One thing that often puzzles modern people about the ancient Mediterranean world, which I study, is the fact that certain kinds of sexual and romantic attraction and relationships between people of the same gender are attested so widely and spoken of so openly in the ancient sources. This seems very strange to many modern people, who assume that same-gender attraction is a rare phenomenon that only a tiny minority of the population experiences.
Contemporary evidence, though, is starting to show that same-gender attraction may be much more common than many people have previously assumed. Last week, on 17 February 2022, the polling agency Gallup published the results of a new survey, which found that no less than 7.1% of all adults in the United States now openly identify as some variety of LGBT+. This is quite significant, because this is nearly double the percentage it was ten years ago in 2012 when Gallup first started polling the question. Especially striking is the fact that, apparently, in the U.S., around 20.8% of adult members of Generation Z (my own generation) now identify as LGBT+, with the overwhelming majority of that percentage identifying as bisexual.
The ubiquity of same-gender attraction in ancient sources
From the relationship of Achilleus and Patroklos in the Iliad (which, as I discuss in this post from October 2020, ancient Greek writers generally interpreted as homoerotic), to the poems of Sappho (which, as I discuss in this post from August 2021, speak frankly about women’s erotic desire for other women), to the celebrated lovers Harmodios and Aristogeiton who slew the tyrant Hipparchos, to the pederastic scenes that dominate Attic vase paintings, to Plato’s Symposion, to the poems of Theokritos, to the love poem addressed from one woman to another found by archaeologists scrawled on the wall of a house in Pompeii, to the love spells Egyptian women in the second and third centuries CE were apparently casting to make other women sexually desire them, same-gender sexual and romantic attraction is ubiquitous in the classical sources.
Even when the Athenian orator Aischines (lived 389 – 314 BCE) wrote his speech Against Timarchos, in which he attacks his political opponent Timarchos by accusing him of prostituting himself with other men, he feels to need to include a digression defending his own many pederastic relationships with adolescent boys. He justifies these relationships by arguing that it’s prostitution that is dishonorable, not male-male sexual relations, and that his own sexual relations are ok because he has never prostituted himself nor paid any adolescent boy money to have sex with him.
A lot of modern people, working under the assumption that same-gender attraction is rare and unusual, find the widespread nature of this evidence difficult to grasp. This is only exacerbated by the fact that ancient paradigms of same-gender attraction are in most cases drastically different from the paradigms that are widely recognized today. New data from the contemporary United States, though, might help people to understand both the ancient evidence and the world we live in today a little bit better.
ABOVE: Three examples of homoerotic scenes in ancient Greek art: tondo of an Attic red-figure kylix dating to c. 500 BCE showing Achilleus bandaging Patroklos’s arm (left), polychrome plate from Thera dating to c. 620 BCE showing a homoerotic courtship scene between two women (middle), and tondo from an Attic red-figure kylix by the Briseïs Painter dating to c. 480 BCE showing an erastes kissing an eromenos (right)
An increase primarily occurring among younger generations
Gallup notes that the recent increase in the number of U.S. adults openly identifying as LGBT+ is primarily driven by Generation Z (i.e., those born in the years 1997–2003) and, to a lesser extent, Millennials (i.e., those born 1981–1996). Strikingly, the survey found that roughly 20.8% of U.S. adult members of Gen Z and roughly 10.5% of U.S. Millennials identify as some variety of LGBT+.
For comparison, the survey found that only 4.2% of members of Generation X (i.e., those born 1965–1980), only 2.6% of Baby Boomers (i.e., those born 1946–1964), and only 0.8% of “Traditionalists” (i.e., those born before 1946) openly identify as LGBT+. This means that members of Gen Z are almost exactly twice as likely to identify as some variety of LGBT+ as Millennials and are roughly twenty-one times more likely to identify as LGBT+ as members of the Silent Generation.
