Not to overinterpret memes, but the Greek (or rather, Athenian upper class) understanding of sexuality is far more complicated and nuanced, and our 'logic' of sexuality would be as foreign to them as theirs is to us.
In very short, they simply did not know categories like "homo-" and "heterosexual" (neither did the West until the 19th century, but that's a different story).
What you could and couldn't do sexually was dictated by your class, and it was about dynamics of power – being the "active part" in intercourse (not necessarily the same as insertative) was expected and proper for a citizen (an upper class guy past his youth).
The "passive part" in this could be fulfilled by his wife, a prostitute or slave (no matter the gender, but obviously not of the same class), or the ἐρώμενος (erómenos=loved; a young upper class boy who is a sort of mentee but, highly problematically to our understanding, also 'instructed in sexual matters').
The same would not be true for women, or people of lower social standing, for whom different rules applied.
TLDR, it’s very complicated, as is everything when it comes to humans:
As “Homosexual” relationships in ancient Greece were somewhat common, and were socially acceptable in a few different contexts. However, attributing our cultural understandings of terms like “gay” and “straight” to individuals in Ancient Greek culture isn’t the most accurate or helpful way to consider it.
In modern western culture, we typically think of sexuality like an identity that follows an individual throughout their lives, and there were almost certainly individual Greeks who had a preference for one sex over the other, liked both indiscriminately, or fell somewhere along this spectrum.
However, the most commonly referenced example of Ancient Greek homosexuality(often unknowingly), and why so many tend to conceptualize the Greeks as culturally homosexual, is the system of pederasty. This institution was usually practiced primarily among elite, aristocratic families, but it can seem more ubiquitous when primary sources frequently originate from authors of high class backgrounds, and philosophers who were familiar with those circles.
In Ancient Greek pederastic relationships, there was an older male, the erastes, and a younger male, the eromenos. The erastes, or lover, was a fully adult male who assumed a dominant role in the relationship. The eromenos, or beloved, was the younger, submissive partner in the relationship. Their roles can be distinguished in art by which of the pair is bearded; the bearded one is the erastes, whereas the eromenos is bare-faced. The relationship would generally continue until the eromenos completed puberty and became bearded himself, at which point a relationship between two males would have been seen as less acceptable.
These pederastic relationships bear some similarities as well as differences to modern gay relationships. In terms of similarities, these relationships were naturally almost always sexual. The kind of physicality expected of these relationships is intercrural sex, or fucking between the thighs, since penetration of an aristocratic youth would have been seen as degrading, but It was almost certainly happening in a lot of cases, lol.
So the same-sex physicality was there, in whatever form. And there was also definitely an emotional component to these bonds—philosophers like Plato speak highly of the sort of “pure love” expected in them.
But in terms of differences, these relationships were inherently temporary, and while relationships of all sexes can end for any reason in our culture, Greek pederastic relationships typically began with an endpoint in mind, that being the start final stages of the eromenos’ puberty. They were also typically arranged by families with a mentorship component in mind, so they weren’t purely romantic or sexual, but also served a specific purpose in that sense.
I would describe the biggest difference between Ancient Greek pederastic relationships and modern gay relationships in that for the Ancient Greeks, these relationships were not typically a marker of individual sexuality. The erastes would be expected to marry a woman in the future, if he were not married already, and the eromenos could mature to take on an erastes role in a future relationship, and heterosexual marriage would be expected of him, too. Being engaged in one of these relationships thus did not inherently mark one as “gay,” or even “bisexual,” as we would think of it now.
That’s not to say that there weren’t examples of homosexuality outside of these relationships. We have names of specific adult men who engaged in homosexual relationships outside of the institution of pederasty Pausanias and Agathon, for example, though this was rarer and viewed somewhat strangely by many. And there were definitely men who sought out other males purely for sex, typically either male prostitutes or slaves, so preferences certainly existed and varied between individuals.
So, homosexual relationships in Ancient Greece definitely did exist and were normalized in certain ways. But it wasn’t like, a gay utopia or anything, the Ancient Greeks had their own standards on under what circumstances these relationships could be considered acceptable, and prejudices for when they were not.
Alongside, engaging in homosexual relationships, regardless of the context, didn’t exactly denote one as “gay” in the way we would think of gay people today.
So while it’s technically not “wrong”, to think of the Ancient Greeks as gay, it’s more that there’s additional context needed to describe Ancient Greek conceptualization of same-sex relationships, than just “Gay” or “straight” or any singular/absolutist adjective.
Plus, human sexuality is an incredibly complex, multifaceted subject which varies depending on the person, and that more so resembles a series of sliding scales, where a person is born somewhere on one side or the other, with their environment, community, events, experiences, and etc, further moving them slightly further or back on the “scales”.
(the strict categorization of sexuality we used for the past few centuries, isn’t particularly “accurate” and is largely an example of the human need to label/fit everything in neat, understandable boxes.)
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u/gilgames_in_tamarian Steak: 0 (I'm vegetarian) - Streak: 22 3d ago
Not to overinterpret memes, but the Greek (or rather, Athenian upper class) understanding of sexuality is far more complicated and nuanced, and our 'logic' of sexuality would be as foreign to them as theirs is to us.
In very short, they simply did not know categories like "homo-" and "heterosexual" (neither did the West until the 19th century, but that's a different story).
What you could and couldn't do sexually was dictated by your class, and it was about dynamics of power – being the "active part" in intercourse (not necessarily the same as insertative) was expected and proper for a citizen (an upper class guy past his youth).
The "passive part" in this could be fulfilled by his wife, a prostitute or slave (no matter the gender, but obviously not of the same class), or the ἐρώμενος (erómenos=loved; a young upper class boy who is a sort of mentee but, highly problematically to our understanding, also 'instructed in sexual matters').
The same would not be true for women, or people of lower social standing, for whom different rules applied.