HISTORIES OTHER THAN BIOGRAPHIES

 

These are arranged by the same geographical and chronological divisions as the website's history menu, and, within them, according to the rough chronological order of the periods with which they begin their serious coverage.

 

General

James Neill, The Origins and Role of Same-Sex Relations in Human Societies, Jefferson, North Carolina: McFarland, 2009.  Perhaps the most exhaustive history of homosexuality ever attempted, and accordingly useful, but suffers from the usual two faults of the many recent and polemical studies of the subject: the pederastic character of most pre-modern homosexuality is deliberately obscured, for instance through referring to pubescent boys as young men, and hordes of famous historical characters are claimed as homosexual on flimsy grounds.

Stephen O. Murray, “Part One: Age-Structured Homosexualities" in his Homosexualities, Chicago, Illinois: University of Chicago Press, 2000. Greek love in many different cultures throughout history.

Stephen O. Murray, Pacific Homosexualities, San Jose, California: Writers' Club, 2002. A fine overview of the different kinds of homosexuality practised in the Far East and parts of Oceania, of which the first two chapters, "Age-Stratified Homosexuality" and "Male Homosexuality in Japan before the Meiji 'Restoration'" are about Greek love.

Thorkil Vanggaard, Phallós, Copenhagen: Gylendal, 1969, translated by the author from the original Danish as Phallós. A Symbol and its History in the Male World, New York: International Universities Press, 1972. PDF. A psychologist's highly original study of the phallos as a symbol of power and dominance, arguing from a wide swathe of old literature that pederasty answered deep psychological needs in the male and that many modern ills stem from its repression.

Elisar von Kupffer, Lieblingminne und Freundesliebe in der Weltliteratur (Chivalric Love and Love of Friends in World Literature), Berlin: Rosa Winkel, 1900. An anthology of homoerotic (primarily pederastic) world literature.

Brandt Aymar, The Young Male Figure in Paintings, Sculptures and Drawings from Ancient Egypt to the Present, New York: Crown Publishers, 1974. 275 black and white illustrations of male youth with information, of interest since many of them were inspired by Greek love.

Dominique Fernandez, A Hidden Love: Art and Homosexuality, Munich: Prestel Publishing, 2002. A coffee table book lavishly illustrated in colour and devoted to the mostly implicit depiction of homosexuality in art; in keeping with the historical reality, it  is primarily of male youth with the exception of the last few chapters on 20th century and modern art, the author being more honest about this than is usual amongst moderns.

Isidre Bravo (editor), La mirada de Zeus:  Antología sobre la fascinación masculina por los muchachos (The Gaze of Zeus: An Anthology on the Male Fascination with Boys), 2 volumes: I, en la literatura griega y latina (in Greek and Latin literature); II, en la literatura medieval, renacentista  y de la Ilustración (in mediaeval, Renaissance and Enlightenment literature), Barcelona: la Tempestad, 2007. An exhaustive anthology of pederastic writings from ancient Greece to the 18^th century, translated into Spanish.

Cécile Beurdeley, L’amour bleu, Halifax, Nova Scotia, Canada: Schooner, 1977. Translated into English by Michael Taylor with the title untranslated, New York: Rizzoli, 1978. An illustrated survey of European and North American homoerotic art and literature from Graeco-Roman antiquity to the 20^th century, much of it pederastic.

D. M. Halperin, One hundred years of homosexuality, and other essays on Greek love, New York: Routledge, 1990. A constructionist view of Greek love, much of it taken up with a nightmarish vision of Greek pederasty, scholarly but extremely jaundiced by a determination to discredit it as purely about power and exploitation (in line with the author's gay assimilationist and politically-correct politics), and to ignore its frequently obviously romantic character.

Theo Sandfort, Edward Brongersma & Alex van Naerssen (editors), Male Intergenerational Intimacy: Historical, Socio-Psychological, and Legal Perspectives, New York: Haworth  & London: Routledge, 1991. Review. Twenty-two academic articles, commentaries and reviews, all essentially historical, with subjects ranging from archaic Greece to the then-present Europe and USA.

Louis Crompton, Homosexuality and Civilization, Cambridge, Massachusetts: Harvard University Press, 2003.  Excellent and thorough scholarly history of homosexuality, mostly down to around 1700.  Probably the most useful general history, slightly marred only by its attempting to obscure the pederastic character of  almost all the homosexuality described in order to set it up as a forerunner of modern androphilia.

Germaine Greer,  The Beautiful Boy,  New York: Rizzoli, 2003. A finely-illustrated survey of how the subject of the beautiful boy has been treated in art through the ages.

Randy Engel, "Historical Perspectives from Antiquity to the Cambridge Spies", being vol. 1 of her The Rite of Sodomy. Homosexuality and the Roman Catholic Church, Export, Pennysylvania: New Engel, 2011.  A biased and bigoted historical survey which, though designed as a polemic against homosexuality, is surprisingly scholarly and useful for its references, and concentrates on pederasty as both the historically most-common form of homosexuality and the most useful in inciting its 21st-century readership.

G. Rousseau (editor), Children and Sexuality: From the Greeks to the Great War, London: Palgrave, 2012.  Ten essays by different authors, mostly similar to what one would expect of a History of the Jewish People commissioned under the Third Reich, but of greatly variable value.  Oddly, the earliest subject matter, the Athenian Alcibiades, is treated most myopically, while the last chapter on child prostitution in late 20th-century Thailand, is the most objective and valuable.

Noel Malcolm, Forbidden Desire in Early Modern Europe: Male-Male Sexual Relations, 1400-1750, Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2024. Examines male homosexuality from 1400 to 1750 in the Mediterranean and northwest Europe, concluding that in the Mediterranean the paederastic pattern predominated, the celebration of boys' beauty being embedded in the Ottoman Eastern Mediterranean in particular. The northwest European pattern was more mixed and lacked a culture of young men having sexual relations with boys before marriage. Takes issue with the notion that only same-sex acts existed before same-sex identities were constructed between 1700 and 1900.

Ronald Hyam, Empire and Sexuality: The British Experience, Manchester: Manchester University Press, 1990. Review. A well-written, balanced and scholarly account of how the British reacted when they encountered the very different sexual mores of their subject peoples. As Greek love was endemic in Asia in particular, it crops up frequently, and the author includes fine accounts of the pederasty of Rajah Brooke of Sarawak, King Mwanga II of Buganda, Sir Hector Macdonald in Ceylon and Kenneth Searight in India.

Dr. Jacobus X..., L’amour aux colonies. Singularités physiologiques et passionnelles observes Durant trente années de séjour dans les Colonies françaises Cochin-Chine, Tonkin et Cambodge—Guyane et Martinique—Sénégal et Bivières du Sud—Nouvelle Galédonie, Nouvelles-Hébrides et Tahiti, Paris: Isidore Liseux, 1893. Republished and edited by Charles Carrington in an enlarged English edition as Untrodden Fields of Anthropology: Observations on the Esoteric Manners and Customs of Semi-civilised Peoples, Being a Record by a French-Army Surgeon of Thirty Years’ Experience in Asia, Africa, America and Oceania, 2 volumes, Paris, 1898. Article linking to most of Greek love content here. A mostly sexual and entertainingly lurid study of the peoples of the various colonies where the author worked as a doctor from about 1865. Mostly heterosexual, but an important primary source for the practice of pederasty in various lands, especially Vietnam.

Dennis Drew & Jonathan Drake, Boys for Sale. A Sociological Study of Boy Prostitution, New York: Brown Book Co., 1969. Article linking to every chapter here. A racy description of the varied boy prostitution scenes in many countries around the world; unscholarly and unreliable in its forays into history, but probably priceless for its record of a trade that was flourishing almost everywhere in the 1960s, but was soon to wither from intense suppression.

