"History is written by the victors. They choose what will be remembered, and what covered up. So it has been with male eros. Looking at any history textbook, one would think that never has a society praised love between men, never has a painter, a poet or a pope shared his bed and his heart with another male. Evidence of same-sex love has been either quietly suppressed, as with the Greeks and Romans, or quickly destroyed, as is still done with newly unearthed Inca and Mayan art. The result of this deception has been a needless polarization of society and untold suffering for those people who happen to fall in love with others of their own sex.

Uncensored, the historical record reveals an opposite reality: the male love instinct is a universal constant. Only society's attitude towards it has varied. All cultures have regulated male love, weaving varied tapestries of ritual around it. And a few have tried - to no avail - to regulate it out of existence.

As a rule, male love was part of the social and religious fabric. From the city states of ancient Greece and Rome with its emperors (Trajan and Hadrian among others), to the Siberian shamans and Native American two-spirit medicine men, from the African tribesmen to Chinese emperors and scholars, people the world over understood and made space for men's vulnerability to the beauty of other males. They accepted that - whether married or not - men fell in love with men or youths, dreamt about them, wrote about them, fought over them, and took them to bed. And they usually understood that boy children were excluded from the game of love, to the same degree that they understood that girl children were excluded as well."
~The History of Male Love
(link to website below)