marry. By making fornication and same sex encounters illegal, you force men to have to enter into a marriage contract to (legally) get access to sex. Burdened with dependents, you limit a man’s economic freedom of movement and his freedom in general. A man with mouths to feed is less likely to stand up for himself due to poor treatment. It’s even pretty explicit that this was the goal at points in history, there is a lot of talk about marriage being an institution meant to civilize men. Which is another way of saying “this system helps preserve the status quo.” It also keeps the population growing, which was seen as more and more imperative as industrialization ramped up and the labor potential of any able bodied man skyrocketed. We of course also see that in laws being passed against sodomy, those laws weren’t just for gay folks, it was the states way of saying “fucking is only for making babies and nothing else. You don’t get to have sex unless there is a chance of it producing offspring in a stable family environment.” It seems from a modern perspective that the repression around sex really peaked in Europe during the Victorian era, but it’s hard to tell as historical resources about gay life are often destroyed. For instance, at the same time that homosexuality was punishable by imprisonment in Europe, we have records of various “Molly houses”, which were quite a bit like modern gay bars or burlesque houses. We also have some old words that imply a more complicated situation, for instance the historical meaning of the word “Minion” is the lover of a powerful man. Powerful men were allowed things like that, so long as they fulfilled their martial duties as well. Even here in the US I’ve seen the rhetoric shift just in my life time, when I was younger you would hear a lot of talk from the political right about “family values” and “ensuring a stable society”, these days, now that gay marriage has been around for awhile and society didn’t spontaneously collapse, they seem to have switched to calling trans people pedophiles.

But the reason I think this moment is different and not just part of the cycle is the legalization of gay marriage. That’s an endorsement that these relationships are allowed in our societal setup. And I think things have been moving that direction since the sixties. Ironically, the birth control pill might have paved the way for gay acceptance. The advent of the pill meant women could have careers, and could also plan out when they were going to get pregnant. The women’s rights movement sprung out of that, and that disruption of the “men provide for women” setup created room for gay relationships to fit in.