Guido Franco, Desert Patrol (une aventure sous les tropiques), Paris: Les Editions de la Jungle, 1980. Translated from the French anonymously as Desert Patrol (An Aventure in the Tropics), The Vending Machine website, 2015.  A sensationalist and treacherously conducted exposé of the sexual involvement of foreigners with boys in Sri Lanka and the Philippines in the late 1970s, vociferously denounced for obvious hypocrisy in issue 7 of Pan magazine.

Guido Franco, Prières pour des paradis meilleurs (Prayers for Better Paradises), Paris: Les Editions de la Jungle, 1984. In French only. Humorous sequel to the preceding, set  in Manila, Ceylon, Europe etc., and denounced on the same grounds in issue 19 of Pan magazine.

Lloyd, Robin, Playland: A Study of Boy Prostitution, London: Blond & Briggs, 1977.  A British edition of the the author's For Money or Love with added material from English cities in the 1970s.

T. Rivas, Positive Memories, Netherlands, 2013; 3rd enlarged edition, 2016. "Cases of positive memories of erotic and platonic relationships and contacts of children with adults, as seen from the perspective of the former minor", the majority of the cases being Greek love.

 

Antiquity (Europe, North Africa and the Near East to AD 381)

Jan Bremmer, "An Enigmatic Indo-European Rite: Paederasty" in Arethusa, Vol. 13, No. 2, Indo-European Roots of Classical Culture (Fall 1980, pp. 279-298. Argues from similarities in its practice and function in Sparta and Crete, elsewhere in ancient Europe and in Melanesia, that  pederasty originated as a general Indo-European intitiatory rite.

Theodore W. Jennings, Jr., “YHWH as Erastes”, in: Ken Stone, ed., Queer Commentary and the Hebrew Bible, Cleveland: Pilgrim Press, 2001, pp. 36-73. Argues that in the biblical story of David and Jonathan set in Israel of the 11th century BC, David, a na’ar (boy) too young to fight, is to be understood as the eromenos of the older warrior Jonathan, as were other pairings of warriors and their armour-bearers, and these relationships had a theological significance as a metaphor for the love between YHWH and own eromenos, his chosen people.

Rudolf Beyer, Fabulae graecae quatenus quave aetate puerorum amore commutatae sint, Weida, Thuringia: Thomas & Hubert, 1910. In Latin only. An important source for Greek myths of love affairs between gods and boys.

Bernard Sergent, L'Homosexualité dans la mythologie grecque, Paris: Payot, 1984. Translated from the French by Arthur Goldhammer as Homosexuality in Greek Myth, Boston, Massachusetts: Beacon Press, 1986. Review. A formidably well-researched and detailed study showing how from its early stages pederasty for the Greeks was not only legitimised, but glorified by their many myths about gods and boys.

Bernard Sergent, L'homosexualité initiatique dans I'Europe ancienne (Initiatory Homosexuality in Ancient Europe), Paris: Payot, 1986. Very scholarly and thorough study with a massive bibliography showing the important role played by pederasty as an initiation into manhood in a wide range of ancient European societies.

Bernard Sergent, Homosexualité et initiation chez les peuples indo-européens (Homosexuality and Initiation Amongst the Indo-European Peoples), Paris, Payot, 1996. Brings together his two books above, L'homosexualité initiatique dans I'Europe ancienne and L'Homosexualité dans la mythologie grecque.

Andrew Calimach, Lovers' Legends: The Gay Greek Myths, New Rochelle, New York: Haiduk Press, 2002.  Review. Despite the very misleading title, a beautifully narrated rendition and scholarly interpretation of the principal Greek myths recounting the love affairs between gods and boys.

M. H. E. Meier, "Päderastie" in J. S. Ersch & J. G. Gruber (editors), Allgemeine Encyclopädie der Wissenschaften und Künste (Universal Encyclopaedia of Sciences and Arts), Leipzig: J. F. Gleditsch, III, vol. IX, 1837, pp. 149-189. A thorough, wide-ranging and scholarly but austere essay on pederasty in ancient Greece (and a little in Rome), with original speculation on its origins.

L.-R. de Pogey-Castries (pen name of Georges Hérelle), Histoire de l'amour grec dans l'antiquité, par M.-H.-E. Meier, augmentée d'un choix de documents originaux et de plusieurs dissertations complémentaires, Paris: Stendhal, 1930. By a highly-reputed professor of philosophy, a translation of Meier's "Päderastie" (1837), followed by extensive appendices with some livelier material such as anecdotes.

John Addington Symonds, A Problem in Greek Ethics, written 1873, privately printed 1883. PDF of 1901 reprint. A pioneering "treatise on Greek love, defined as "what the Greeks called paiderastia, or boy-love", addressed especially to "medical psychologists and jurists" in order to give them a new perspective on "sexual inversion."

William Armstrong Percy, Pederasty and Pedagogy in Archaic Greece, Champaign: University of Illinois Press, 1996. Downloadable from the author's website together with two further unpublished volumes continuing the history down to the end of the ancient era and making this by far the most thorough history of Greek love in antiquity.

Eric Bethe, "Die Dorische Knabenliebe: Ihre Ethik und Ihre Idee" (Dorian Boy-love: its Ethics and Meaning) in Rheinisches Museum für Philologie 62 (1907), pp. 438-74. A rough translation from the German as The Doric Boy-Love: Its Ethics and Ideology by Franco Luigi Viero, 2017, is online.

Paul Cartledge, "The politics of Spartan pederasty" in The Cambridge Classical Journal, 27, January 1981, pp 17-36. A study of Spartan pederasty in the 7th to 4th centuries BC, concluding that it was very probably sexually expressed and linked as an archaic initiatory rite to similar Melanesian practices, and stressing its importance in forging political bonds in the later period.

Gisela M. A. Richter, Kouroi: Archaic Greek Youths. A Study of the Development of the Kouros Type in Greek Sculpture, New York: Hacker Art Books, reprinted 3rd edition, 1988.  Discussion of the anatomical development of the kouros type sculpture of male youth from its first appearance in the 7^th century BC to its final dissolution during the 5^th century BC, with additional illustrations and photos not in the previous editions.

Kenneth Dover,  Greek Homosexuality, London: Gerald Duckworth & Co., 1978. The first serious and still the greatest study of Greek pederasty, refreshingly free of the ideological baggage that has burdened others before and since.

Félix Buffière, Eros adolescent: la pédérastie dans la Grèce antique, Paris: Belles Lettres, 1980. In French only. A broad and erudite survey of the important role of pederasty in ancient Greek life, divided into four parts on history, poetry, philosophy and everyday life.

Gundel Koch-Harnack, Knabenliebe und Tiergeschenke: Ihre Bedeutung im päderastischen Erziehungssystem Athens (Boy-love and Animal Gifts: Their Meaning in the Athenian Pederastic Educational System), Berlin: Gebr.-Mann-Studio-Reihe, 1983.  A published revision of the author’s dissertation on the symbolism of animals used as gifts in scenes of pederastic courtship on Attic vases in the 6^th and early 5^th centuries BC.

Carola Reinsberg, "Knabenliebe" ("Boy-love") in her Ehe, Hetarentum und Knabenliebe im antiken Griechland (Marriage, Prostitution and Boy-love in ancient Greece), Munich: Beck, 1989. An illustrated survey unimaginatively limited by pigeon-holing the subject into strict sub-categories and an overly-literal and narrow interpretation of the ancient sources considered.

