This was certainly the attitude of ancient Greece, to a first approximation anyway (they didn’t even have a social category for gay relationships between two men of equal status).
This is the way it was in Japan and China, and seems to be the societal default. Male-male relationships were typically between older and younger men, with some between two young men.
Given how fashionable it is in certain parts of academia to retroactively declare historical people gay, I’d take this claim with a grain of salt.
Which claim? The evidence for existence of socially acceptable sexual relationships between men seems as good for ancient China and Japan as it is for ancient Greece.
(Agreed that individual claims of sexuality- was Buchanan gay, or just asexual?- are dubious, because it’s hard to get anything more definite than a “maybe,” but it’s much easier to be confident about aggregates: at least some of the historical figures suspected to be gay were gay.)
I’ve heard one suggestion that it might not even make sense to talk about people in societies with different sexual morals, such as the ancient Greeks or the Chinese and Japanese in these examples, as being “gay” or “straight” in the sense that modern Western countries talk about it. They certainly didn’t see themselves that way. It’s clear from examples like pederasty that cultural values have a lot of impact not only on how people act sexually, but on how they conceive of sexuality.
On the other hand, it’s clear from the existence of “homosexuality” even amidst Christian moral values that humans also have innate tendencies on this that differ from person to person for some reason.
But I’m not sure if we really know enough to say what those innate tendencies are like on a statistical level; we don’t have any large data on a society with minimal enough influence on both sexual mores and the conception of sexuality that we can see how humans act as a result.
Maybe studying a large number of hunter-gatherer societies would give us something similar; they’d all have societies with specific conceptions of sexual morals, but we’d avoid most arbitrary distinctions and get at some things that actually relate to natural human tendencies, even if they aren’t the pure expression of them.
This is the way it was in Japan and China, and seems to be the societal default. Male-male relationships were typically between older and younger men, with some between two young men.
Which claim? The evidence for existence of socially acceptable sexual relationships between men seems as good for ancient China and Japan as it is for ancient Greece.
(Agreed that individual claims of sexuality- was Buchanan gay, or just asexual?- are dubious, because it’s hard to get anything more definite than a “maybe,” but it’s much easier to be confident about aggregates: at least some of the historical figures suspected to be gay were gay.)
I’ve heard one suggestion that it might not even make sense to talk about people in societies with different sexual morals, such as the ancient Greeks or the Chinese and Japanese in these examples, as being “gay” or “straight” in the sense that modern Western countries talk about it. They certainly didn’t see themselves that way. It’s clear from examples like pederasty that cultural values have a lot of impact not only on how people act sexually, but on how they conceive of sexuality.
On the other hand, it’s clear from the existence of “homosexuality” even amidst Christian moral values that humans also have innate tendencies on this that differ from person to person for some reason. But I’m not sure if we really know enough to say what those innate tendencies are like on a statistical level; we don’t have any large data on a society with minimal enough influence on both sexual mores and the conception of sexuality that we can see how humans act as a result. Maybe studying a large number of hunter-gatherer societies would give us something similar; they’d all have societies with specific conceptions of sexual morals, but we’d avoid most arbitrary distinctions and get at some things that actually relate to natural human tendencies, even if they aren’t the pure expression of them.