Homosexuality was fine, then during the Victorian era it was considered worse than murder. During the 17th century people would have had sex in rooms with children present, whereas Victorians wouldn't even want to look at each other naked even when married. These days you're bigoted for being against homosexuality. What exactly is the reason for these changes? Why were the Victorians so different to previous time periods? Surely if they were told it was okay and natural, that would continue would it not?
Part I: Morality and the Victorian Family
Someone else with expertise in that area will have to address the Ancient Greek side of things, but I can tackle the Victorians. Your question is based on a common misconception about the Victorian period, so I’m going to spend some time debunking that misconception and then try to explain why perfectly reasonable people believe it.
The Victorian period did not represent a sudden rupture from the past with regards to sexuality. Same sex desire and homosexuality and sex outside of marriage were taboo to differing degrees in different times and places in Western culture for centuries. The Victorians did not just up and decide that sex was bad outside of nowhere.
However, this is not to say that the Victorians didn’t differ from the generations immediately preceding them in some ways. One important development of the Victorian period was its heavy emphasis on domesticity. For the Victorians, the home and the family were paramount, the basis of the superior British civilization. The home was an oasis protected from the harsh outside world, a place of comfort where you can rest with your loved ones. Note that this ideal of the home and the family is not so different from how we as a culture think of homes and families today. However, for the Victorians, this idea of the home carried with it a hierarchy, with the husband and father as the head of house, the wife and mother as caretaker of the home (the "Angel in the House," as one famous poem called it), both working to bring up well-adjusted, successful children.
Of course, people before the Victorians had homes and families and valued these things highly. The Victorians didn’t invent the family. What shifted was the importance of the family as a social category that needed to be protected and conceptions of public vs private life. On one hand, the nineteenth century saw, for respectable middle class people, the home was a private sphere, secluded from the world and with significantly more privacy within the home than had been available in previous centuries. Privacy has its own earlier history and development that other users can speak to better than me; for our purposes it’s enough to say that the domestic sphere was supposed to be private.
I say this with the caveat that I’m describing middle class people here; the working classes often lived in very different conditions. This cult of domesticity was very much a phenomenon of the middle class, who set themselves up as the upright, respectable contrast to the stereotypical image of the profligate and licentious aristocrat that had been promoted in late eighteenth and early nineteenth century as the rake or the libertine.
However, there is a contradiction in the Victorian family in that domesticity was also often the subject of public performance. We can argue that this phenomenon is reflected best at the top of society with Queen Victoria herself. Victoria navigated the contradiction of being a woman monarch. Women are supposed to be the Angel in the House, master of the private sphere, not involved in public life. To reconcile this, Victoria made a public performance of being the nation's exemplary mother—utterly devoted to her husband and many, many children. Victoria and Albert were a model of Victorian domestic life, but this model was also very publicly performed.
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u/PreRaphaeliteHair gave a really excellent answer--one thing that I would add is that the Victorian era was a significant social and historical sea change, and so the stereotypes about it do seem to made sense in some ways. At the beginning of the 1800s, London was completely different than what it would be 100 years later. By 1900, there were:
Along with the communication and transport advances, there was massive social upheaval as well. The industrial revolution saw millions of young women and men in the country leave their families and move to cities. Inevitably, major social changes like that can prompt "panic" about norms and gender roles, just as Queen Victoria understood very well about her own role.
More importantly, I would urge a reader to remember that these "stuffy" Victorian ideas about sexuality, etc., were very much a part of middle/upper middle class life. Resist the urge to paint everything with a broad brush--to wit, here's a passage describing the lives of pitmen and their families in Northern England:
The houses were 16 feet by 16, all one room, except that the fourpost bed served as bed and bedroom too, and that there was a window in the roof loft which made it into a sort of children's bedroom. ...The whole colony of about 600 people, pitmen and their families, had not a single privy among them...In the walls opposite the house-fronts bays or recesses are sunk a little below the usual level, and these are made, alternately, coal stores and cesspools. The women and children dung into pots, which are emptied into these bays, the men dunging away from the home, valuing their dung and depositing it in the garden if they have one.
*From Dr. Hunter's Inquiry into the state of the Dwellings of Rural Labourers Durham and Northumberland; 7th Report of Medical Officer of the Privy Council, Appendix 6 (1864), pp. 180-186; P.P. 1865, vol. 26.
I doubt anyone living in those places had very prim ideas about bodies, sex, or privacy. For millions of Victorians, notions about privacy, virginity, cleanliness, and defined gender roles were about as real as unicorns. All this to say, the Victorian era is not a monolith of culture. It had just as much brutality, violence, and licentiousness as another other time. Therefore, to think of the Victorian era as a prim and proper time is just as inaccurate as thinking that in 2018, everyone is internet famous. Yes, certain conditions may be true for some, but it also ignores the reality for many, many others.