J. R. Ungaretti, "Pederasty, heroism and the family in classical Greece" in Journal of Homosexuality, vol. 3, 1978, pp.291-300. Shows how pederasty was an integral part of Greek culture related to the literary concept of heroism, but operating as "part of a larger system of emotional and sexual outlets."

Harald Patzer, Die griechische Knabenbliebe (Greek boy-love), Wiesbaden: Franz Steiner, 1982. A work building on Dover's foregoing study, but which insists on Greek boy-love as a distinct phenomenon with clearly defined characteristics that cannot be encapsulated by terms such as homosexuality.

Thomas K. Hubbard,  Homosexuality in Greece and Rome, Berkeley, California: University of California Press, 2003.  A massive and scholarly anthology of all the most important ancient texts shedding light on the various forms of ancient European homosexuality, amongst which Greek love was easily predominant.

Thomas K. Hubbard (editor), Greek Love Reconsidered, New York: Wallace Hamilton Press, 2000. Four essays on pederasty in ancient Greece: 1. "Pederasty and Democracy: The Marginalization of a Social Practice" by Hubbard himself, an interesting survey of deteriorating attitudes in both classical Athens and the late 20th century due to an upsurge in egalitarianism; 2. "Leagros and Euphronios: Painting Pederasty in Athens" by H. A. Shapiro; 3. "Athenian Ideas about Cretan Pederasty" by David D. Dodd; 4. "The Allure of Harmodius and Aristogeiton" by Sara Monoson. Also translations of twenty short poems.

Thomas K. Hubbard, "Popular Perceptions of Elite Homosexuality in Classical Athens" in Arion: A Journal of Humanities and the Classics, Third Series, Vol. 6, No. 1 (Spring-Summer, 1998), pp. 48-78. Argues from Athenian comedy and oratory that there was proletarian Athenian prejudice against pederasty as well as against adult passives, that other historians have exaggerated the sharp distinction between active and passive roles, and that Greek homosexuality was not therefore as radically different as usually supposed from late 20th-century American homosexuality.

Jennifer Larson (editor), “Chapter 4: Pederasty and Male Homoerotic Relations” in Greek and Roman Sexualities: A Sourcebook, London: Bloomsbury Academic, 2012, pp. 107-131. A selection of texts from ancient Greece and Rome that illustrate the various attitudes toward pederasty from the 7^th century BC through the 5^th century AD.

B. C. Verstraete, "Homosexuality in ancient Greek and Roman civilization: A critical bibliography" in Journal of Homosexuality, Vol. 3, No. 1, 1977, pp. 79-89. Brings together more than thirty references to ancient homosexuality, predominantly being pederasty.

Eva Cantarella, Secondo natura. La bisessualità nel mondo antico, Roma: Editori Riuniti, 1988; 2nd expanded and updated edition, Milano: Rizzoli, 1995. 1st edition translated from the Italian by Cormac Ó Cuilleanáin as Bisexuality in the Ancient World, New Haven: Yale University Press, 1992.

Andrew Lear & Eva Cantarella, Images of Ancient Greek Pederasty. Boys were their Gods, New York: Routledge, 2008. An excellent survey of the ancient Greek ceramics most important for knowledge of pederastic practices, disappointingly illustrated only with small black and white images, together with a very useful catalogue of all the ceramics touching obviously on the subject.

Jean Marcadé, Eros Kalos: Essay on Erotic Elements in Greek Art, Geneva: Nagel, 1962.  Review. A well-illustrated "essay on erotic elements in Greek art" by an archaeologist.

James Davidson, The Greeks and Greek Love: a Radical Reappraisal of Homosexuality in Ancient Greece, London: Weidenfeld & Nicolson, 2007.  Review. Only relevant in a purely negative sense, this is a rewriting of history rather than a reappraisal, denying Greek love its essential nature and purporting through invention and distortion to show that Greek homosexuality was nearly the same as 21st-century American gay culture.

John M. Dillon, “Chapter 5: A Peculiar Institution: The Etiquette of Homosexual Relationships” in his Salt and Olives: Morality and Custom in Ancient Greece, Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press, 2004, pp. 101-126. A discussion of the moral attitudes towards the practice of pederasty in Classical Athens, based on the writings of Plato, Xenophon, Lysias and Aischines. The degree to which the author is influenced by 21st century values  may be deduced from his anachronistic conclusion that "either...Athenian adult males were quite oblivious to the harm that they were doing to the psyches of the young…, or ... in a society where such practices were accepted, no significant harm was done."

Robin Osborne, "Chapter 11: Imaginary Intercourse: An Illustrated History of Greek Pederasty" in How to Do Things with History: New Approaches to Ancient Greece, edited by Danielle Allen, Paul Christensen and Paul Millett, Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2018, pp. 313-338. The author of this chapter argues that the scenes depicted on Ancient Greek vases were fantasies of homoerotic desire and not a narrative history of pederasty.  He debunks the modern invention of “intercrural intercourse.” 

Erick Pontalley, "Celtic Pederasty in Pre-Roman Gaul" in Paidika issue VI, Amsterdam, Autumn 1990, pp. 32-39. A summary of all that is known mixed up with a great amount of sometimes wild speculation suggesting close parallels between the initiatory pederasty practised in ancient Gaul and archaic Greece.

David Clark, “Chapter 2: Germanic Pederasty: The Evidence of Classical Ethnographers” in his Between Medieval Men: Male Friendship and Desire in Early Medieval English Literature, Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2009, pp. 39-53. Useful quotations and discussion of all the classical references to the practice of homosexuality amongst the ancient Germanic tribes, but underestimating the probability that, like other ancients, the Germans accepted pederasty as an initiatory rite while condemning adult male passives.

P. Murgatroyd, "Tibullus and the Puer Delicatus" in Acta Classica, Vol. 20 (1977), pp. 105-119. Despite the title, this includes a survey of the character of the loved boy in Greek and other Augustan Roman poetry, as well as Tibullus; his freedom from facial and bodily hair is shown to be the preeminent key to his attraction.

Craig A. Williams, Roman Homosexuality: Ideologies of Masculinity in Classical Antiquity, 1st edition, Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1999; 2^nd, revised edition, Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2010. An exhaustive and very insightful study of Roman homosexuality laying bare its distinct and mostly pederastic character, which only falls short of being definitive in not tracing its evolution over the imperial period.

Caroline Vout, Power and Eroticism in Imperial Rome, Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2009. 

Dyfri Williams, The Warren Cup, London: British Museum, 2006. A scholarly study of the Roman silver drinking-cup superbly engraved with explicit scenes of pederastic sex, breath-takingly honest and clear-sighted in its analysis for a 21st-century book on such a subject.

Geoff Puterbaugh, The Crucifixion of Hyacinth. Jews, Christians, and Homosexuals from Classical Greece to Late Antiquity, New York: Authors Choice, 2000. Review. A thorough and well-sourced survey of the critical role of Christianity in demonising pederasty in late antiquity that would have been more valuable if more understanding of the appeal of Christian thinking.

 

Europe, AD 381-1700

Sir Noel Malcolm, Forbidden Desire in Early Modern Europe: Male-Male Sexual Relations, 1400-1750, Oxford University Press, 2024. An non-doctrinaire history of homosexuality in not only non-Slavic Europe, but the Ottoman Empire and European colonies, based on thorough and original research in an impressive array of languages and challenging some orthodoxies. The popularity of Greek love among men who also liked women in southern Europe and the Ottoman Empire is affirmed, while northern Europe is shown to have been different even well before the emergence of mollies around 1700.

Dyan Elliott, The Corrupter of Boys: Sodomy, Scandal and the Medieval Clergy, Philadelphia: University of Pennysylvania Press, 2020. A study of how the mediaeval church was usually keen to avoid scandal by largely ignoring widespread sex between the clergy and boys. Useful for the researcher as a guide to the many sources cited, but more than usually bigoted and myopic, even for 2020. The poets of the 12th-century flowering of Greek love (almost the only source of understanding apart from records of rules and punishments) are touched on in only one page and assumed with no evidence to have been "abusers".

