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. Ones in which Greek love is only a minor theme are marked in gray.

 

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.

Karsch-Haack, Ferdinand, Das gleichgeschlechtliche Leben der Naturvölker, Munich: Reinhardt, 1911. Translated from the German by M. Lombardi-Nash as The Same-Sex Life of Indigenous Peoples, 2 volumes, Jacksonville, Florida: Urania Manuscripts, 2024. Comprehensive compilation of primary source materials on male same-sex sexuality, much of it pederastic, among North and South American Indians, Australian aborigines, Malayans and Melanesians, Eskimos and other Arctic peoples, and negroes of Africa. Believing sexual norms and behaviour often to be socially constructed rather than arising from an innate drive, the author argued it was less important to understand the etiology of same-sex sexuality than to understand its manifestations, which motivated his worldwide survey.

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 (Love of Darlings and Love of Friends in World Literature), Berlin: Adolf Brand, 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.

Camille Paglia, Sexual Personae, New Haven, Connecticut: Yale University Press, 1990. Read all the major passages to do with Greek love. A seminal study of sexual decadence in European and North American literature and art, including substantial passages examining the beautiful boy as one of "the most stunning sexual personae."

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.

Marcella Marongiu, Il Mito di Ganimede prima e dopo Michelangelo (The Myth of Ganymede Before and After Michelangeo), Florence: Mandragora, 2002. Detailed catalogue of artistic depictions of Ganymede 490 BC to AD 1760, arranged chronologically and fully illustrated in colour.

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 survey of how the subject of the beautiful boy has been treated in art through the ages, finely illustrated in colour.

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.

Abdulhamit Arvas, Boys Abducted: The Homoerotics of Empire and Race in Early Modernity, Durham, North Carolina: Duke University Press, 2025. Through a comparative reading of both English and Ottoman literatures and visual arts, this book discusses the abduction and circulation of both real and fictional adolescent boys in the Mediterranean during the 16th and early 17th centuries.

NEW!  Federico Garza Carvajal, Butterflies Will Burn: Prosecuting Sodomites in Early Modern Spain and Mexico, Austin: University of Texas Press, 2003. Contains many valuable records from sodomy trials, most of them involving pederastic sex, and material on Spanish colonisers' over-keyed and sometimes outright fantastical accusations that the local indigenous people practised sodomy.

NEW!  Luiz Mott, "In vino veritas: vinho e aguardente no cotidiano dos sodomitas luso brasileiros à época da Inquisição" ("In Wine, Truth: Wine and Spirits in the Daily Life of Luso-Brazilian Sodomites at the Time of the Inquisition”), in Topoi. Revista de História, Vol. 6, no. 10, 2005. An examination of sodomy cases brought before the Portuguese Inquisition in 16th to 18th century Portugal and Brazil from the angle of consumption of wine or sugarcane spirit; several are man-boy, and there is also the touching case of a 12-year-old (!) teacher who wrote love notes to his 10-year-old pupil and arranged to meet him in a banana grove

Katherine O'Donnell and Michael O'Rourke (eds), Queer Masculinities, 1550–1800: Siting Same-Sex Desire in the Early Modern World. Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan, 2006. A valuable collection of essays on homosexuality (most of it pederastic, though this is obscured and downplayed) ranging across most of the globe.

NEW!  Robert Purks Maccubbin (ed.), 'Tis Nature's Fault: Unauthorized Sexuality During the Enlightenment, Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1987. Essay collection addressing "unwed heterosexual domesticity, masturbation, prostitution, libertinism, homosexuality [overwhelmingly pederastic], and erotic literature," mostly in 18th-century Britain, but with a little on France and North America.

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.

NEW!   C. K. Li, D. J. West and T. P. Woodhouse, "Part One: "Sexual Encounters Between Boys and Adults" in Children's Sexual Encounters With Adults, London: Gerald Duckworth and Co., 1990. A survey of 20th century male students in Europe and the USA, mostly those studying social sciences and psychology, regarding sexual experiences with older people when the students were under sixteen and contains quite a few first-person reports on man-boy contacts.

Guido Franco, Desert Patrol (une aventure sous les tropiques), Paris: Les Editions de la Jungle, 1980. Translated from the French by Edouard 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.

Tsang, Daniel (editor), The Age Taboo: Gay Male Sexuality, Power and Consent, Boston: Alyson, 1981. Nineteen essays by seventeen writers with disparate views, all American excepting only two British, addressing the issues that then made pederasty controversial among "anglo progressives." Interesting, but the writers are mostly so absorbed in their topical politics that the book must be considered a little slice of Anglo-American history rather than a general study of pederasty, less still of "Greek love" which (with all the bigotry modernists are so capable of mustering) the writers unite in condemning (together with the historical legitimacy that it alone can confer).

