tossing a grenade into a hornet's nest here but if I am being quite honest, I think the fandom-ification of certain aspects of ancient Greece and Rome combined with an approach that I can only describe as mining ancient societies and mythologies for (almost invariably M/M) shipping material does unfortunately lead a lot of people to (a) treat male homosexuality in Greek and Roman contexts as the punchline to a joke and not what it is, which is a spectrum of human sexuality that certainly included some relatively consensual relationships between adults of similar social status but far more often involved systematic abuse of people who for reasons of age, power, and legal status could not give meaningful consent, and (b) to downplay the extent to which the rhetoric of male homosexuality and homosociality in Greece and Rome is inextricable from both cultures' fundamental misogyny.
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