Norman Roth, "'Deal gently with the young man': Love of Boys in Medieval Hebrew Poetry of Spain" in Spectrum, Vol. 57, No. 1 (Jan. 1982), pp. 20-51. PDF. A study with a few characteristic examples of what was evidently a popular genre accepted by the Jewish communities of mediaeval Spain and with many similarities to the Moslem boy-love poetry of the time, though the love depicted is not known to have been physically expressed beyond licit kissing.

Thomas Stehling, “To love a medieval boy” in Journal of Homosexuality 8 (1983) 151-170. A fascinating analysis of how the erotic appeal to men of boys was distinguished from that of girls in 12th-century French love poems.

James Saslow, Ganymede in the Renaissance: Homosexuality in art and society, Yale University Press, New Haven, 1986.

Dyan Elliott, The Corrupter of Boys: Sodomy, Scandal, and the Medieval Clergy, University of Pennsylvania Press, 2020. A study of mediaeval sex between the clergy and boys with pretensions to originality founded on its rewriting mediaeval sodomy as child abuse conforming with modern dogma; valuable nevertheless for its presentation in detail of numerous cases.

Guido Ruggiero, The Boundaries of Eros: Sex Crime and Sexuality in Renaissance Venice, Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1985.  An examination of both licit and illicit sex from the records of Venetian courts, including much on then prevalent pederasty.

Michael Rocke, Forbidden Friendships. Homosexuality and Male Culture in Renaissance Florence, Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1996. Review.

Marcella Marongiu, Il Mito di Ganimede, Florence: Mandragora, 2002.

Richard Sherr, "A Canon, A Choirboy, and Homosexuality in Late Sixteenth-Century Italy" in  Journal of Homosexuality, Volume 21, issue 3 (1991), pp. 1–22. The story, with original documents appended, of a scandal at Loreto in the Papal States in 1570 over a sodomitical liaison between a canon (beheaded) and a chorister of about 15 (whipped and banished).

Gabriele Martini, Il “vitio nefando” nella Venezia del Seicento: Aspetti sociali e repressione di giustizia (The “nefarious vice” in seventeenth-century Venice: Social aspects and repression of justice), Rome: Jouvence, 1988. A study of the criminal records of Venice, showing Greek love to have been ubiquitous and regarded as normal.

Luciano Marcello, “Società maschile e sodomia: dal declino della ‘polis’ al principato (Male Society and Sodomy. From the decline of the "polis" to the principality)” in Archivio storico italiano Vol. 150, 1992, pp.115–38. Study of Greek love in early modern Florence and Lucca showing it was widespread, customary and regarded as an entirely normal part of masculine sexual life.

Roger Freitas Freitas, "The Eroticism of Emasculation: Confronting the Baroque Body of the Castrato" in The Journal of Musicology, Vol. 20, No. 2, University of California Press, Spring 2003), pp. 196-249. A study of the popularity of the castrated singers of early modern Italy, arguing that it was erotically highly charged through close association with the popularity then of pederasty, with interesting insights accounting for the latter.

Karen Liebreich, Fallen Order: Intrigue, Heresy, and Scandal in the Rome of Gallileo and Caravaggio, New York: Grove, 2004.  A detailed account of the teacher-boy sex scandal that led to the Papal suppression of the educational Order of the Piarists in 1646.

Cristian Berco, Sexual Hierarchies, Public Status: Men, Sodomy, and Society in Spain's Golden Age, Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 2006.

Clement A. Miller, "Jerome Cardan on Gombert, Phinot, and Carpentras" in The Musical Quarterly, Vol. 58, No. 3, July 1972), pp. 412-419. Translation and analysis of what Gerolao Cardano had to say about the punishment for sodomising boys of three eminent French and Italian men in the mid-16th century: the composers Nicolas Gombert and Dominique Phinot and the humanist Jacopo Bonfadio.

B. R. Burg, Sodomy and the Pirate Tradition: English Sea Rovers in the Seventeenth-Century Caribbean, New York: New York University Press, 1994. Portrays the pirate community, which  it appears certain was exclusively homosexual while aboard ship, as almost exclusively pederastic, comparing it, for instance, to vagabonds on the road, among whom men also paired off with boys.

 

Modern Europe

Wilhelm van Rosen, "Sodomy in Early Modern Denmark" in the Journal of Homosexuality XVI: 1-2 (1989), pp. 177-204. A study detailing and explaining the rarity of prosecutions for sodomy in early modern Denmark.

Arthur N. Gilbert, "Buggery and the British Navy, 1700-1861" in Journal of Social History, 10 (1), Fall 1976, pp. 72-98.  An excellent survey, which makes it clearly that even in this late period buggery at sea was usually of a boy by a man: in 18 of the 19 cases cited where the age of the passive participant was indicated, he was a boy. Also offers some original and fascinating explanations for the navy's extreme antipathy to buggery then.

Barry Richard Burg, Boys at Sea, Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan, 2007. Review. An account of homosexuality in the British Royal Navy 1700-1850 as seen in the records of the courts martial for its punishment. Aptly titled from most of it having involved boys.

Rousseau, George, "The Kiss of Death and Cabal of Dons: Blackmail and Grooming in Georgian Oxford" in Journal of Historical Sociology Vol. 21 No. 4 December 2008, pp. 368-396. A study of changing attitudes to sodomy in mid-18th century England and the emergence of teenage blackmailers, concentrating on the case of an Oxford don who fled after being accused of propositioning a boy of 15.

Eufemiosvoudes, Anecdotes pour servir à l'histoire secrète des Ebugors (Anecdotes to help with the secret history of buggers), Amsterdam: J.-P. Du Valis, 1733. An important early pamphlet about sodomy, with particular attention to the notorious Deschauffours affair of 1726 wherein Benjamin Deschauffours was burned at the stake in Paris for kidnapping boys and selling them to some 200 French aristocrats. The pamphlet depicts Deschauffours ("Fourchuda") as the champion of the oppressed class in Spira ("Paris") who in his zeal in defending a large army of buggers was taken prisoner in the struggle, thrown into the fire by the partisans of the Cytherons (referencing the Greek island of Cythera, traditionally associated with heterosexual love). Routinely banned by censors.

Daniel Orrells, Classical Culture and Modern Masculinity, Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2011 An examination of the significance of ancient Greek pederasty for the formation of scholarly historicism by German and English thinkers from the middle of the eighteenth century into the beginning of the twentieth.

Chiara Beccalossi, “The ‘Italian Vice’: Male Homosexuality and British Tourism in Southern Italy,” in Italian Sexualities Uncovered, 1789–1914, ed. Valeria Babini, Chiara Beccalossi and Lucy Riall,, London: Palgrave, 2015, pp. 185–203.

John Chandos, "A Demon Hovering", being chapter 14 of his Boys Together: English Public Schools 1800-1864, London: Hutchinson, 1984. Read on this website.

Alisdare Hickson,  The Poisoned Bowl. Sex and the public school, London: Duckworth, 1996. A history of homosexuality in British public schools in the 19th and 20th centuries, priceless as a primary source because most of it is devoted to witness accounts elicited by the author from the old boys of the many schools covered.

Alex Renton, Stiff Upper Lip: Secrets, crimes and the schooling of a ruling class, London: Weidenfeld & Nicolson, 2017.  A polemic about the harmful effects of attending British boarding-school in the late 19th and 20th centuries, of which chapters 28, 31 and 33 are all or mostly about sex in them between older and younger boys, and chapters 34, 36-9, 41 and 43-4 about the same between boys and masters. Some valuable information is disfigured by the author's unfair dismissal of narratives that do not fit with the 21st-century dogma he takes for granted as definitive wisdom.