NEW!  Thomas Waugh and Jason Garrison, Montreal Main: A Queer Film Classic. Vancouver: Arsenal Pulp Press, 2010. The authors use the fashionableness of the term "queer" to get away with being extremely forthright in this study of Frank Vitale's closely autobiographical 1974 film about a tender friendship between a boy of 12 and a man of 28 and of its reception, with many incisive observations about Greek love and its briefly positive depiction in avant-garde cinema of 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.

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.

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.

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.

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. Despite the title, mostly a study of pederasty in classical Greece and republican Rome, tracing it from its early apotheosis towards its debasement and proscription.

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.

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.

ISRAEL

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.

GREECE

Rudolf Beyer, Fabulae graecae quatenus quave aetate puerorum amore commutatae sint (Greek myths—how far, or at what stage, they were reshaped by love of boys), Weida, Thuringia: Thomas & Hubert, 1910. 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.

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.

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."

Hans Licht [Paul Hans Brandt], Sittengeschichte Griechenlands (Moral History of Greece), 3 volumes, Zurich: Paul Aretz: I. “Greek Society”, 1925; II “The Love Life of the Greeks”, 1926; and III. “Eroticism in Greek Art”, 1928. Almost all the first two vols. only translated from the original German by J. H. Freese as Sexual life in ancient Greece, edited by L. H. Dawson, London: Routledge & Kegan Paul, 1931. PDF. A superbly well-documented and informative study of sex in ancient Greek literature, concluding that Greek sexual life, taking pederasty comfortably on board with heterosexuality and eroticism in general, was unusually healthy.  Pederasty has its own section (II.5), but also pervades the rest.

William Armstrong Percy, Pederasty and Pedagogy in Archaic Greece, Champaign: University of Illinois Press, 1996. An excellent and original study arguing that pederasty became institutionalised in Greece in the 7th century BC and this was responsible for the extraordinary cultural florescence that ensued. Two further unpublished volumes on the author's defunct website continued the history down to the end of the ancient era, 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. PDF. A rough translation from the German as The Doric Boy-Love: Its Ethics and Ideology by Franco Luigi Viero, 2017, is online. A scholarly well-documented essay arguing that Greek boy-love was a Dorian innovation which became essential to the best in Greek culture, with sexual consummation a critical condition with sacred associations.

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. Illustrated in black-and-white.

Félix Buffière, Eros adolescent: la pédérastie dans la Grèce antique (Adolescent Eros: Pederasty in ancient Greece) Paris: Belles Lettres, 1980. 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 (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.

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.

NEW!  Martin F. Kilmer, Greek Erotica on Attic Red-Figure Vases. London: Duckworth, 1993. A detailed and thorough study of this corpus; more than half about pederasty.

Ross Brendle, "The Pederastic Gaze in Attic Vase-Painting" in Arts, Volume 8, issue 2, Basle, Switzerland: MDPI, 2019, 14 pp. PDF. Excellent explanation of the pederastic iconography on Attic vases, principally based on nine examples.

Christopher A. Faraone, Ancient Greek Love Magic. Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1999. This book is mostly concerned with heterosexual relationships but touches on pederastic ones here and there, e.g. "A tablet from Athens, for example, employs a simple wish-formula: 'Let him not "marry" another woman or boy'..."

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.” 

ROME

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.

Jennifer Ingleheart (ed.), Ancient Rome and the Construction of Modern Homosexual Identities. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2015. An interesting collection of essays on the intellectual and artistic legacy of specifically the Roman, as opposed to the Greek, pederastic tradition, of variable quality but making no attempt to disguise the boy-oriented nature of the phenomenon in question.

Amy Richlin, "Pueri" (pp. 34-44) and "Appendix 2. The Circumstances of Male Homosexuality in Roman Society of the Late Republic and Early Empire", being sections of her The Garden of Priapus: Sexuality & Aggression in Roman Humor, revised edition, Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1992, pp. 34-44 and 220-6. The first is an admirably detailed and graphic examination of the attributes of boys that sexually attracted Roman men, showing their interest was sharply focussed on pedication, and the second examines the extent to which the values presented  about male homosexuality (almost entirely pederasty) reflected actual practices.

Caroline Vout, Power and Eroticism in Imperial Rome, Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2009. Detailed study and analysis of some of the love affairs of the (mostly early) Roman emperors, including consideration of why they are interesting and important. Most of the case studies chosen are pederastic. Illustrated in black-and-white.

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.

NORTHERN EUROPE

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.

