Ancient greek gay sex art
![ancient greek gay sex art ancient greek gay sex art](https://i.pinimg.com/550x/5b/56/4b/5b564b5b04f4152e58dc87b8b5ab1cf3.jpg)
Democracy was another invention of the Greeks, and the two men they honored for its introduction were Harmodios and Aristogiton, a gay couple. Male love was a cornerstone of the culture that created theater, philosophy, mathematics, history, and other arts and sciences. The customs and ethics of male love were encoded in Greek mythology. The main difference was that the “gay marriage” could only take place with the beloved’s consent, while the girl was told by her father whom to marry and had to obey. Grown men sought teenage lovers, just as they married teenage wives. In Ancient Greece love between males was styled along the same lines as the marriage customs. And they usually understood that boy children were excluded from the game of sex, to the same degree that they understood that girl children were excluded as well. They recognized that – married or not – men fell in love with men or youths, dreamt about them, wrote about them, fought over them, and took them to bed. From the city states of ancient Greece, and Rome with its emperors (Trajan and Hadrian among others), to the Siberian shamans and Native American two-spirit medicine men, from African kings and tribesmen to Chinese emperors and scholars, people the world over understood and made space for men’s sensitivity to the beauty of other males. Normally, male love is part of the social fabric. Only a few have tried to deny it, repress it, and cover it up. Most cultures have regulated male love, integrating it by means of customs and traditions. Only society’s attitude towards it has varied. Uncensored, the historical record reveals just the opposite: the male love instinct is universal. The result of this fraud has been a needless polarization of society and suffering for those people who happen to fall in love with others of their own sex.
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Evidence of same-sex love has been either quietly suppressed, as with the ancient Greeks and Romans, and modern figures of all kinds, or quickly destroyed, as is still done with newly unearthed Inca and Mayan art. Looking at any history textbook, one would think that never has a society praised love between men, never has a painter, a poet or a pope shared his bed and his heart with another male. They choose what will be remembered, and what covered up.