Brian Reade (editor), Sexual Heretics: Male Homosexuality in English Literature from 1850 to 1900. London: Routledge & Kegan Paul, 1970. A then-revelatory anthology of mostly pederastic prose and verse.

Michael Matthew Kaylor, Secreted Desires. The Major Uranians: Hopkins, Pater and Wilde, Brno: Masaryk University, 2006.

Timothy D’Arch Smith, Love in Earnest: Some Notes on the Lives and Writings of the English “Uranian” Poets, London: Routledge & K. Paul, 1970. This definitive study of the Uranians, English poets between 1889 and 1930 inspired by Greek pederasty, is unusually much more interesting than its subject: many of the poets had dull and/or unhappy lives and little of their poetry is outstanding, but the book is so extraodinarily erudite as to be fascinating and indispensible.

Brian Taylor, "Motives for Guilt-free Pederasty: Some Literary Considerations" in The Sociological Review, vol. 24, no. 1, 1 February 1976, pp. 97-114.  A study of how the literary output of the English "Uranian Poets" can be read as "a recitation of available situated motives for [...] guilt-free pederasty".

Morris Kaplan, Sodom on the Thames: : Sex, Love, and Scandal in Wilde Times, Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 2005.

H. Montgomery Hyde, The Cleveland Street Scandal, London: W. H. Allen, 1976. Review.

C. Caunter,‘Dr. Bradford is obviously a lover of boys.’ Early-20^th-century reactions to the theme of boy love in the poetry of E. E. Bradford, 1st published on this website, 2023. Read here. An erudite and thorough survey of contemporary reviews of the works of probably the best Uranian poet, showing how tolerant the mainstream press of the 1910s-1920s was of openly-expressed Greek love.

Hans Blüher, Die deutsche Wandervogelbewegung als erotisches Phänomen: Ein Beitrag zur Erkenntnis der sexuellen Inversion, Berlin Tempelhof: Bernhard Weise, 1912. Translated from the original German as The German Wandervogel Movement as Erotic Phenomenon, North Carolina: Morrisville, 2018. An active participant and observer's analysis of this German youth movement of 1896-1933, arguing that erotic feeling between the boys and the young men who led them was a central and positive dynamic in it.

Oliari, Enrico, L'omo delinquente: Scandali e delitti gay dall'Unità a Giolitti (The Homo Delinquent: Gay Scandals and Crimes from Unity to Giolitti), Rome: Prospettiva, 2006. Discussion of nineteen homosexual scandals in Italy 1861-1914, of which seven were pederastic, mostly in church-run boarding-schools but also including boy models for the photographers Pluschow and von Gloeden.

Franz Schoenberner, "Sicily, Taormina, and Connected Matters", being chapter 18 of his Confessions of a European Intellectual, New York: MacMillan, 1946. Read the Greek love content.  Written in the context of the author's stay in the little Italian town of Taormina, an account of the by-then well established community of foreign pederasts and local boys.

Alessio Ponzio, "'What They Had between Their Legs Was a Form of Cash': Homosexuality, Male Prostitution, and Intergenerational Sex in 1950s Italy," in Historical Reflections, Volume 46, Issue 1, Spring 2020, pp. 62–78.  Described as "showing how ubiquitous male youth prostitution was in 1950s Italy, exposes the pederastic and (homo)sexual vivacity of this decade. Moreover, this article also suggests that even if police, the media, and medical institutions were trying to crystallize a rigid chasm between homo- and heterosexuality, there were still forces in Italian society that resisted such strict categorization. The young hustlers described by contemporary observers bear witness to the sexual flexibility of the 1950s in Italy."

Roger Peyrefitte, Jeunes Proies (Young Quarry), Paris: Flammarion, 1956. In French only. A book in two parts, of which only the first is of Greek love interest, concerning letters to the author from pubescent boys about his famous novel on schoolboy pederasty, including confessions of their own special friendships.

Dillibe Onyeama, "Chapter 7 Homosexuality" (& the following sentence) in Nigger at Eton, London: Leslie Frewin, 1972, pp. 161-172. Review. An account of homosexuality (typically pederastic) at England's leading public school, by the second African to attend it, there 1965-69.

Jean-Luc Hennig, Les garçons de passe: enquête sur la prostitution masculine, Paris: Hallier, 1978. About male prostitution, mostly of teenage boys, in France.

Michael Ingram, "Ingram, M., The Participating Victim—A Study of Sexual Offences against Pre-Pubertal Boys" in Cook & Wilson (editors), Love and Attraction, Oxford: Pergamon, 1979, pp. 511-7. PDF. A child counsellor's study of the varying motivations of 73 willing English boys aged 6-14 and of the men sexually involved with them.

Father M. Ingram,"The Participating Victim A study of 92 cases of sexual contact between adult and child" in British Journal of Sexual Medicine, Vol 6, 1979, Nos. 44:  pp. 22-26 and 45: pp. 24-26 & 60. A report on the author's then recent experience counselling 74 Leicestershire boys aged 6 to 14 who had been sexually involved with men, as well as some of these men. Nearly identical to the preceding entry.

Trobriands collective of authors, The (editors), Forbrydelse uden offer, En bog om paeofili, Denmark, 1986. Translated from the Danish by Dr. Edward Brongersma as Crime Without Victims. A book about paedophilia, Global Academic Publishers, Amsterdam in 1993. Description with links to Greek love content. Despite the secondary title, mostly about sexual relationships between men and boys of 12 to 14. The second and much more valuable half of the book is made up of interviews with those involved in such relationships in Denmark between ca. 1943 and 1986.

Sandfort, Dr. Theo, Boys on their Contacts with Men: A Study of Sexually Expressed Friendships, Elmhurst, New York: Global Academic Publishers, 1987.  Based on interviews conducted 1977-9 with 25 Dutch boys involved in Greek love.

Michael C. Baurmann, Sexualität , Gewalt und psychische Folgen (Sexuality, Violence and Psychological Consequences), Wiesbaden: Bundeskriminalamt, 1983. A translation into English by Jeff Nickel is available online. A study, extremely rare of its kind, produced by the West German government of all 8,058 sexual "victims" known to the police in Lower Saxony 1969-73, which, emphasised self-evaluation as well as using other criteria, and found that not one of the boys under 14, as opposed to the girls, had been injured. 

Glenn D. Wilson and David N. Cox, The Child Lovers, London: Peter Owen, 1983. Description with links to Greek love content.  An investigation by psychologists in 1978-9 into 77 British men mostly, despite the title, attracted only to pubescent boys. Rare for the era in being based on a non-prisoner sample, and unusually objective, its value was obfuscated by its fashionable insistence on conflating Greek love with other forms of child-love.

Van Naerssen, Alex, "Man-Boy Lovers: Assessment, Counseling and Psychotherapy," in Journal of Homosexuality, volume 20, nos. 1-2, 1990, pp. 175-188. A sex therapist's study of sixteen men in the Netherlands in the early 1980s who had come to him for help coping with their sexual preference for adolescent boys.

Wolf Vogel, Heimliche Liebe: Eros zwischen Knabe und Mann, Hamburg: Jahn & Ernst, 1997. Anonymous translation from the original German as Secret Love: Eros between Boy and Man, online only, 2022. Read on this website. True stories of love affairs between German and Dutch and men told to the author in interviews or letters by the former boys and, in a few cases their parents. The earliest story stretches back to 1966 and most are from the 1970s.