 

Europe, AD 381-1700

Mark D. Jordan, The Invention of Sodomy in Christian Theology. Chicago: The University of Chicago Press, 1998. A study of the conceptual medieval foundations of sodomy as a sin, with quite a bit on pederasty, especially the first chapter, a study of the cult of the boy saint Pelagius of Córdoba, martyred aged thirteen for refusing the Caliph of al-Andalus's advances.

NEW!   M. Lazar and N. Lacy (eds), Poetics of Love in the Middle Ages. Fairfax: George Mason University Press, 1989. An anthology of essays on medieval European ideas of love, of which Norman Roth's 'The Care and Feeding of Gazelles: Medieval Arabic and Hebrew Love Poetry' concerns love poetry addressed to boys and women in Islamic Spain, and Mahmoud A. Manzalaoui's " 'I Follow the Religion of Love': The Erotic Surrogate in the Arabic Tradition" says "the instances are many in which the ectype of the Divine is without doubt a beautiful and charming young boy."

Sir Noel Malcolm, Forbidden Desire in Early Modern Europe: Male-Male Sexual Relations, 1400-1750, Oxford University Press, 2024. A 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 claimed to have been different even well before the emergence of mollies around 1700.

William Burgwinkle, Sodomy, Masculinity and Law in Medieval Literature: France and England, 1050-1230. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2004. A survey of writings on homosexuality most of which refer to pederastic emotions and relationships.

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, with pretensions to originality founded on its rewriting mediaeval sodomy as child abuse to conform with modern dogma. 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".

Kenneth Borris and George S. Rousseau (eds), The Sciences of Homosexuality in Early Modern Europe. London: Routledge, 2008. An essay collection on early scientific accounts of homosexuality during the period about 1450-1750; most of the homosexuality discussed is, of course, pederastic.

James Saslow, Ganymede in the Renaissance: Homosexuality in art and society, Yale University Press, New Haven, 1986. An exploration of the changing imagery of the Ganymede myth from its most widespread expression in the Italian Renaissance to its decline in 17th-century Dutch art as a reflection of attitudes towards Greek love.

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. 

NEW!   Ulrich L. Lehner, Inszenierte Keuschheit: Sexualdelikte in der Gesellschaft Jesu im 17. und 18. Jahrhundert (Staged Chastity: Sexual Offences in the Society of Jesus in the 17th and 18th Centuries), Berlin: De Gruyter, 2024. A study of sexual misconduct committed by members of the Society of Jesus in Europe in the 17th and 18th centuries, most of it involving boys and taking place in an educational setting.

BYZANTINE EMPIRE

Timothy S. Miller, "Chapter VIII. The Orphanotropheion: The Orphan School" in his The Orphans of Byzantium: Child Welfare in the Christian Empire, Washington, D.C.: The Catholic University of America, 2003.  Briefly discusses the evidence that "homosexual relationships, particularly between older students and their younger wards, did occur" in this institution.

ITALY

NEW!   Giovanni Dall' Orto's “ 'Socratic Love' as a Disguise for Same-Sex Love in the Italian Renaissance" in Journal of Homosexuality, Vol. 16, no. 1-2, 1989. Avoids admitting that the "same-sex love" discussed was almost entirely pederastic, but nevertheless offers conclusive evidence highly relevant to Greek love that Italian writers understood something sexual by "Socratic" or "platonic" love.

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.

NEW!   Michael Rocke, "Sodomites in Fifteenth-Century Tuscany: The Views of Bernardino of Siena"  in Journal of Homosexuality, Vol. 16, no. 1-2, 1989. What Bernardino's fierce sermons and attitudes reveal about the pederasty then prevalent in Tuscany.

Michael Rocke, Forbidden Friendships. Homosexuality and Male Culture in Renaissance Florence, Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1996. Review. A thorough and ground-breaking study with far-reaching implications of the the detailed records of the 15th-century Florentine Office of the Night, charged with investigating sodomy. Sodomy, overwhelming pederastic, is shown to have involved at least two-thirds of Florentine males and was practised as part of "a single male sexual culture."

NEW!  Trevor Dean, "Sodomy in Renaissance Bologna", in Renaissance Studies, vol. 31, 2016, pp. 426-443. Almost all the cases discussed are man/boy.

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.

SPAIN

Lisa Weston, "The Saracen and the Martyr: Embracing the Foreign in Hrotsvit's Pelagius", Chapter One of Albrecht Classen (ed.), Meeting the Foreign in the Middle Ages, New York: Routledge, 2002. An interesting if somewhat jargon-ridden study of Hrotsvit of Gandersheim's Pelagius, a hagiography of the Galician boy captive martyred in 911 for refusing the Caliph's advances.

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.