When it comes to specific LGBT+ identities, the increase in the percentage of U.S. adults identifying as LGBT+ is driven primarily by more people identifying as bisexual. If you look at the breakdown of the percentage of members of each generation who identify with each LGBT+ label, you’ll find that, although members of younger generations are significantly more likely to identify as gay, lesbian, or transgender than older generations, the percentages for all these identities are still relatively low, even for Gen Z. According to Gallup, only 2.5% of members of Gen Z identify as gay, only 2% identify as lesbian, and only 2.1% identify as transgender.
By contrast, according to Gallup, roughly 4% of U.S. adults overall identify as bisexual. If we break that number down by generations, self-identified bisexuals make up 15% of all Gen Z adults, 6% of all Millennials, 1.7% of all Gen Xers, and 0.2% of all “Traditionalists.”
Interestingly, Gallup found that members of the two oldest generations—“Traditionalists” and Baby Boomers—are more likely to identify as gay or lesbian than bisexual.
ABOVE: Table from Gallup showing the percentage of members of each generation who self-identify with different LGBT+ labels
Self-identified bisexuals make up not only the largest percentage of LGBT+ U.S. adults by far, but also the majority of LGBT+ U.S. adults overall. The Gallup survey found that fully 57% of LGBT+ U.S. adults identify as bisexual, which far outstrips the percentages for all other LGBT+ identities. For comparison, the poll found that 20.7% of U.S. LGBT+ adults identified as gay, 13.9% as lesbian, 10% as transgender, and 4.3% as some other label.
ABOVE: Table from Gallup showing that the majority of LGBT+ U.S. adults identify as bisexual
How do we make sense of these percentages?
After reviewing the data, I think that the most likely explanation for the massive increase in U.S. adults openly identifying as LGBT+ in recent years is that at least fifteen percent (and probably actually a much higher percentage) of U.S. adults have most likely always felt some degree of sexual and/or romantic attraction to both women and men.
In older generations, though, there was enormous stigma attached to same-gender attraction, so the vast majority of people who experienced bisexual attraction either never fully realized or deliberately buried their attraction to members of the same gender in favor of attraction to members of the gender that has traditionally been considered the “opposite” of their own.
Now, as the stigma attached to same-gender attraction is slowly starting to fall away, a large percentage of people belonging to the youngest generations who do not remember the time when same-gender attraction was most heavily stigmatized, are starting to realize and admit that they are attracted to more than one gender.
The bisexual gender gap
Interestingly, the same Gallup poll I have been citing found that women were roughly three times more likely than men to identify as bisexual. Specifically, the poll found that fully 6% of U.S. women overall identified as bisexual, compared to only 2% of U.S. men. It is not entirely clear why it is apparently so much more common for women to identify as bisexual than men, but there are a couple of factors that probably play some role.
One factor that probably influences the predominance of bisexual women over men is that scientific studies of female sexuality have been finding for decades that women in general are more to be sexually attracted to more than one gender and, regardless of sexual orientation, women’s sexual arousal is less likely than men’s sexual arousal to be dependent on gender.
An oft-cited study conducted by the sex researchers Meredith Chivers, Michael Seto, and Ray Blanchard, titled “Gender and sexual orientation differences in sexual response to sexual activities versus gender of actors in sexual films,” published in 2007 in the Journal of Personality and Social Psychology, 93(6), 1108–1121, measured both genital and self-reported arousal responses in twenty-seven men who identified as exclusively attracted to women, seventeen men who identified as exclusively attracted to men, twenty-seven women who identified as exclusively attracted to men, and twenty women who identified as exclusively attracted to women.
The study found that all the male participants consistently displayed greater genital arousal to scenes involving members of the gender they claimed to be attracted to, regardless of the level of sexual activity depicted on the screen. The female participants, by contrast, showed greater genital arousal to scenes that were more sexually explicit, regardless of the genders of the people in the scenes depicted.
The study found that women who identified as exclusively attracted to women did show greater genital arousal to scenes involving women than scenes involving men, but, surprisingly, the women who identified as exclusively attracted to men showed no discernable difference in their genital arousal in response to scenes involving women versus their genital arousal in response to scenes involving men.