Karl Andersson,  Bögarnas värsta vän - historien om tidningen Destroyer, Berlin: Entartes Leben, 2010. Translated from the original Swedish by the author as Gay Man’s Worst Friend – the Story of Destroyer Magazine & its Appendix, same publisher, 2011. A telling account of the hypocritical animosity of the Swedish gay community in the first decade of this century to a witty and provocative magazine that unabashedly celebrated the beauty of teenage boys.

 

Sub-Saharan Africa

Stephen Murray & Will Roscoe, Boy-Wives and Female Husbands: Studies in African Homosexualities, New York: St. Martin's Press, 1998.

Revd. J. P. Thoonen, Black Martyrs, London: Sheed & Ward, 1941. An account, based mostly on missionary testimony and told from their point of view, of Mwanga II King of Buganda's fury over the success of Christian missionaries in convincing some of his 500 pubescent boy pages to refuse pedication by him, and his consequent massacres in 1885-7 of those of his pages and ex-pages held responsible.

Father J. F. Faupel, African Holocaust: the Story of the Uganda Martyrs, London: Geoffrey Chapman, 1962. A revised account of Thoonen's foregoing account of Mwanga II King of Buganda's violent clash with Christian missionaries provoked by their subversion of the boy pages he was accustomed to pedicating, told from the same missionary point of view and with some useful details added.

E. E. Evans-Pritchard, "Sexual Inversion among the Azande", in American Anthropologist, New Series, Vol. 72, No. 6, December 1970, pp. 1428-34. Read on this website. An anthropologist's report on the once-prevalent custom of bachelor Azande warriors taking boys aged 12-20 as temporary wives, a custom which had been killed by European influence by the time of his fieldwork of 1926, but was still well remembered by its old practitioners.

Henri Junod, "Appendix III. Unnatural Vice in the Johannesburg Compounds" in his Life of a South African tribe, London: Macmillan, 1927. Read on this website. An account of the pederasty found in 1915 to be practised by those living in the compounds set up for the Bantu-speaking natives working in the gold mines of Johannesburg in South Africa.

 

The Near East and North Africa from AD 381

"Homosexuality in Persian Literature" in Encyclopaedia Iranica XII (2004) pp. 445-454. As the literature from the 9th to the early 20th centuries shows that Greek love was extremely prevalent in Persia and was the only socially accepted form of homosexuality, this scholarly study of it amounts nearly to a history of Greek love there.

Allen Edwardes [Daniel Allan Kinsley], "Pederasty" in his The Jewel in the Lotus: A Historical Survey of the Sexual Culture of the East, New York: Julian Press, 1959, pp. 239-254. Read on this website. A writer on oriental erotica's entertaining but opinionated historical survey of Greek love in Islamic countries.

David Ghanim, “Chapter 11: Tempting Pederasty” in The Sexual World of the Arabian Nights, Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2018, pp. 138-151. A brief discussion of the depictions of male homosexuality in the 1,001 Nights, showing it to have been exclusively pederastic and representative of the flourishing of Greek love in the medieval Moslem world due to Sufi mysticism, in which youthful male beauty is a manifestation of God's beauty, and the prevalence of male-dominated commerce, trade and travel.

Bernhard Stern, "Chapter Eighteen: Pederasty and Sodomy" in his Medizin, Aberglaube und Geschlechtsleben in der Türkei. Mit Berücksichtigung der moslemischen Nachbarländer und der ehemaligen Vesallenstaaten. Eigene Ermittelungen und gesammelte Berichte, Berlin: H. Barsdorf, 1903, translated from the German by David Berger M. A. as The Scented Garden: Anthropology of the Sex Life in the Levant, New York: American Ethnological Press, 1933. Read on this website. A cultural historian's account of the widespread practice of pederasty in the Ottoman Empire down to his own day.

Peter Lamborn Wilson, “Chapter 4: The Witness Game: Imaginal Yoga and Sacred Pedophilia in Persian Sufism” and “Chapter 5: The Wine Songs of Fakhroddin Iraqi” in Scandal: Essays In Islamic Heresy, Brooklyn, NY: Autonomedia, 1988, pp. 93-151. Chapter 4 is about the Persian Sufi practice of shahed bazi (witness play), in which spiritual realization is obtained through the contemplation of the beauty of boys, and includes a commentary on several homoerotic quatrains of the medieval Persian Sufi mystic Awhadoddin Kermani (d. 1238). Chapter 5 provides anecdotes from a medieval biography of Persian Sufi poet Fakhroddin (Fakhr al-Din) Iraqi (1213-89) that demonstrate his love for the beauty of boys, together with translations of several of Iraqi's boylove poems and the author's commentary on this genre of Persian Sufi poetry.

Jonathan Drake, "'Le Vice' in Turkey" in the International Journal of Greek Love, II (November 1966) pp. 13-27. Read on this website. A sketch of Greek love in Turkey from the 14th to 20th centuries, less scholarly but livelier and more sympathetic than Stern's chapter on the same subject cited above.

Matthew Thomas Miller, "Embodying the beloved: embodiment, (homo)eroticism, and the straightening of desire in the hagiographic tradition of Fakhr al-Dīn ʿIrāqī" in Middle Eastern Literatures 21 No. 1 (2018) pp. 1-27. A study showing how erotic feeling for boys was harnessed by Sufism for spiritual ends, concentrating on the example 13th-century ʿIrāqī.

W.A. Andrews & Mehmet Kalpakli,  The Age of Beloveds, Durham, North Carolina: Duke University Press, 2005.

Stephen O. Murray, "Homosexuality in the Ottoman Empire" in Historical Reflections, vol. 33, No. 1 Eighteenth-Century Homosexuality in Global Perspective, Spring 2007, pp. 101-116. A brief survey of Ottoman pederasty between 1683 and 1807.

Khaled El-Rouayheb, Before Homosexuality in the Arab-Islamic World, 1500-1800, Chicago: Chicago University Press, 2005. An excellent and thorough study of sexual behaviour between males, almost entirely pederastic, and attitudes towards it in early modern Arabic lands, making excellent use of the author's exhaustive knowledge of manuscript, as well as published, sources.

Eyuboglu, Ismet Zeki, Divan Şiirinde Sapik Sevgi (Perverted Love in Divan Poetry), Istanbul: Okat, 1968. A journalist's study of pederasty as a popular theme in early modern Ottoman poetry, claiming it only arose due to gender segregation, and advocating banning it from schools to avoid the corruption of youth.

 

India and Central Asia

Ruth Vanita and Saleem Kidwai (editors), "Part III – Medieval Materials in the Perso-Urdu Tradition" in Same-Sex Love in India: Readings from Literature and History, New York: St. Martin’s Press, 2000, pp. 107-190. Depictions of homoerotic (almost all pederastic) love in Indian literature (primarily in Persian and Urdu) during the 13^th to 18th centuries.  Brief biographies of several Indian Islamic writers and excerpts of their writings are presented.

C. M. Naim, “Chapter 2: Homosexual (Pederastic) Love in Pre-Modern Urdu Poetry” in Urdu Texts and Contexts: The Selected Essays of C.M. Naim, Delhi: Permanent Black, 2004, pp. 19-41. Discussion of the treatment of amrad-parasti (pederastic love) by Urdu-language poets of the pre-1857 Indo-Muslim world, and also of the similarities and differences between these pre-modern Urdu poets and the English Uranian poets of the late 19th and early 20th centuries. 

Ingeborg Baldauf, Die Knabenliebe in Mittelasien: Bacabozlik (Boylove in Central Asia: Bacabozlik), Berlin: Das Arabische Buch, 1988. In German only.