NEW!   Norman Roth, " 'My Beloved Is Like a Gazelle': Imagery of the Beloved Boy in Religious Hebrew Poetry" in Hebrew Annual Review, Vol. 8, 1984. A scholarly study of how medieval Hebrew religious poetry uses the image of the “beloved boy” in ways that draw on the imagery of the Song of Songs.

NEW!   Norman Roth, " 'Fawn of My Delights': Boy-Love in Hebrew and Arabic Verse" in Joyce E. Salisbury (ed.), Sex in the Middle Ages: A Book of Essays, New York: Garland, 1991. A literary study of the erotic adulation of boys' beauty in the Hebrew and Arabic poetry of medieval Islamic Spain.

Jaume Riera i Sans, Sodomites catalans: història i vida (segles XIII-XVIII) (Catalan Sodomites: History and Life (13th-18th centuries), Barcelona: Editorial Base, 2014. Another study of prosecutions for homosexual activity discussing multiple pederastic examples; the author explains that in almost all the cases examined, at least one of the partners was under the age of twenty.

NEW!   Mary Elizabeth Perry, "The 'Nefarious Sin' in Early Modern Seville" in in Journal of Homosexuality, Vol. 16, no. 1-2, 1989. The nefarious sin was sodomy, which Perry avoids revealing usually amounted to pederasty in this case, but nevertheless a useful study of how it was understood, prosecuted and socially imagined in the 16th and early 17th centuries.

NEW!   Mary Elizabeth Perry, Crime and Society in Early Modern Seville. Hanover: University Presses of New England, 1980. A social history of Seville in the 16th and early 17th centuries which describes several cases of sodomy with boys and comments that "The only juveniles younger than sixteen years who appear in criminal records are accomplices in sodomy."

Cristian Berco, Sexual Hierarchies, Public Status: Men, Sodomy, and Society in Spain's Golden Age, Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 2006. A shortish study of the sodomy trials of the Aragonese Inquisition, overwhelmingly involving pederasty.

Rafael Carrasco, Inquisición y represión sexual en Valencia: Historia de los sodomitas (1565-1785) (The Inquisition and Sexual Repression in Valencia: A History of Sodomites (1565-1785)), Barcelona: Laertes, 1986. Another study of prosecutions for homosexual activity, thorough and detailed and containing the expected high number of pederastic cases.

PORTUGAL

NEW!   Veronica de Jesus Gomes, "4. Capitulo com ameaças ou com mimos: a sodomia com meninos" ("A Chapter on Threats or Abuse: Sodomy with Boys") in  'Com temerária ousadia e pouco temor de Deus e da Justiça': clérigos sodomitas na Inquisição de Lisboa (1610-1699). Doctoral thesis for the Universidade Federal Fluminense, Brazil, 2019. Read online. A study of the 22 cases involving clerics with boys; with the exception of one 6-year-old, all of the boys were aged 10-16.

FRANCE

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.

Jeffrey Merrick and Bryant Ragan (eds), Homosexuality in Early Modern France: A Documentary Collection. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2000. Translations of documents 1533-1795 mostly concerned with pederasty and ranging from philosophical writings to records from sodomy trials.

NEW!  Jeffrey Merrick, "Chaussons in the Streets: Sodomy in Seventeenth-Century Paris" in Journal of the History of Sexuality, Vol. 15, no. 2, 2006. A study of the case of a septuagenarian pederast, with the wording of the original documents provided and then translated.

THE NETHERLANDS

NEW!  Jonas Roelens, Citizens and Sodomites: Persecution and Perception of Sodomy in the Southern Low Countries (1400-1700). Boston: Brill, 2024. Many of the male cases are pederastic, though the author points out that there seems to have been more variance in relational structure here than in southern Europe.

NEW!   Dirk Jaap Noordam, "Sodomy in the Dutch Republic, 1600-1725" in Journal of Homosexuality, Vol. 16, no. 1-2, 1989. A study of attitudes to sodomy, a high proportion of the cases mentioned being Greek love, especially before the rise of an androphile sub-culture in Amsterdam around 1690.

GERMANY

NEW!  Helmut Puff, Sodomy in Reformation Germany and Switzerland, 1400-1600, Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2003. Argues that one factor uniting the German-speaking Protestant movement was the 'othering' of sodomitical behaviour, associated with Italy and with Roman Catholicism; contains multiple man-boy cases.

NEW!  E. William Monter, "La sodomie à l'époque moderne en Suisse romande" ("Sodomy in Modern Times in French-speaking Switzerland") in Annales. Histoire, Sciences Sociales, 29e Année, No. 4, July - Aug. 1974. A study of prosecutions and social attitudes towards sodomy in the 16th-18th centuries, explains that "several cases of homosexuality involved schoolchildren and adolescents," including two students executed in the 1560s, and accused boys were usually publicly flogged rather than killed.  

