It’s also skewed by our own cultural bias against male affection. In other cultures men were (and are) free to express a level of affection or platonic love that we in America cannot. There is evidence across history of many such intense friendships. Was sex involved in any of these? No way to tell. There is little evidence in some cases and no evidence in others.

Much of what documentation we do incontrovertibly have, at least in Western history, is sexualized love of older men for teenage boys. There’s much more actual evidence, including in modern day Afghanistan - of that than of sexualized love among adult men. Yet no one claims we should follow those examples, adopt that into our culture. (Well, a few do, of course, but they are all on the discredited fringe.)

What is astonishing to me is that in ALL such cases, our “modern historians of gay sexuality” - and I hope you can hear my sneer - take every such instance of affection and immediately state that all of them, ALL of them, are evidence of gay sexual practice. Anyone with half a brain, and any sense of different cultural norms, must know that that simply cannot be the case.