Murad Khan Mumtaz, “Chapter 4: 'I Saw My Lord in the Form of a Beardless Youth'” in Faces of God: Images of Devotion in Indo-Muslim Painting 1500-1800, Leiden: Brill, 2023, pp. 194-246. A detailed analysis of paintings from Mughal India in which young Mughal princes are portrayed as the Sufi ideal of the beautiful youth being the embodiment of divine beauty and excellence.

Ali Abdi, "The Afghan Bachah and its Discontents: An Introductory History" in Iranian Studies (2022), pp. 1–20. Available online. A short but remarkably objective, well-documented and useful study of the important cultural phenomenon of bachas (a word for beardless boys used with erotic implications) in Afghanistan from the late 18th century to 2021.

 

The Far East

Fang Fu Ruan, "Homosexuality: From Golden Age to Dark Age", being chapter 7 of his Sex in China: Studies in Sexology in Chinese Culture, New York: Plenum, 1991.

Bret Hinsch, Passions of the cut sleeve: the male homosexual tradition in China, University of California Press, 1990.

Bernard Faure, "Chapter Five. Buddhist Homosexualities" and "Chapter Six. Boys to Men” of his The Red Thread: Buddhist Approaches to Sexuality, Princeton, New Jersey: Princeton University Press, 1998. The 5th of these very thorough and scholarly chapters concerns pederasty among Buddhists in Japan and China, and the 6th the chigo (boy acolyte) as the beloveds of Japanese Buddhist monks.

Or Porath, “Cosmology of Male-Male Love in Medieval Japan: Nyakudō no kanjinchō and the Way of Youths “ in Journal of Religion in Japan, Volume 4 (2015), pp. 241-271.  An analysis of Ijiri Matakurō Tadasuke’s Nyakudō no kanjinchō (The Solicitation Book of the Way of Youths) of 1482), which sought to establish a religious basis for homoerotic love between young Buddhist acolytes and adult monks by constructing a Buddhist-based cosmology, a pantheon of divinities, and ethical standards for such love.

Kitamura Kigin 北村季吟, Iwatsutsuji 岩津々志 (Wild Azaleas), Kyoto: Sawada Kichizaemon, 1713. Translated (with an introduction) from the original Japanese by Paul Gordon Schalow in “The Invention of a Literary Tradition of Male Love: Kitamura Kigin's Iwatsutsuji” in Monumenta Nipponica, Vol. 48, No. 1 (Spring 1993), pp. 1-31.  An illustrated anthology of Japanese male homoerotic poetry and prose allegedly compiled in 1676 from sixteen classical works of literature spanning six centuries, with the purpose of providing a model for the proper expression of love between the men and male youths of his day.

Jun'ichi Iwata 岩田準一, Honcho danshoku ko 本朝男色考 (Considerations on Japanese Homosexuality), a series of essays in Showa 5-8, 1930-33.  In Japanese only, excepting excerpts from four which appeared in English in Tsuneo Watanabe and Jun'ichi Iwata's The love of the samurai: a thousand years of Japanese homosexuality, London: GMP, 1989.

Tsuneo Watanabe and Jun'ichi Iwata, La voie des éphèbes: histoire et histoires des homosexualités au Japon, Paris: Éditions Trismégiste, 1987. Translated from the French by D. R. Roberts as The love of the samurai: a thousand years of Japanese homosexuality, London: GMP, 1989.

Sachi Schmidt-Hori, Tales of Idolized Boys: Male-Male Love in Medieval Japanese Buddhist Narratives, Honolulu: University of Hawaii Press, 2021. A thorough and scholarly study of chigo, the boy acolytes of medieval Japaninvolved in institutionalised sexual liaisons with monks, and of the stories written about them. Breath-takingly open-minded for the date of publication.

Giovanni Vitiello, The Libertine's Friend: Homosexuality in Late Imperial China, Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2011. A study of male homosexuality in China focussing on "ideologies of masculinity and romantic love" as represented in fiction printed between 1550 and 1849.

Wu Cuncun, Homoerotic Sensibilities in Late Imperial China, London: RoutledgeCurzon, 2004. Study focusing on elite men's patronage of boy actors (xiaodan) of the Beijing opera during latter half of the Qing dynasty (18^th and 19^th centuries). The xiaodan typically ranged in age from 13 to 18 years.

J.-J. Matignon, “Deux mots sur la pederastie” in Superstitions, Crime et Misère en Chine (Superstitions, Crime and Misery in China), Lyon: Storck & Paris: Masson, 1899, pp. 255-80. Read a translation. A survey of pederasty in China by the military physician then attached to the French legation in Peking.

Laurent Long and Jean-Claude Féray, "Observations inédites d'Henri Jeoffrai sur la pédérastie en Chine (Unpublished observations of Henry Jeoffrai on pederasty in China)" in Inverses (Châtillon), No. 9, 2009. Read a translation of the partial online republication. Jeoffrai was a soldier ca. 1900 in love with a Peking boy prostitute and generally keen on Chinese boys, but who was shocked by the abundance of propositions he received from boys in Tonkin.

Mitsuo Sadatomo, Kobo daishi ikkan no sho, written in 1598; published in Kinsei shomin bunka 13 (1952) pp. 13-24. Described and partially translated from the Japanese by Paul Gordon Schalow as "Kobo Daishi's Book" in Buddhism, Sexuality & Gender edited by José Cabezón Ignacio, Albany, New York: State University of New York Press, 1992, pp. 216-221. Read on this website. Purports to give the insights and recommendations of the 9th-century founder of the Shingon school of Buddhism's concerning sexual relationships between monks and boy acolytes, thereby revealing 16th-century practices.

Gary Leupp, Male Colors: The Construction of Homosexuality in Tokugawa Japan, Berkeley, California: University of California Press, 1997. 

Gregory M. Pflugfelder, Cartographies of Desire: Male-Male Sexuality in Japanese Discourse, 1600–1950, Berkeley, California: University of California Press, 1999.

Timothy Screech, Sex and the Floating World: Erotic Imagery in Japan 1710-1820, London: Reaktion Books, 1998. 2nd edition, 2009.

Jeffrey Angles, Writing the Love of Boys: Origins of Bishonen Culture in Modernist Japanese Literature, Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2011.  A most valuable guide to twentieth-century Japanese literature on the love of boys, though unfortunately written in academic jargon and fundamentally misguided through blindness to the differences between traditional pederasty and recent gay culture.

J. B. M. de Lyon, "Over de waroks en gemblaks van Ponorogo" in Koloniaal Tijdschrift, vol. 30 (1941), pp. 740-60.  Translated by Olius Belombre for this website as "On the Waroks and Gemblaks of Ponorogo", 2023. Read here.

Jerome Weiss, "The Gemblakan: kept boys among the Javanese of Ponorogo." Ph.D. dissertation, American Anthropological Association Meetings, Mexico City, 1974.

Richard Rawson, The Paggers Papers, Amsterdam: Acolyte Press, 1993. PDF. A frank first-hand account by an American of the ready acceptance by the youngsters and their parents of sex between boys and foreigners, both commercial and not, in the Philippines of the 1970s and early 1980s, concentrating on the most developed scene of boy prostitution in the Pagsanjan Falls.

 

Oceania

Yorick Smaal, “Boys and Homosex: Danger and Possibility in Queensland, 1890–1914,” in Children, Childhood and Youth in the British World, ed. Shirleene Robinson and Simon Sleight, London: Palgrave Macmillan, 2016, pp. 221–236.

Chris Brickell, “Waiting for Uncle Ben”: Age-Structured Homosexuality in New Zealand, 1920–1950" in Journal of the History of Sexuality, Vol. 21, No. 3 (2012)  467-495. Available online. A study of pederasty from richly-informative court records that pays careful attention to its distinct character in that time and place.