ENGLAND

NEW!   Alan Bray, Homosexuality in Renaissance England, London: The Gay Men's Press, 1982. A ground-breaking study of how homosexual acts were understood in 15th to 17th century England. These acts are shown to have been mostly pederastic. Chapter 4, on the rise of the molly houses towards 1700, comments: "The new forms may even have involved only a minority of homosexual acts, but they overshadowed the old: they were a radical extension of the meaning of homosexuality."

NEW!  Alan Bray, The Friend, Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2003. A study of religious friendships pacts in England, of which the 3rd chapter is shaped around that of the master of a Cambridge College and a scholar formed in 1582 when they were aged 47 and 16 and leading to their burial together with the inscription “Love united us in life; may the earth likewise unite us in burial.”

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. Also has much to say about the slightly tolerant attitudes to sodomy in 17th century England.

 

Modern Europe

NEW!   Stephen O. Murray, "Homosexual Acts and Selves in Early Modern Europe" in Journal of Homosexuality, Vol. 16, no. 1-2, 1989. Survey the other writings in this volume on the very late 17th to 18th centuries (mostly listed on this page) and argues persuasively that, throughout the period, the sodomite in the active role was most often drawn to boys and was not perceived as effeminate.

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.

Dr. Frits Bernard, Paedophilia: A Factual Report, Rotterdam: Enclave, 1985.  Despite the then-fashionable misnomer, a study of Dutch and Belgian boysexual men in 1973, of whom 96% preferred boys (mostly peripubertal ones), and 94% had been sexually active with them.

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. Review. True stories of love affairs between German and Dutch boys 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.

GREAT BRITAIN

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.

NEW!   Randolph Trumbach, "Sodomitical Assaults, Gender Role, and Sexual Development in Eighteenth-Century London", in Journal of Homosexuality, Vol. 16, no. 1-2, 1989. A series of pederastic cases are presented and examined from the angle of the development of sexual knowledge among boys.

NEW!   Randolph Trumbach, Sex and the Gender Revolution: Heterosexuality and the Third Gender in Enlightenment London, Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1998. Trumbach's thesis is that the rise of the notion of the effeminate exclusive sodomite towards 1700 meant that males had to define themselves in opposition to this figure as exclusively sexually interested in women, and that this put paid to easy sexual interactions between boys and men. He gives short shrift to gaywashing: "a historian like John Boswell was always determined to find an exclusive homosexual minority and to deny the plain presumption of his sources that homosexual activity occurred between most men and boys." However, as a result of the "gender revolution" , "sexual interaction between an adolescent and an adult male was [...] no longer acceptable, as it had been earlier, and boys who had passes made at them were thrown into a panic."

NEW!   William Gibson and Joanne Begiato, "Chapter 7. The Church, Sodomy, and Same-Sex Desires" in their Sex and the Church in the Long Eighteenth Century: Religion, Enlightenment and the Sexual Revolution. London: Bloomsbury Academic, 2017. Discusses a series of pederastic cases in England.

Netta Murray Goldsmith, The Worst of Crimes: Homosexuality and the Law in Eighteenth-Century London. Aldershot: Ashgate, 1998. A study of prosecutions brought for homosexual activity, most of this activity being between boys aged 10-18 and adult men.

George Rousseau, "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.

John Chandos, "A Demon Hovering", being chapter 14 of his Boys Together: English Public Schools 1800-1864, London: Hutchinson, 1984. Read on this website. An excellent, detailed and fascinating survey of (predominantly pederastic) homosexuality in English Public Schools and the efforts made to suppress it as the authorities awoke to its ubiquity.

NEW!  John Raymond de Symons Honey, sections "12. The blight of friendship" and "13. Friendship and passion" in Chapter 3 of his  Tom Brown'(s Universe: the Development of the English Public School in the Nineteenth Century. London: Millington, 1977. On how in the late 19th century "the courtship by older boys of 'pretty' younger boys (hitherto an accepted feature of public-school life which caused no alarm, except when leading to detectable sexual acts")  became severely disapproved of as suspicions of pederastic sex, sometimes well-founded and sometimes not, began to close down an emotional landscape of tender and unselfconsciously physically intimate male friendship.

Christopher Hibbert, No Ordinary Place: Radley College and the Public School System 1847–1997, London: John Murray, 1997. Discusses, among many other subjects, the pederastic culture at Radley; old boy author Louis Wilkinson is quoted as saying: "There were continual affairs between the older and younger boys, and they were sometimes highly romantic. They were always of great and universal interest."

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.

Gavin Lambert, Mainly About Lindsay Anderson: A Memoir, London: Faber & Faber, 2000. Read the Greek love content. A general biography of this film director by a friend who took the opportunity to write about his own love affairs in the 1930s aged 11 to 12 with a prep school master and then at Cheltenham with older boys.

