The Sacred Band, ancient sexuality, and depths of male friendship

What a mess of a thread & replies. Everyone talking past each other. I want to try essentially steelmanning what I understand the main thread to be saying. Note that I'm a very different guy than this guy, and I'll be saying what seems true *from my perspective* t.co/K989HesPVs

Jun 23, 2021

The men in the Sacred Band of Thebes were definitely fucking. In fact, they were all pairs of lovers of some kind. This is not in dispute, including by the guy writing the thread! He wrote here about ancient greek male power+sex relationships patheos.com/blogs/inebriat…

Those pederasty relationships were very different from contemporary "sexual orientation" and romantic homosexual relationships. Most of those men also had wives. The entire cultural concepts of sex & love (and who had the right to do it) were profoundly different.

(As an aside, wikipedia suggests these relationships almost never had anal sex, which was considered shameful, but mostly had "intercrural sex" which is a fancy way of saying "fucking between someone's thighs". Idk if gay men do this today but if so I've never heard of it.)

Thus, the mapping of "homosexuality" onto erastes-eromenos relationships is misleading, very similar to how mapping modern western romantic marriage concepts onto pre-romance marriage concepts or arranged marriages or whatever hunter-gatherers do is misleading.

In parallel to this, there's also a phenomena we might call friendship. Friendship is fucking cool. And it can go way deeper than many people ever have the chance to experience, unfortunately. And surely it has also evolved in many ways over the millenia of human culture.

There are depths of friendship that most people don't experience because they assume that intimacy necessarily involves sexual or romantic elements. This means if one or both people don't want a sexual or romantic relationship, they can't have intimate friendship.

Hence the classic maxim "men & women can't be Just Friends". In practice, this is often true, but it's not inevitable, it's a result of the same assumptions that keep men from being close friends because they don't want to be or seem gay. (There are other factors too)

I've had multiple very close male friendships in my life, including my childhood best friend—when I wanted to go to a boarding school, he chose to go too, because it would have been too painful to both of us to part. I've said "I love you" to >5 male friends in the last 2y.

Here's where I really diverge from the other guy's thread. I'm mostly straight, but not entirely. So I can say: I've had lots of close intimate friendships with men and they all feel totally different from the homoerotic spark I've *also* felt a few times with *other* men.