Heroic Homosex - The Greeks is my take on Greek homosex and Greek history. I wrote it primarily for the guys in this club, and other m2m guys, who feel out of place cause they're into frot, and maybe like some fightin too, and cause they're masculine, and consequently have a hard time fitting in to the "gay" male world.

So I wrote it so that guys could see that there are alternatives, cross-cultural and historical alternatives that can guide us to a way of life that was and will be again far better than the one we currently know.

Though I cite original sources and scholarly texts, the views in Heroic Homosex are my own, based on my own interpretation of the documents and images I'll be presenting to you.

Some of my views are mainstream, and some of them, while not necessarily radical, push the envelope in terms of how most contemporary scholars see the Greeks.

As many of you know, I believe very strongly that to survive, men like ourselves need to go beyond the dominant paradigm, that is, the dominant cultural model, whether that model is heterosexuality or anal sex.

That concept - that there's a dominant paradigm and that one needs to identify it and then look beyond it - is based on the work of a famous historian of science named Thomas Kuhn.

Kuhn, like other historians of ideas, understood a somewhat disconcerting fact: that almost everything everyone has believed throughout history, we now believe to be wrong. So he recognized that it's in the very nature of ideas and cultures that they shift and change.

He applied that thinking to the history of science and came to conclusions that have been embraced by some in the natural sciences and by almost all in the social sciences. For it was Kuhn who introduced the now common notion of paradigm as an accepted set of principles by which the world is viewed, and which silences or otherwise excommunicates dissenters. And when a paradigm shifts, said Kuhn, when, for example, the earth is no longer seen as the center of the universe, old notions of truth are discarded and new ones take their place.

Kuhn also argued, by the way, that new paradigms are no more valid than the old; they just turn out to be more useful. An interesting idea, but one that most natural scientists reject.

But not social scientists. Virtually all social scientists today see the world and culture in relative terms - to the extent that we are multiculturalists and cultural relativists, we are all students of Kuhn.

So although Kuhn's work, in certain respects, was and remains controversial, I agree with him that when we look at a people like the Greeks, for whom we have spotty documentation, we have always to go beyond the dominant paradigm, or, as Warrior Chuck Tarver would say, to think outside the box.

That's what Cockrub Warriors and Heroic Homosex is about - thinking outside the box. If we didn't do that, we'd all be getting fucked up the ass and worrying about what drugs to take at our next circuit party.

That's pretty much what mainstream gay male life is about. But it's not what our lives are about.

Twenty years ago a guy named David Winnie Hayes said, in a letter to the NYC gay paper that my lover then edited, that "The Sacred Band of Thebes was not known for casseroles and folded napkins nor did the priests of Apollo create a leper colony of sexually transmitted diseases... It is difficult to know at this time what it might mean to be gay. We have been bent out of shape by centuries of persecution and our true profile is only beginning to re-emerge. This process is one of the great adventures of our time and we are all invited to participate in it - to be responsible to it and to each other."

David was right. Our true profile is only beginning to re-emerge. That's what Heroic Homosex is about.

This is what I believe about the Greeks:

1. they had an ideal and a practice of homosex that was masculine, martial, and monogamous

2. they played and fought nude much of the time - nude athletics, nudity in war - not on a whim, but as an expression of natural male sex aggression that was central to their culture

3. they had myths and rituals similar to those in a great many other warrior and m2m cultures that honored masculinity in all its aspects and that were designed to move adolescents into the adult, m2m world, while defining the role of men in that world

4. they were into frot, not anal - they very carefully constructed their sexual culture so that frot was at its erotic center, and so that the adolescent's first experience of m2m was cock2cock, dick2dick

5. and that experience then shaped the rest of their consciousness of male-to-male eroticism

I will be quoting from documents and showing you literally hundreds of images from Greek Heroic Homosex - a world built upon phallus and the beauty of men.

Am I choosing those images selectively? No more than the Greeks themselves. What most scholars do, in point of fact, when talking about the Greeks, is attempt to "balance" their presentation by juxtaposing heterosexual images with nude male homosexual ones, to make it seem as though the world of the Greeks was closer to that of our own, with just a little homosex thrown in for spice and variety.

But that's deeply misleading. Because the number of images from ancient Greece of nude youths and men vastly outweigh those of women or even clothed males, just as the weight given male-male romance by the Greeks is far greater than that they give to heterosexual love affairs.

Greek society honored phallus and celebrated the erotic bonds between men - that's accurate, and that's what you'll see.

Back when David Winnie Hayes wrote his letter, the Gay Lib artist and muralist named Tava said, in a letter to the same paper, that his work commemorated a time when men had sex with men for pleasure, and with women for procreation.

An overstatement? Perhaps. But when we look at the realities of Greek life, what we see is men passionately pursuing other men. Not women. It's rare, among the archaic or classical Greeks, to hear of passion for a woman as motivator.

So in Heroic Homosex -- The Greeks we'll examine a culture that focused the attention of men on other males as love objects, that provided rules for how that love would be expressed, and that celebrated the passions that were thus aroused.

And we'll see that those attributes taken together created a world of incredible strength, beauty, and innovation.

AND

bill

Note: In order to keep files a reasonable size, Heroic Homosex -- The Greeks is presented in sections. Just click the link at the end of each section to go to the next page.