Royston Lambert, The Hothouse Society: An Exploration of Boarding-School Life Through the Boys' and Girls' Own Writings. London: Weidenfeld & Nicolson, 1968. Chapter Eleven, "Sex in Single-Sex Schools", is mostly concerned with attraction and love affairs between older and younger boys, and there are some mentions of this elsewhere in the book.

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.

John Wakeford, The Cloistered Élite: A Sociological Analysis of the English Public Boarding School. London: Macmillan, 1969. Study centred on one anonymous school and including discussion of its sexual culture: homosexual activity was most evident between similarly-aged boys in the same house, but included affairs "between beautiful juniors and older boys, often following social exchanges (initially in public) characteristic of heterosexual dating."

NEW!   Seth Koven, Slumming: Sexual and Social Politics in Victorian London. Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2004. The section on homosexual desire touches on pederasty with a contemporary description of a Lambeth lodging house where "youths lay in the arms of men".

NEW!   Richard Dellamora, Masculine Desire: the Sexual Politics of Victorian Aestheticism, Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina, 1990. Includes quite a lot on pederastic feeling, including the forthright statement that "focus on boys by men who are attracted emotionally, at times sexually, to other males is a leading feature of homoerotic writing in the final third of the century."

Richard Dellamora (ed.), Victorian Sexual Dissidence, Chicago: The University of Chicago Press, 1999. Chapters 3, Martha Vicinus's "The Adolescent Boy: Fin-de-Siècle Femme Fatale?" and 11, Julia Saville's "The Romance of Boys Bathing: Poetic Precedents and Respondents to the Paintings of Henry Scott Tuke" are about Greek love.

Linda Dowling, Hellenism and Homosexuality in Victorian Oxford. Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 1997. A study of the emergence of homosexual identity as a concept, with much discussion of the "tradition of pederastic Hellenism" and "cult of boy-worship" semi-openly flourishing at this time and place.

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. A scholarly and well-written demarcation of the distinctly paederastic elements within a series of highly nuanced, Uranian texts of the mid-19th to mid-20th centuries.

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".

David Hilliard, "UnEnglish and unmanly: Anglo-Catholicism and Homosexuality" in Victorian Studies, Vol. 25, no. 2, winter 1982. A study of the prevalence of homosexuality, including boy-love, in the Anglo-Catholic subculture of the late 19th and early 20th century England.

Morris Kaplan, Sodom on the Thames: Sex, Love, and Scandal in Wilde Times, Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 2005. Well-written and thoroughly researched account of several British homosexual scandals 1871-90, of which most were pederastic.

H. Montgomery Hyde, The Cleveland Street Scandal, London: W. H. Allen, 1976. Review. A well-researched but narrow study of the scandal that arose in 1889 when some teenage London telegraph boys were found to have been prostituting themselves to an upper-class clientele.

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.

NEW!   Jeffrey Meek, "Adult-adolescent sexual activity" in his Queer Voices in Post-War Scotland: Male Homosexuality, Religion and Society, London: Palgrave Macmillan, 2015, pp. 73-78. Interviews by the author of men sexually involved as adolescents with men; all of the cases reported were positive experiences for the boy.

Gordon Westwood, A Minority: A Report on the Life of the Male Homosexual in Great Britain. London: Longmans, 1960. Found that most subjects had first had homosex when they were under sixteen, with an older boy or an adult in a high proportion of cases. As adults, three subjects were deemed to be solely or predominantly interested in boys under 16, and fifteen (12%) had, since reaching 18, had some sexual contacts with such boys.

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.

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.

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.

Li Chin-Keung, ' "The Main Thing Is Being Wanted": Some Case Studies on Adult Sexual Experiences With Children', Journal of Homosexuality, 20:1-2, 1991, pp. 129-143. A psychologist in England's report on the feelings of interviewed boysexuals (and, despite the title, only them).

Paul Watkins, Stand Before Your God: An American Schoolboy in England, London: Faber & Faber, 1993. A memoir going into some detail about the romantic and sexual affairs at Eton, the most famous British public school, between senior boys and pretty juniors, witnessed by the author as a pupil there.

Barbara Gibson, Male Order: Life Stories from Boys Who Sell Sex, London: Cassell, 1995. The unhappy true stories of four boys and two transsexuals who prostituted themselves on the streets of London.

DENMARK

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.

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.

SWEDEN

H. B. Rosqvist, “Desiring difference, desiring similarity: Narratives on sexual interaction between boys and men in the Swedish homosexual press 1954–1986” in Sexualities, 15(2), 2012, pp. 117–138. A discussion of the varied approaches towards Greek love taken by the press of the title and the drift towards a less favourable attitude.

