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Posted 5/22/01
This really isn't a personal story, but I think it's important enough to list it here. For those who are interested in the Greeks and their gay practices, I urge you to read the second response to the Cockster's CocktoCock: the response came from Bill. What Bill doesn't say in his response is this: YES the Greeks practiced gay sex, but, contrary to the dominating buttfuckers, they did NOT practice anal sex. The older man who took a younger man, an EPHEBE under his protection, had sex with the teenager. But it consisted of the man placing his cock between the thighs of the youth and rubbing to climax. The Greeks were frotters, and we can tell our buttfuck friends that the ancients are OUR heroes, and certainly not theirs. In fact, men who fucked their boys in the ass were outcasts from civil society. John
reply from bill
YES YES YES WARRIOR JOHN
thank you for your post
one of the really beautiful things that's happening in the club is that more and more people are feeling free to speak the simple truth about frot and homosex
so, for example, both Warrior Stockpeck in Erotic Wrestling is Best and Warrior RubMeRight in Long Live Frottage are openly critical of anal -- they're talking openly about the many problems inherent in buttfucking
similary, now we have Warrior John (who also wrote The Book of Cockrub) coming forward and telling the truth about the ancient Greeks
i started to do that in a reply to Warrior Andrew's The Wrestling Way to Cockrubbing -- and i've included some of what i said there here as well
but Warrior John is going all the way with it -- and just telling the truth -- for the warrior Greeks, frot was the form of sex that was socially-sanctioned -- these were people who prized reason and freedom, and they weren't supposed to do anal
i don't think that's a big surprise
and it's clear from many of the vase paintings that they didn't just do cock between thighs -- they did cockrubbing too -- you can see it by the body positions -- they're face to face, and their cocks have to be touching
rubbing hard i would say
cause who were they? these were adult warriors and teen warriors-in-training -- in peak physical condition -- who spent their afternoons wrestling nude at wrestling schools called palestrae -- all part of a society that celebrated homosex in art, literature, philosophy, and poetry
why? because in large part because they believed that warriors who were erotically bonded made the best fighting men
sounds weird doesn't it? our dumbass puritan military leaders, who seem to be terrified of actually committing their troops to battle, believe that homosex destroys morale.
the greeks, who fought incessantly, knew that homosex strengthened morale -- so much so, that before battle they most often prayed to Eros, the winged adolescent-boy-god of male-male love
and look at what they accomplished: in just four battles the Greek Alliance repulsed the Persians, the mightiest empire in the world; the Spartans, whose system of warrior-training was designed to produce the fiercest sort of m2m erotic bond, were undeated for 200 years; when the Spartan line was finally broken, it was by the Sacred Band of Thebes, another military unit of same-sex lovers; and under Alexander the Great, the combined Greek and Macedonian armies took all of the Middle East, Egypt, Persia, Arabia, and a big slice of India
these were warriors raised on wrestling and frot, many of them involved in passionate m2m romances
i'll have a lot more to say about this in Heroic Homosex
in the meantime, here's part of what i said in my response to Warrior Andrew64's The Wrestling Way to Cockrubbing:
It's clear that the peoples of the ancient Mediterranean world understood very well the relationship between homosex and wrestling and cockrub. It's implicit in Gilgamesh, but it was the Greeks who institutionalized it. Every Greek city state had a palestra, a wrestling school, where, in the afternoons, men and youths would meet to socialize, wrestle nude, and look for lovers. As a matter of fact, Plato sets one of his great dialogues about love, Lysis, in a palestra, and not just the palestra, but in the Apodyterium, the "undressing" (or what we would call locker) room, where he describes the young Lysis, who's been watching a game of dice, as "a fair vision, not less worthy of praise for his goodness than for his beauty."
Sweet, huh?
The Greeks were quite clear that wrestling nude would lead to eroticism between males, and that the preferred form of that eroticism should be frottage. Scholars have long assumed that the Greeks only paid lip service to frottage, and that in private they were into anal, even though there's very little evidence for that. I always assumed those scholars were right, until Warrior Patrick said to me, in one his emails, "I've always found that combat and frot are pretty closely tied together... And I've never found a fighter who didn't like to frot."
That got me thinking, cause it was coming not from some academic sitting in an ivory tower, but from a boxer. And I began thinking about other emails I've received that I can't make public, like one from a pro-wrestler who told me there's a big but secret wrestling-frot scene among wrestlers and bodybuilders. Or another from an Olympic wrestler for a foreign nation, talking about his own devotion to frot.
And it occurred to me, literally for the first time, that maybe we should start listening to what the Greeks themselves said, that frottage was the preferred form of m2m sex among these wrestling warriors.