I am very hesitant to agree with anything that has Ray Blanchard’s name attached to it, given his invention and continued promotion of his so-called “transsexual typology,” which works very poorly as an interpretative model for understanding transgender people and, in fact, is routinely actively used to harm trans people. Nonetheless, in the case of this particular study, the takeaway that women’s sexual arousal generally tends to be less dependent on gender than men’s seems like a good scientific conclusion.
ABOVE: Screenshot of the abstract for the 2007 study on female and male arousal coathored by Meredith Chivers, Michael Seto, and Ray Blanchard
Another factor that is almost certainly also playing a significant role in influencing the disparity in numbers between self-identified bisexual women and self-identified bisexual men is that there seems to be much greater social stigma attached to male same-gender attraction than there is attached to female same-gender attraction. Sexual or romantic attraction to men is typically gendered as feminine, while sexual attraction to women is typically gendered as masculine. Meanwhile, because of cultural misogyny, people often see femininity as inferior to masculinity.
Thus, conservative-minded people often perceive it as unnatural, but at least tolerable or understandable, for a woman to behave in a manner that they perceive as masculine (such as being sexually or romantically interested in women) because they assume that masculinity is superior. On the other hand, if a man behaves in a manner that they perceive as feminine (such as being sexually or romantically interested in men), they view it as an abominable disgrace and a failure of masculinity.
Allow me to illustrate what I mean with an example that is not related to sexuality. In January 2020, Florence Pugh—a straight cisgender woman—was photographed in Vogue wearing a suit jacket and vest. No one batted an eye. Then, in November 2020, Harry Styles—a straight cisgender man—was photographed in Vogue wearing a dress. This time, conservatives flew into a full-blown, apoplectic moral panic about how liberals are destroying masculinity or something.
In theory, someone opposed to crossdressing should have reacted the same to both of these sets of photos, but conservatives reacted with much greater ire toward the man in the dress than the woman in the suit, because, whether consciously or unconsciously, they felt that the man was debasing himself by dressing like a woman.
It is therefore possible that women and men are, in fact, equally or nearly equally likely to feel an attraction to both men and women, but women are more likely to admit their attraction to other women because it is more socially acceptable for them to do so.
Meanwhile, many men who experience attraction to both men and women who still want to have relations with women may not admit the fact that they are also attracted to men because they fear that such an admission might hurt them socially, because it might cause them to be perceived as unmanly, especially when it comes to trying to date women.
ABOVE: Photograph of Florence Pugh wearing a suit in Vogue in January 2020 (left) and photograph of Harry Styles wearing a dress in Vogue in November 2020 (right). One of these photos sparked outrage, but not the other.
Another factor is probably as “girl on girl is hot” to many men, with our interests more predominant. I’m not sure if there is any equivalent for women into male/male eroticism, at least in the West (but I hear Japan has that). Bisexuality is so often erased it’s easy to ignore too, especially if one has more opposite-sex attraction. I know that was my experience.
Dear Spencer,
Thank you for your fine scholarship. I have one point of disagreement with you, however. Having been born in 1937, I am simultaneously a “Depression Baby” and a member of what you called the “Silent Generation.” However, that is a misnomer. We were not so much “silent” as silenced. Some illustrations from The Bronx High School of Science, which I attended from 1950 to 1953.
(1) In an American History class (1950-1), the teacher Morris Cohen regularly administered “loyalty oaths” to students, asking me and others, “Are you now, or have you ever been, a member of the Communist Party?” and “Do you favor the overthrow of the government by force and violence?” The American Communist Party was in the forefront of civil liberty, racial equality, pro-labor and peace movements. Though many were deceived by Stalin and his propaganda machine, few, if any, members favored violent revolution or any activities against our country. Many, if not most, quit the Party following Khrushchev’s confession (?) of Stalin’s crimes and upon the Soviet military suppression of the Hungarian Revolt in 1956. My mistake in answering Morris Cohen’s questions was in answering “NO” instead of saying, “No, but where can we sign up to join?” and “By force, yes, but not violence,” mocking his attempt to distinguish between the two.”
