Greek love: classical

The ancient Greeks viewed same‐sex eroticism between adult men and teenaged young men as normal and, within certain limitations, admirable. This fact does not indicate a broad acceptance of “homosexuality” in ancient Greece, but rather an entirely different discursive organization of erotic desire from that of the modern West. The Greek valorization of same‐sex sexual activity was idealized by later European cultures, and used by those cultures to explain and justify same‐sex eroticism in the face of legal and social suppression of the same.