So there just happened to be more gay people per capita in Ancient Greece than in Modern America? Listen to what you're saying, it doesn't make sense. Many people live in a grey zone of sexuality between fully straight and fully gay, and they can choose to express it in one way or another, albeit regulated by cultural norms. A substantial cultural shift can change what people choose to express. Ancient Greece, Ancient Greece, and Ancient Greece are my arguments.
As I said, a return to Ancient Greece, or something very similar.
It's hard to make the proper gestures and facial expressions online, but, really, what I'm saying is not hard to understand. People just have their defenses up because they think I'm in some way "anti-gay".
Except when you look at what actually happened in Ancient Greece.
For a start, the fact that it was only ok to be with a male until they actually hit puberty and actually start looking like a male. Basically it started being not ok when it wasn't paedophilia any more.
It's pretty hard to make a case that more people actually had gay sexual preferences back then, when actually for the vast majority it only happened for as long as that child basically looked like a girl.
(This continued with the Romans too. It was ok for someone very young to have the female role, but very much not ok for an adult male.)
Also, depending on time and place, a lot of the time it was actually frowned upon actually having sex with your underage protege.
It's also hard to tell exactly how much gay sex was actually happening. It wasn't actually prescribed to actually do it. As long as you played the role of having an underage protege, you'd be perfectly within the social norms even without actually having any sex. And again, in various times and places, that's actually the only thing that was actually within the social norms.
It's also not hard to notice that there was a brisk trade for _female_ prostitutes and hetaeras (deluxe prostitutes or long time paid mistresses), and often even parties and social occasions included hiring a few. So however socially acceptable it may have been to be a gay pedophile, a _lot_ of people, including such notable figures as Pericles, still preferred a (hired) vagina. Between boning a kid for free and paying for an experienced woman, you get the idea, a heck of a lot preferred to part with the money and bone a woman.
But there's a more perverse aspect that I only skimmed so far. Being a certain kind of gay was fashionable and considered an integral part of the Greek way. But we don't really know if that was really descriptive or prescriptive. We don't know how many of them actually got a boner at a young boy's ass, and how many just went with the flow and just said they too are proper Greeks. And we don't know even if going with the flow was actually that common. As in all us-vs-them chest-thumping exercises, they chest-thumped and exaggerated a lot.
Basically they were no more honest than we are. Just like nowadays you get fundies chest-thumping that everyone is properly straight in their parts (or very nearly everyone, except for a few guys with an agenda), the Greeks were chest-thumping that everyone is properly bisexual in their parts. Likely it was just as much BS for them.
Don't get me wrong, there was homosexuality around too, and we know that for _some_ it continued well into adulthood. Or that even some otherwise respectable people preferred to play the female role for sex, so to speak. There even was a certain amount of male prostitutes to satisfy such customers.
But at the end of the day we really don't know how many people were really gay in Greece. It's hard to make a case whether it was more or fewer than today, as percentage of the population, because really we don't know.