(2) Bobby Williamson was in the Class of 1954. His father, John Williamson, was false convicted and imprisoned for “conspiracy to” teach and advocate the overthrow of the government by force and violence.
(3) In February 1953, Dr. Julius Hlavaty, Chairman of the Math Department, was summarily fired following an investigation triggered by somebody searching the voter registration lists from the 1930s and finding his wife’s name registered under the American Labor Party.
In short, we were intimidated and scared. This continued during the Eisenhower Administration that soon followed. At Oberlin College, one of my friends, Dave Davies (Class of 1957) earned $30 per month from the FBI for spying on fellow students and filing reports. I wonder why the FBI didn’t recruit me. I could have used the money, and unlike Dave, I’d have spelled the names of the students on whom I reported correctly.
Nonetheless, I had some classmates who were not scared. I’ll name two, whose stories you might be able to look up on the Internet: David L. Horn (Class or 1955) and Sheridan D. Speeth (Class of 1957).
Keep up your good work!
Having been born in 1962, I have watched the shift in disclosure , meeting reactive resistance and also greater acceptance through several stages, some of them seismic. Nor is it done. I think a lot of it traced back to the increasingly-more-applicable idea that life may be lived for the fulfillment of the individual–which, itself, has by no means reached it’s full potential implementation.
Of course, all of this is met, in some quarters, with the ferocity that all cornered animals will always bring to bear as a last resource–in this case, they have made the corner with their own limited ideas and unwillingness to change. No walls, no corner.
Articles like this offer what possibility there is that the current culture wars might still be concluded by some way other than violence and, given other problems to solve, the real possibility of a total collapse if the dinosaurs among really continue to refuse to evolve with the rest of us.
Another fine article!
There’s no question that the demographics of the United States are changing.
In addition to having the highest percentage of members who openly identify as LGBT+, my generation is also the most racially and ethnically diverse. According to the Brookings Institute, only 50.1% of members of my generation in the U.S. are white. Of children under fifteen at the time the survey was published, white children only made up the plurality, not the majority.
Members of Generation Z are also the least likely to identify with formal religion. Pew Research Center found in a survey published in 2021 that, at that time, only 36% of Millennials were members of a church and fully 31% of Millennials had no formal religious affiliation whatsoever. That particular Pew survey didn’t include Generation Z, but surveys have generally indicated that members of my generation are, if anything, even less likely to identify with formal religion than Millennials. A survey published in 2018 by The Barna Group (an Evangelical Protestant polling agency) found that 8% of members of Generation Z identified as agnostics, 13% as atheists, and 14% as nothing in particular. (For comparison, the same survey found that 8% of Millennials identified as agnostics, 7% as atheists, and 15% as nothing in particular.)
Members of my generation are also more likely to have a positive opinion of socialism than capitalism. A Gallup survey published in 2018 found that, in that year, only 45% of U.S. residents between the ages of eighteen and twenty-nine said that they had a positive view of capitalism, while 51% said that they had a positive view of socialism.
Of course, we cannot be certain that current demographic trends will continue. It is also far from certain that these continuing social and demographic changes will result in corresponding political changes. Indeed, at least in the immediate future, all signs indicate that the right wing is likely to continue amassing even greater control over institutions.
Indeed-we shall see.
The Right Wing is pulling itself together like a fist. Power and current institutionalization favor them–in the immediate picture. So does fear,
WHAT–do they fear? I think it is midgame and endgame.
Control–thank goodness!–does not grant medical longevity and they know it. Growing up, what they said about desegregation in the South is that we had to wait for the old men to die. They did. The children that chose to carry on that set of traditions did not forget–many of us who grew up wanting change did forget–but does it matter? Now they are old too.
The present fills me with great apprehension only because it is, by definition, what we all must live through next. The immediate future is what proves fatal when age doesn’t–all that said, I still do not think that midgame favors the dinosaurs. The accelerationists may very well get the chaos and disruption they want–but will it bring them to endgame?
My gut is that it will not. As a species, we will re-order and I think that it will not be along their line of thinking. I think that too much has already changed.