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.

NORWAY

Nina Ratcliff, Den Store Sedelighetssak i Bergen 1937/1938. Kulturelle forståelser av sex mellom menn, homoseksualitet og seksuelle overgrep mot barn (The Great Morality Case in Bergen, 1937/1938: Cultural Understandings of Sex Between Men, Homosexuality, and Sexual Abuse of Children), Master's thesis for the University of Bergen, 2023. Read online. A study of "a large police investigation and subsequent trial in which over 30 men were convicted of having had sexual relations with young boys. ... Most of the boys were between the ages of 14 and 19, and the police eventually concluded that as many as 160 boys had been sexually involved with at least one of the accused men."

BOHEMIA

NEW!   Valsik, Cyril, Váš kluk – prostitut? (Your boy – a prostitute?), Prague: Mladá fronta, 2009. A journalist's study of boy prostitutes in Bohemia 1992-2002.

GERMANY

NEW!  Ulrich L. Lehner, "Clerical Child Abuse and Public Justice in Eighteenth-Century Germany" in Journal of Ecclesiastical History, Vol. 77, no. 2, 2026. The case of pederast Johann Conrad Arbogast Gauch, the only priest executed for sodomy in the eighteenth-century Holy Roman Empire.

NEW!   Dr. James Steakley, "Sodomy in Enlightenment Prussia: From Execution to Suicide" in Journal of Homosexuality, Vol. 16, no. 1-2, 1989. A study covering 1700 to 1811 with some examples of pederasty, especially a 1782 description of a boy bordello in Berlin. 

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.

Thijs Maasen, "Man-boy friendships on trial: On the shift in the discourse on boy love in the early twentieth century" in Journal of Homosexuality, 20(1-2), 1990, pp. 47–70. A study of ideas about Greek love in early-20th century Germany, focussing on how the conviction of Gustav Wyneken in 1921 for sex with boys transformed discourse from one founded on pedagogical eros to a medico-sexlogical one.

Javier Samper Vendrell, The Seduction of Youth: Print Culture and Homosexual Rights in the Weimar Republic. Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 2020. A study of the brief flourishing of pederastic publications during the Weimar period and of the wider public’s reaction to these.

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.

Rüdiger Lautmann, Die Lust am Kind. Portrait des Pädophilen (Lust for Children. Portrait of the Pedophile), Hamburg: Ingrid Klein, 1994. Despite the rather misleading title, based on then-recent interviews with sixty men who had been sexually active with children, of whom forty were boy-lovers, mostly interested in pubertal boys. Draws positive conclusions about the consensual nature of most of these contacts, with the exception of a few cases involving sexually overbearing behaviour towards young girls.

NEW!  Horst Vogt, Pädophilie; Leipzicher Studie zur gesellschaftlichen und psychischen Situation pädophiler Männer, Lengerich: Pabst Science Publishers, 2006. Read an online translation as The Leipziger Study of the Social and Psychical Situation of Pedophilic Men. A remarkably unbiased survey of 72 implicitly-German men, of whom 61 were  were interested in boys only. With "pedophilic" stretched to mean attraction to those under 14 (only), their interest was unsurprisingly concentrated on the last four years of the age range considered and was thus really hebephilic. Most were or had been sexually active with boys. There were some touching excerpts from letters about affectionate relationships with boys.

SWITZERLAND

Hubert Kennedy, "Chapter 9. Man and Boy" in his The Ideal Gay Man: The Story of Der Kreis. New York: Haworth Press, 1999, pp. 183-203. A chapter in this history of a homosexual journal published in Switzerland 1932-67 devoted to the ambivalent stance on boy-love of it and its editor (Karl Meier, pseudonym Rolf).

THE NETHERLANDS

NEW!   Theo van der Meer, "The Persecutions of Sodomites in Eighteenth-Century Amsterdam" in Journal of Homosexuality, Vol. 16, no. 1-2, 1989. In the section "Children and Women" we learn of the extremely severe punishments inflicted on seven participant boys, one only 11.

NEW!  Arend H. Huussen, "Persecution of Sodomy in Eighteenth Century Frisia, Netherlands" in Journal of Homosexuality, Vol. 16, no. 1-2, 1989. Concentrates on the Frisian cases in the particularly vicious Dutch persecution of 1730. The cases involved were mostly abndrophile, but included Caspar Abrahams Bersé, a boy servant promiscuous with gentlemen from the age of ten until his arrest and execution at sixteen.

NEW!   Jan Oosterhoff, "Sodomy at Sea and at the Cape of Good Hope During the Eighteenth Century" in Journal of Homosexuality, Vol. 16, no. 1-2, 1989. On the punishment of such sodomy, some of the cases cited being pederastic, including one  involving a remarkably forward and persistent boy of 14.

