[Gay] Lesbians parents better at raising children

[Malthus]

Having said that there's a book on Greek sexuality I want to buy because I hope it'll answer whether we know anything about the sexuality of the vast majority of the Greeks.  My understanding is that most of what we know about the gay stuff and much of Greek society comes from what was effectively a wealthy upper class.  As Britain's history demonstrates it's perfectly possible to have a society in which the upper class are a bunch of buggers while the lower and middle classes are puritanly missionary in their sexual attitudes.  Perhaps it's impossible to know about it because a lot of what we know about the less-favoured classes of Greek society come from archaeology, like pot shards, from which it's difficult to try and work out a whole society.

Uhum, this is pretty much my take on it as well. In any case, any society or social class where arranged marriages are a norm would, imo, have a higher tolerance for extra-marital sexual relationships, at least when engaged in by men (women for obvious reasons would be still ostracized for being adulterous).

The historical uniqueness of our society, when it comes to sexuality, imo, is less connected to the tolerance for homosexual sex, but more to the concept of non-heterosexual identity being central to one's marital relations - I think most societies tolerated buggery to a certain (if varying degree), especially if engaged in by upper classes. We are however unique in tolerating people who identify as homosexual to the exclusion of "normal" heterosexual marriage.

That is why I also think the term "gay" is inapplicable to anything before the 20th century.

I dunno if the upper class Greek attitude towards buggery can be classified like the upper class English attitude of tolerance for a bit of decadence. Alexander the Great was not Oscar Wilde in armor. 

The Greek attitude seems (if Plato and the like can be believed) to have been based on an extreme level of casual mysogeny, to the point where, for some, relations with women were simply not on a level of equality suitable for profound emotions - they were okay for household drudgery and having babies, but for a real relationships, one must look to other men, and not simply in a sexual manner - either as comerades in arms, like Alexander and Hephastion, or in a master-tutor type relationship. 

This is part of why I think sexuality is at least in part more malliable than immutable; if you grow up in a culture that values love between men (and scorns women) as a higher and more philosophic type, your attitudes, and prerhaps your orientations, are going to be very different than if you grow up in one in which love between men is "the love that dare not speak its name", associated with decadence and degeneracy even if "tolerated", etc. Nature clearly plays its part or very few would ever be gay where it is strongly disapproved (who *wants* to be considered a "degenerate" and persecuted?); nurture plays its part as well, or homosexual-type behaviours would never be any more prevelant than now.