The John Waynes will get their Alamos. It will still not be enough. Endgame will see a new world come. They will make it cost much more than it should have. They have done so all along. I say: let that price be paid. Maybe even that axiom can die a long time from now–for now, it has always been the only way.
Spencer,
You are an excellent writer, and I really enjoy reading your posts. It is clear you have done extensive research into the topics on which you write.
There are a couple of things I would love to know your thoughts on–why is it, do you think, that our generation tends to favor socialism over capitalism? Why do you suppose our generation, as a whole, has rejected structured religion? I do not intend to put you on the spot if you do not wish to answer. I simply enjoy hearing the opinions of other (intelligent) individuals on topics such as these in order to better understand the ways in which our world is changing.
Also, since Biden’s inauguration, it seems as though the right political wing have not exactly gained control in any further ways, beyond those which they already possessed. It seems evident that the political left are rapidly taking back what they once laid claim to under former president Obama. I wonder, what signs are you noticing which would seem to indicate an increase in control from the right?
Thank you so much for the complements!
I have many thoughts about why people of our generation tend to favor socialism over capitalism—far too many thoughts for me to express them all here. I may write a full post about this subject someday, if I have the time. I will, however, give you the short version.
People who grew up in the United States before the collapse of the Soviet Union in 1991 (or at least before glastnost and perestroika in the mid-to-late 1980s) grew up in a time when the communist Soviet Union was widely represented in U.S. media and spoken of in popular discourse as the greatest enemy of “freedom” and “democracy” in the whole world and as a place where ordinary people were desperate and starving, forced to wait in long lines in order to acquire meagre rations of food and necessities.
As a result, people of those generations still remember the time when Soviet-style Marxist-Leninist communism was widely seen as not just an unworkable economic system, but as a real, living threat to their entire way of life. This naturally tends to influence their perception of socialism more broadly. People of our generation, by contrast, have no such memories; for us, the Soviet Union is just history. As a result, I think people of our generation’s impression of socialism tends to be less influenced by the twentieth-century U.S. perception of the Soviet Union. Instead, when people of my generation think of “socialism,” they are far more likely to think of the Nordic countries in the present day. The Nordic countries are arguably not really socialist, but many young people perceive them as socialist and the perception is what matters.
Additionally, I think that various long-term historical, economic, and social forces have led many young people to become much more disillusioned with capitalism in general than people of previous generations. Throughout most of the latter half of the twentieth century, due to a combination of many factors (including, but not limited to, adequate and well-enforced regulations designed to protect workers, strong unions, limited automation, widespread competition to attract workers, and unique historical circumstances resulting from the U.S.’s position as the preeminent western superpower), it was possible for a white man with only a high school education to get a job as, say, a worker in a factory or as a salesman or something, make a decent living wage, support a wife and children, own his own decent-sized home and a car, work the same job until retirement, and eventually retire to live off a decent pension.
Now, due to a combination of many factors (including, but not limited to, a decreasing number of regulations meant to protect workers and decreasing enforcement of the regulations that do exist, increasing levels of successful union busting on the part of corporations, increasing levels of automation, increasing corporate monopolies and decreasing competition, and increasing levels of offshoring) it is much more difficult for a person without (or even with) a college degree to find stable employment with a living wage than it was for a white man forty years ago. The Millennial generation was the first to really face this new economic reality and our generation has grown up hearing stories about people struggling to live the so-called “American dream” only to discover that it is impossible for them due to their circumstances.
On top of this, most of us older members of Gen Z were in elementary or middle school when the Great Recession of 2007–2009 happened. This means that none of us are old enough to really remember the time before the Great Recession very well. For many of us, the recession itself was the first time we really became aware of the U.S. capitalist economic system.
I personally remember my Dad (who was a software engineer for airbag controllers at Delphi at the time) coming home, talking about the layoffs at work, and being constantly worried about losing his job. I remember adults around me in general talking constantly about the recession and how bad the economy was for years while I was growing up, even long after the Recession itself was nominally over. When a person first becomes aware of the U.S. capitalist economic system in that sort of context, that tends to make them distrustful of capitalism.
