Ancient greek gay sex art
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Davidson’s book argues convincingly that in ancient Greece, at least, socially accepted relationships between men actually worked to create greater cohesiveness within the city-state. Opponents of gay marriage often express concern that legalizing such relationships will somehow damage our communities. Instead, history can usefully complicate contemporary assumptions. Sweeping claims about the social impact of sexual arrangements should be made with caution, too. These ceremonies were a way of forming public same-sex bonds and of conferring a public blessing on the most attractive youngsters in a generation. The boys who were chosen in this way were treated as special thereafter and won the dangerous honor of serving in the front lines in battle. This seems to have been something that happened not to every reasonably attractive boy but only to the very cutest. There was a ceremony that Davidson identifies as a form of gay marriage, involving carefully choreographed, public “abductions” of pretty male teenagers by their male lovers. Cretan rituals were equally strange, from an Athenian perspective. Apparently the lover was supposed to relieve himself only by rubbing against the boy’s cloak: The cloak had to remain on at all times, as a sort of all-body condom. In Sparta, for instance, a curious kind of sex seems to have been the custom between well-behaved men and chaste teenage boys.
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The assumption was that men grow less crazy for boys as they approach middle age, and that boys would remain attractive to men only until their first beard began to grow-perhaps at around 20, since adolescence came later for ancient people.Īthenians, in turn, were puzzled by the sexual practices of other Greek societies. (The amazing thing about Socrates’ sex life, according to Plato’s Symposium, was not that he fancied the gorgeous Alcibiades but that he resisted having sex with him, even when snuggling under the same blanket.) Long-term same-sex partnerships did exist (for instance between the tragic poet Agathon and his lover Pausanias), but these seem to have been rare and less socially accepted. Of course, many men continued to be interested in “boys” even after marriage happily married poet Sophocles and unhappily married philosopher Socrates both flirted with young men at drinking parties and caused no scandal in doing so. Upper-class Athenian men usually got married at around 30, often to a much younger girl. As Davidson portrays it, same-sex relationships-which seem to have generally taken place between youths in their late teens and young men in their early 20s-were an important part of a boy’s journey to manhood. He argues, more vigorously than other historians have done, that the Athenians themselves were very much concerned to mark the distinction between those who were underage (i.e., under 18) and those who were not. Opponents of gay marriage argue that it threatens the “traditional” (i.e., historical?) family, while defenders-like Speaker of the California Assembly Karen Bass-often look to the “tide of history” to overturn the ban.ĭavidson emphasizes that we should not think of these relationships in terms of child abuse. Since history is so often invoked, either implicitly or explicitly, on both sides of the debate, now is a particularly good time to look back at the history of same-sex relationships. * The ban is based on the idea that there is-or should be-something fundamentally different about sexual and romantic relationships between people of the same sex and those between a man and a woman. On May 26, California judges upheld a constitutional amendment banning same-sex marriages in the state-one year after a court decision that had made such unions legal. states have also legalized gay marriages, although one, California, has just backtracked. The Netherlands was the first modern nation to legalize marriage proper for gay people, in 2001. Many countries allow same-sex couples the right to a “civil union” but withhold from them the name of marriage. The status of same-sex relationships is a central problem for modern Westernized societies.