Was homosexuality accepted in Ancient Greece, Ancient Rome, Ancient China, and/or Ancient Egypt?

by benevolentonion
bigbluepanda

I talk about homosexuality in Ancient China in bits here and there in this comment, this comment, and a bit more here. Also, I touch on the philosophy/culture of sexual relationships in China here. Foregrounding this, it's important (and this applies to any historical field, especially pre-modern, and even more so with such a fluid topic as sexuality) not to project our pre-conceived notions (or otherwise) of homosexuality when we look at how it was practiced and viewed in these periods (recent scholarship does better with this too). The short answer to your question is yes, homosexuality was accepted, embraced, however you choose to word it, in Ancient China - many ancient/middle texts talk about homosexual activity. It was widely known, and recorded, however our records are almost entirely limited to the emperors, princes, officials, and so on, and so we're not too sure if this "trickled down" to the common people (but from sources of the above comments I linked, we know of some semblance of homosexual involvements across all tiers of society). Since it seems to be one of the few sources I have on my laptop, here's a paraphrasing of the Spring-Autumn Annals cited by Fang Fu Ruan:

Qi Jing Kong, the king of Qi State [reigned 547-490 B.C.] was very beautiful, in a feminine fashion. One day, when an officer looked at him lustfully, Qi Jing Kong asked, 'Why are you looking at me that way?" The officer replied, "Because you are so very beautiful," and Qi Jing Kong said, "If you have sex with the king, you will receive the death penalty." Master Yen, the premier, told the king that it was not right to reject sexual desire, and not good to reject love. "The officer's desire for you is not a crime deserving the death penalty." The king responded by allowing the officer to embrace him as he was bathing.

Then, accounts pop up here and there over the period of time, all the way throughout the succeeding dynasties, all the way through the Ming and Qing.

TLDR Yes.

frtzer

This was supposed to be a reply to the removed comment claiming that anal sex did not happen in ancient greece:

You are right in that the act of being penetrated was associated with passivity and as such was not the ideal of the free male. However categorically saying there was no anal sex is definetly not right, there are tons of very explicit depictions of the act and we have no reason to assume that slaves were not penetrated. Even among free men and between men and boys the relationship was more complicated and we cant assume there was no penetration, but yes, if there was it would have been considered a "favor" or a "giving in" by the receiving part.
Besides that the label of homosexuality is sort of difficult to apply to antiquity. It implies attraction to the same sex (only), but gender simply wasn't the relevant decisive factor for people in antiquity. There was pleasure to be gained from all sorts of relationships, depending not so much on the gender of the partner but simply on whether or not he was considered "beautiful". Relationships between two males, typically a younger and an older male were definetly accepted and an integral part of the social dynamic of the ancient greek society regulated by a clear moral codex.

We find mention of those relationships basically all throughout the classic literature e.g. Aristophanes plays (often times mocking the men behaving madly because of their lvoe for some beautiful young boy or Platos dialogues, especially the Phaidros and the Symposiom where Plato implicitly mocks the typical dynamic of those relationships, namely that young men are of interest only for a short amount of time, and once they are too old the lover loses his interest and abandons him. Socrates is not interested mainly in the body of the young males but in their soul.

Source: Foucault- The History of sexuality, Vol.2: THe use of pleasure