Finally, the rise of the internet has given people who have long been marginalized and excluded from positions of power within our capitalist society (including people of color, Indigenous people, immigrants, disabled people, trans people, et cetera) greater opportunities to make their voices heard. As a result, more people, especially people of the younger generations who are highly online, are hearing more about the struggles of people who belong to different groups from themselves.
The cumulative effect of all this is that young people are increasingly disenchanted with capitalism and view socialism increasingly favorably.
Now, to respond to your second paragraph, you may think that the political right is losing ground to the left, but, in the long-term, I think it is most likely the opposite. For one thing, Republicans are currently absolutely dominating state governments. Republicans currently hold a trifecta (meaning they control the governorship and the majority in both houses of the state legislature) in twenty-four U.S. states. This means that, of the states that exist, nearly half of them are totally controlled by Republicans. By contrast, Democrats currently only hold a trifecta in fourteen states.
Meanwhile, Republicans currently control the majority of both houses in thirty state legislatures, while Democrats only control the majority of both houses in eighteen state legislatures. The fact that Republicans currently control the majority of state legislatures also means that they have either already gotten or will get to draw the lines for the majority of congressional districts, meaning they can gerrymander those districts to give Republicans an advantage in their states for the next decade to come.
Additionally, thanks to Mitch McConnell’s machinations, under the Trump administration, conservatives greatly and disproportionately increased their control over the judicial system. According to Pew Research Center, Trump appointed 226 young conservatives as federal judges, including fifty-four federal appellate judges. For comparison, Obama only appointed fifty-five federal appellate judges, even though he was president for twice as long. The judges appointed by Trump will continue to shape our judicial system, rendering important verdicts, for decades to come.
Trump also appointed three young conservative justices to the Supreme Court. As a result, conservatives now hold a six-to-three majority on the Supreme Court, which they will most likely retain for the foreseeable future. They will most likely retain the majority on the Supreme Court for at least the next two or three decades, during which time they will establish many new precedents and most likely overturn some older precedents that conservatives have wanted to overturn for the longest time.
Democrats actually lost thirteen seats in the House of Representatives in the 2020 election and they are now only barely holding onto the majority by eleven seats. Meanwhile, Democrats and Republicans are exactly tied for their number of seats in the Senate, with the Democratic coalition holding fifty seats and the Republican coalition holding fifty seats, meaning Democrats only barely hold the majority in the Senate by one vote when Vice President Kamala Harris acts as a tie-breaker.
The party that controls the presidency virtually always loses seats in the House and the Senate in the mid-term elections. Democrats aren’t polling especially high right now, so they will almost certainly lose control of both the House and the Senate in the 2022 mid-term election. Once Republicans control Congress, they will stonewall to prevent President Biden from doing anything for the rest of his time in office.
It is hard to say how the 2024 U.S. presidential election will go, but Republicans will certainly nominate either Donald Trump himself or a Trumpian candidate who will position himself as Trump’s natural successor. There is at least a decently high chance that the Republican candidate will win, given the fact that, according to FiveThirtyEight, Biden currently has a 52.4% disapproval rating and only a 42.6% approval rating, and his ratings in the polls appear to be very stably hovering around these numbers.
By next year, Republicans will most likely hold the majority in the U.S. House of Representatives, the majority in the U.S. Senate, a six-to-three conservative majority on the Supreme Court, trifectas in roughly half of state governments, and control of the majority of both houses in the majority of state legislatures. The only thing they definitely won’t control next year is the presidency, and they may gain control of even the presidency in 2024.
I’m more amazed someone in ancient Pompeii one day was like, “You know what, I’m gonna write on the wall this Lesbian love poem I once read.”
The walls back then were a bit like message boards now. It’s just one of the love poems they’ve found there.
Indeed, most of the buildings archaeologists have excavated in Pompeii and Herculaneum are absolutely covered in graffiti. I still think that the presence of so much graffiti all over the cities is striking evidence that literacy was not quite so rare in the Roman world (or at least in Roman cities) as some scholars have argued. (When I say “some scholars,” I’m particularly thinking of William V. Harris, who, I should note, was a professor at Columbia University for many decades until he agreed to retire in ignominy as part of a settlement for a sexual harassment lawsuit after his notorious decades-long sexual harassment and coercion of female students became public knowledge.)