Mary Gillingham, "Chapter Six. Male Victims" in her Sexual Pleasures and Dangers: A History of Sexual Cultures in Wellington, 1900-1920, M.A. thesis, Massey University, 1998. An analysis of trials for sex crimes between males in the Wellington Supreme Court district of New Zealand, in which 29 of the 46 "victims" were boys aged 8 to 15, and many more were only a few years older.

Gilbert H. Herdt, Guardians of the Flutes, New York: McGraw-Hill, 1981.  An anthropological study of the institutionalised pederasty of the Sambia of Papua New Guinea.

Robert I. Levy, "The Community Function of Tahitian Male Transvestitism" in Anthropological Quarterly, Vol. 44, No. 1 (Jan., 1971), pp. 12-21. PDF. An anthropologist's study based almost entirely on a community where the mahu (institutionalised transvestite) was a boy of 16.

Thomas M. Ernst, "Onabasulu Male Homosexuality: Cosmology, Affect and Prescribed Male Homosexual Activity among the Onabasulu of the Great Papuan Plateau" in Oceania, Vol. 62, No. 1 (Sydney, Sept. 1991), pp. 1-11. PDF. An anthropological study, made in 1970-73, of the "culturally required" insemination of Onabasulu pubescent boys by men selected as their lovers through mutual choice, and achieved through the man rubbing his semen on his boy's skin after being masturbated by him.

Martin Flanagan, The Empty Honour Board: A School Memoir, Australia: Viking, 2023. A memoir of life as a schoolboy 1966-71 at a brutal Catholic boarding school in Tasmania, including much about sex there between priests and his schoolfellows.

 

The Americas

Bernard Sexton, Gray Wolf Stories: Indian Mystery Tales of Coyote, Animals and Men, illustrated by Gwenyth Waugh, New York: Macmillan, 1921. PDF. Review. Traditional North American Indian tales some of which, though they include no overt mention of Greek love (and indeed purport to be for modern children), report customs bearing such striking resemblances to ancient Greek pederastic practices that (considering Greek love is attested by other sources to have been practised among many tribes) they must be considered a valuable resource for surmise.

Julia Ogden, "Innocent Children and Passive Pederasts: Sodomy, Age of Consent, and the Legal and Juridical Vulnerability of Boys in Buenos Aires, 1853–1912" in Law and History Review, February 2019, Vol. 37, No. 1, pp. 237-274. A study, founded on 65 court cases over the alleged rape of boys, of evolving attitudes leading to and resulting from the legalisation of sodomy with males of twelve in 1887.

Don Romesburg, " 'Wouldn't a Boy Do?' Placing Early-Twentieth-Century Male Youth Sex Work into Histories of Sexuality" in Journal of the History of Sexuality, Vol. 18, No. 3, New Perspectives on Commercial Sex and Sex Work in Urban America, 1850-1940 (Sep., 2009), pp. 367-392.

Steven Maynard, "'Horrible Temptations': Sex, Men and Working-Class Male Youth in Urban Ontario, 1890-1935" in The Canadian Historical Review, Volume 78, No. 2, Toronto, June 1997, pp. 191-235. PDF. A nuanced survey of criminal proceedings over pederasty, unsurprisingly including everything from rape to long-lasting love affairs, and shedding interesting light on the social and cultural conditions that gave rise to them.

Ralph Tindall, "The Male Adolescent Involved With a Pederast Becomes an Adult", in Journal of Homosexuality, volume 3, no. 4, 1978, pp. 373-382. Read on this website.  An American psychiatrist's study of the long-term effects of sex with men between 1946 and 1970 on nine of his boy patients (none of whom had been referred to him on account of their sexual histories).

John Gerassi, The Boys of Boise: Furor, Vice and Folly in an American City, New York: Macmillan, 1966. The story of the massive furor that arose 1955-7 over allegations of a sex ring In Idaho involving men and teenage boys.

Harmon, Dennis (editor), The Boy-Lovers. Four Sociological Case-Histories of Men Who Loved Boys, New York: Jumeaux, 1969.  Four erotically-explicit true American stories told by men of their sexual encounters with boys presented with a view to shedding light on Greek love.

John Mitzel, The Boston Sex Scandal, Boston: Glad Day, 1980. PDF.  An exposé of the brutality against boys and general dishonesty deployed in an ultimately unsuccessful plot to concoct a huge man/boy sex scandal in December 1977.

Lloyd, Robin, For Money or Love: Boy Prostitution in America, New York: Vanguard, 1976.  A sensationalistic study of boy prostitution, mostly in the USA in the 1970s, which, unusually, tries at least a little to see the boy's point of view.

Silverstein, Dr. Charles, "Love Between the Generations", a chapter in his Man to Man, New York: Morrow Quill, 1981. A psychologist's conclusions on Greek love, based on interviews with homosexuals from his practice in the USA in the 1970s, and rebutting the negative assumptions about it then increasingly prevalent.

Dr. Joseph Winchester, Getting It On. Rites of Passage: Homosexual Histories of Six Heterosexual American Boys, Amsterdam: Acolyte Press, 1989. PDF. Review. Interviews with boys all of whom had sexual experiences with both men and other boys, spanning a quarter of a century from the 1960s to the 1980s, none of them in large cities.

Patrick Boyle, Scout's Honor: Sexual Abuse in America's Most Trusted Institution, Rocklin, California: Prima, 1994.  A history, concentrating on then recent criminal cases, of sex between American Scout leaders and boys, much of it genuinely abusive, but including some mutual love affairs seen as abuse from the author's typically-narrow 1990s perspective.

Friedrich Krönke and Helma Börgartz, NAMBLA: Ein Porträt der "North American Man/Boy Love Association", Kiel: Frühlings Erwachen, 1985. A short (64 pp.) collection of documents dated 1982-84 shedding light on the organisation then at its peak in struggling for the acceptance of man/boy love in North America.

Schifter Síkora, Jacobo, La casa de Lila; un estudio de la prostitución masculina (The House of Lilac; a study of male prostitution), San Jose, Costa Rica: Instituto Latinoamericano de Prevención y Educación en Salud, 1997. A case study of boy prostitution.

Bruce Rind, "Gay and bisexual adolescent boys’ sexual experiences with men: An empirical examination of psychological correlates in a nonclinical sample" in Archives of Sexual Behavior, 30, 2001, pp. 345–368. Analysis of a 1997 study of 129 American university students who had had sex with men between the ages of 12 and 17.

Thomas K. Hubbard & Beert Verstraete (editors), Censoring Sex Research; The Debate over Male Intergenerational Relations, Walnut Creek, California: Left Coast, 2013.  A detailed academic study of the ruthless suppression in the last generation of any research producing results challenging the prevailing dogma that Greek love is necessarily harmful to boys.

 

Comments

If you would like to leave a comment on this webpage, please e-mail it to greek.love.tta@gmail.com, mentioning in the subject line either the title or the url of the page so that the editor can add it.

Anonymous 76, 26 December 2021

Here are some suggestions for the Other Histories list:
Sachi Schmidt-Hori, Tales of Idolized Boys: Male-Male Love in Medieval Japanese Buddhist Narratives, University of Hawaii Press, 2021.
Brandt Aymar, The Young Male Figure in Paintings, Sculptures and Drawings from Ancient Egypt to the Present, Crown Publishing, 1974.  Note: B&W photos of art depicting male youth
Dominique Fernandez, A Hidden Love: Art and Homosexuality, Prestel Publishing, 2002. Note: The artwork presented in this coffee table book is primarily of male youth with the exception of the last few chapters on 20th century and modern art.

 

Anonymous 79, 17 January 2022