Because we all know - Patrick knows and Andrew64 knows and Missouri knows and cumbat1 knows and I know and a lot more of us know - that nude combat leads to cockrub and dick2dick.
So it's certainly worth thinking about. And that's the beauty of a post like Andrew64's, that not only is it a strong and unapologetic statement, but it gives us so much to think about as well.
The image of Greek wrestlers that appears throughout the site comes from the base of a statue of a naked teenager, a kouros (to see a kouros, visit Plato's Cave). There were thousands of kouroi in Athens, and most had these nude athletes at their base.
To the Greeks, as to Warriors Andrew64 and Patrick and tens of thousand of others of us, this wasn't just an athletic image. It was erotic as well.
Two follow-up posts:
Re: Greeks and sex
3-12-2002
First of all, I would like to congratulate you on your site. I am really delighted that I have found a place to read, write and come across the stuff that I really like. I am Greek and I live in Athens for all of my life. I think that you have a very right aspect of our ancient history, as far as male bonding is concerned. However, we have to underline that these ancient Greeks were not gay. They all had to have a male partner, with whom no anal sex was taking place. And being straight myself, I believe that their blood is still running into my veins, making me a happier person, since I have realized that I can be that close with my best friend, enjoying things that our girlfriends cannot....
Keep on doing the best work.
See ya around,
Nikos, Athens
Profile:
I am a Greek 24 yrs old str8 guy, into cockrub, frot, and wrestling, strictly with str8 guys.
Re: Greeks and sex
3-12-2002
This is a really interesting post and I thank Nikos for making it.
Of course Nikos is right -- the ancient Greeks were not gay -- not in our sense of the word.
But they weren't straight either.
They quite rightly didn't divide humanity into those two groups, since that division is artificial and false.
Instead they were what we would call bisexual, which to them was simply normal.
In the archaic and classical periods (776-323 BCE), it appears that though there may have been minor variations among the various city states (of which there were more than one thousand), starting in their early teens, virtually all Greek men had love affairs with other men, usually but not always pederastic, and these love affairs could continue into adulthood.
In addition, most Greek men married, sometimes at a relatively late age -- 30 in Sparta -- and of course could have sex with women outside of marriage.
But the literary and historical record is clear that prior to the Hellenistic era (which started in 323 BCE), love affairs -- passionate romances -- were almost exclusively restricted to people of the same sex.
And it's possible that some people were exclusively homosexual throughout their lives.
For example, there's no record of Plato having a wife. And Aristotle refers to a lifelong relationship between Diocles, an Olympic athlete, and Philolaus, a Theban lawgiver, with no mention of wives.
But most men would have been in an arranged marriage and had love affairs with men.
That's why the artist Tava once said of the ancient world that men had sex with men for pleasure, and with women for procreation.
That doesn't mean that men didn't enjoy sex with women. But it does mean that ancient authors agreed that erotic friendships between men were the highest expression of love.
And the most passionate.
I'll be saying a great deal more about this in subsequent chapters of The Greeks.
Once again Nikos is right that Greek men of that era were not supposed to have anal sex. No warrior culture wants its fighters effeminized in that way, and again as I'll be writing about, being a citizen soldier was the single most important act of any ancient Greek's life.
So what's interesting is that in the last 25 years we've created, in our own culture, an artificial division of humanity into gay and straight.
Gay men are thought to be promiscuous, effeminate, and into anal. And any man who has sex with another man is thought to be gay.
Now read Nikos' self-description in his member profile:
"I am a Greek 24 yrs old str8 guy, into cockrub, frot, and wrestling, strictly with str8 guys."
Nowadays if someone asks me if I'm gay, my response is, "I'm into guys, but I don't use the word "gay" cause I'm masculine, not into anal, not promiscuous, don't like drag, and just generally not into the gay scene."
That's about the only way I can answer. Cause if I say I'm gay, the next question will probably be "are you a top or a bottom?" So I have to heavily qualify the answer. For the simple reason that to say "yes, I'm gay," would mislead.
And Nikos has done something similar in his self-description -- he's said, like the ancient Greeks, I'm a guy into cockrub frot and wrestling with other guys.
Just like me, Bradwrestle, Andrew64, Stockpeck, and so on and so on.
That's why I've started saying, this isn't about gays, it's about guys.
And I wouldn't have said that a year ago. That formulation is a result of interactions here in the club.
So we're at a point where roles are being redefined, and I'm hopeful that this time around we'll get closer to the basic human reality of bisexuality.
Which will free men like Nikos to do what he just did: say I'm a str8 guy into wrestling and rubbing cocks with other guys.
Related post:
Sex Between Men: An Activity, Not a Condition
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