More literacy would make sense. Unfortunate just how many have high positions they abuse too.
Wow, another very good article! As usual, your articles show how knowledge of history also helps in being socially and politically conscious.
I hope this comment won’t be deleted (in the light of the reception of my community) but, to speak of male sexuality, I think the furry fandom, of which I’m part, is an interesting phenomenon.
The fandom is a largely-male-dominated fandom, and yet only 20% of people identified as heterosexual around 2015 (based on a poll made by psychologists), and now the percentage of straight people has dropped to 10%. While a decisive factor in this is that the fandom is an accepting safe space for outcast people (which can explain its high percentage of autistic people, around 15%), I would say that the fact that furries are usually more open sexually plays a big part in this matter, too.
As a personal experience, I have only talked with one straight person (a woman), and tens of other furries, and in the fandom no sexuality is considered the default, and therefore there is no need of coming out.
Spencer, in case you’d be interested in this from a sociological point of view, here is a website with some psychological findings:
https://furscience.com/
There’s no need to worry, Wichiteglega; I have nothing against furries. Do you happen to know of Christopher Polt? He’s an associate professor of classics at Boston College who is also a furry. I follow him on Twitter.
I will admit that I do not know very much about furries, since I am not a furry, I have no personal connection to the furry community, and I am not personally close with anyone who is involved in the furry community. Most of what little I know about furries is what I have gained from following Christopher Polt. I know enough, though, to know that the mainstream media portrayal of furries is inaccurate and rooted in prejudice.
I will make sure to take a look at the link you have provided here.
Oh, wow! I didn’t know about Christopher Polt, but it seems like an extremely interesting person! Especially since the furry fandom is very, very STEM-oriented, and I had never heard of someone who also dabbled in history. That’s basically a dream of mine come true! I kinda started squealing when I saw he made a post about Reynard the Fox, I’m a big fan of that medieval epic and more furries should know about this and appreciate it.
I would definitely want more overlap between the furry fandom and history/classics. One of the few instanced of overlap I know of is… well, me, since I really like to translate furry-themed memes in old languages I know, such as Old English or Old Norse (I did a couple simple ones in Latin, too). I especially find it fun to try and phrase very fandom-specific concepts in a way that would kinda be understandable to people of the past. Unfortunately, this brand of humor is far too niche for most people, so not many people consume it.
The other overlap, which is actually of some interest to you, is a game called ‘Adastra’. Unfortunately I can’t really recommend the game to you, since it’s fairly long and only tangentially related to history, but I have to say that it’s one of the most accurate and nuanced portrayals of Roman culture that I have ever seen in my life, which is kinda impressive, considering it’s a fantasy videogame with a romantic plot. I especially found interesting how the game called out the main love interest (who is the soon-to-be emperor) for his toxic masculinity and sexism. Even its portrayal of sexuality within Roman culture is surprisingly accurate, with the emperor not having any problem with having a male ‘bride’ at his side, but also being concerned of being perceived as a cinaedus. I wasn’t expecting this level of accuracy from a dating simulator. It’s also a great story about male-male couples overcoming the toxic traits of masculinity, but that’s another matter. I do wonder, however, since Christopher Polt seems to be focused, among things, on Ancient Rome… Did he ever mention this game? It actually would be a very good source of cultural informations about Rome for furries, so… do you happen to know if he ever made a post or tweet about this?
I had no idea that the game Adastra even existed until you mentioned it here in this post. As far as I am aware, Christopher Polt has never tweeted anything about it.
If you’re enthusiastic about Reynard the Fox, you and Christopher Polt will probably get along famously, because he is very passionate about Reynard. He also does a lot of work on classical reception in Walt Disney animated films and he’s very passionate about Disney’s 1973 animated Robin Hood film (the one where Robin Hood is depicted as an anthropomorphic fox). I first started following him on Twitter two years ago, when, during the early months of the COVID-19 pandemic, he started posting really fascinating, detailed threads about classical reception in Disney films. He ended up doing a couple of really fascinating mega-threads about the relationship between medieval Reynard legends and Disney’s Robin Hood. (Here is a link to the earlier thread, which he posted on 23 July 2020, and here is a link to the later thread, which he posted on 4 August 2020 and is even longer and more detailed.)
If you are interested in furries who “dabble in history” another interesting person is Ohs688, also known as Wilhelm. This person makes very meticulously researched art of historical periods, it seems mostly Achaemenid Persia, Ancient Korea and Pre-Columbian Mesoamerica. On Wilhelm’s blog there are even some academical articles translated to Korean and with historical images (I found one about the clothing of Alexander the Great)
I tried to look for any mention of Adastra in Polt’s tweet, and the only thing I was able to find was him replying to a tweet asking if it was historically accurate for people to sometimes wear grapes as a headwear – as I found out, this is another accurate thing from Adastra, albeit a bit simplified.
Oh, thank you for those two megathreads about Robin Hood and Reynard the Fox! As a furry, it’s basically my duty to be a big fan of the Robin Hood movie (it helps that, unlike in America, that movie is seen as the best classic in Italy, my home country), and I did know about the fact that it used to be an adaptation of Reynard, but I didn’t have anything detailed all the original ideas and sketches. Thank you a lot!
This is a really interesting study, and as you say it makes sense that more people are bisexual than previously thought. Still when reading about the ancient world it is surprising that, for example, of the first 18 Roman Emperors only 3 were not described as (what we would categorise as) homo- or bisexual.
Thank you for recommending Ohs688’s page; historical clothing is one of my main areas of interest, and seeing a furry drawing historically accurate stuff instead of stereotypical ye-olde clothes is amazing!
Yes, when I first saw them I was amazed by how accurate the artpieces are!
I got a question: this poll shows that bisexuality may be more common than previously thought, but how is this correlated to the sexuality of Ancient Greece (and many other premodern civilizations)? A bi person, or a gay man for that matter, is attracted to a person of the same age, not a teen like Emperor Adrian, or Theognis etc. Being sexually (or just romantically) attracted to a 15yo boy would be certainly considered a hideous crime by the lgbt community itself. Dedicating a poem like those by Tibullus to Marathus to a teen would be considered (and is) a sexual harassment of a child. So I guess my question is, sexuality is influenced by culture, even if it may appear to have just “biological” basis?
You make a very fair point, but there are three comments that I would like to make in response.
First, just because I am drawing a comparison between the apparent prevalence of same-gender attraction and relationships in the ancient world and same-gender attraction and relationships in the present day does not mean that these things are alike in all respects, only that they are alike in the specific respect in which I am comparing them.
Second, the age difference you point out was typical for all erotic relationships in the ancient world that included a man. The age at which an adolescent boy was expected to take an erastes and become an eromenos was the same age at which parents typically forced adolescent girls to marry a husband, who was usually an adult man who was at least a decade older than the bride and frequently more than twice her age. The crucial difference between an eromenos and a bride, then, was gender, not age.
Third and finally, the age difference you point out is only known to have been typical of same-gender erotic relationships between males. Admittedly, the surviving historical evidence for same-gender erotic relationships between females is nowhere near as plentiful as the evidence for those between males, since male authors rarely wrote about female same-gender erotic relationships. The evidence we do have, though, suggests that female same-gender erotic relationships were relatively common in the ancient world and they do not seem to have necessarily involved any vast discrepancy in age.
For instance, the polychrome plate from Thera dating to c. 620 BCE that I have used as part of the main image for this article is remarkable not only because it depicts a certainly erotic scene between two women (as demonstrated by the gesture of one women touching the other women’s chin, which is normally seen in Greek vase paintings depicting an erastes and an eromenos), but also because the two women depicted seem to be of similar age and social status, which suggests a much more equitable relationship than was typical for Greek pederastic relationships between adult men and adolescent boys.