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.

NEW!  Jan Schuijer and Benjamin Rossen, "The Trade in Child Pornography", IPT Journal, Vol. 4, Northfield, Minnesota: Institute for Psychological Therapy, 1992. Read online. In this thorough study of the erotic material featuring children produced in northern Europe and the USA in the 1970s and 1980s, the section "A Child Sex Ring Discovered" describes the arrest in 1978 of three men in the Netherlands for filmed sex with 19 pubescent boys and one girl. Appendix D reports what all the children said about the three men (much of it positive), while Appendix E reproduces interviews of three of the boys, by then in their late teens and active with girls, gave about one of the men, in which they described still loving him and remaining in contact, and were strongly critical of the police tactics. The photo sessions had been fun, but they felt betrayed that the photos had been published without their knowledge.

Alex Van Naerssen, "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.

Gertjan van Zessen, "A Model for Group Counseling with Male Pedophiles", Journal of Homosexuality, 20:1-2, 1991, pp. 189-198. Despite  the misleading title, discusses five men interested in mutual relationships with boys of 10 to 15 and, in this, representative of the broader group of men turning to the Utrecht university clinic for support in living with their sexual orientation.

FRANCE

NEW!   Didier Godard, L'Amour philosophique : l'homosexualité masculine au siècle des Lumières (Philosophical Love: Male Homosexuality in the Century of the Enlightenment) Saint-Martin-de-Londres: H & O, 2005. Mostly concerned with homosexuality in the intellectual and social world of the French enlightenment. Most of the homosexuality discussed is pederastic, and Godard shares some of Trumbach's views on how the rise of the notion of the effeminate preferential sodomite in the eighteenth century began to eclipse a previously widespread and relaxed appreciation of the androgynous beauty of boys.

NEW!  Jeffrey Merrick (ed.), Sodomites, Pederasts and Tribades in Eighteenth-Century France: A Documentary History, University Park, Pennsylvania: Penn State University Press, 2019. A collection of translated source documents, many of them about sex between men and teenaged boys; though some attempt is made to downplay this aspect, it is acknowledged that "more often than not, older males desired younger males".

NEW!   Michel Rey, "Police and Sodomy in Eighteenth-Century Paris: From Sin to Disorder" in Journal of Homosexuality, Vol. 16, no. 1-2, 1989. A study of how and why sodomites were caught and punished, many of the cases cited being pederastic.

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.

NEW!   William A. Peniston, Pederasts and Others: Urban Culture and Sexual Identity in Nineteenth-Century Paris. Milton, Oxfordshire: Routledge, 2004. Documents the continuance of the pederastic tradition at this time and place, alongside the emergence of a new underground subculture of men seeking sex with other men of a similar age.

NEW!   Scott Gunther, "It Could Have Been Worse (1940s–1960s)", being the 1st chapter of his The Elastic Closet: A History of Homosexuality in France, 1942-present, London: Palgrave Macmillan, 2008. Documents the persistence of the understanding that pederasty is the predominant form of male homoerotic feeling. Mentions the 1950s magazine Futur, "forced to close down to a large extent because of its constant criticism of the law establishing sexual majority", its founder convicted of sex with teenage boys. Interviews with former members of the homosexual rights organisation Arcadie mention the prominence it gave to pederasty and reducing the age of consent and how in the 1950s lifelong relationships with age-equals were not aspired to and homosexual pornography featured boys almost exclusively.done specifically for the book. 

Roger Peyrefitte, Jeunes Proies (Young Quarry), Paris: Flammarion, 1956. 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. 

Julian T. Jackson, Living in Arcadia: Homosexuality, Politics and Morality in France from the Liberation to AIDS. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2009. A study of the homophile organisation Arcadie, founded in 1954, containing a substantial amount on pederasty and a section on "the pedophile moment".

Jean-Luc Hennig, Les garçons de passe: enquête sur la prostitution masculine (Rent Boys: An Investigation into Male Prostitution), Paris: Hallier, 1978. About male prostitution, mostly of teenage boys, in France.

ITALY

Augusto F. Prieto, Una tumba en la Arcadia: Homosexuales exiliados en Italia a partir de 1747, Madrid: Amistades Particulares, 2025. Biographies of devotees of Greek love who sought freedom in the Italian peninsula during the golden age of the Grand Tour, from the 1747 onwards.

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. A survey of the changing attitudes of the British and Italians to the perceived ubiquity of homosexuality in Italy, especially in the south, and of British tourists and settlers finding relief in it. While indulging in some gaywashing (frequently referring to Italian "men" where "boys" would be more honest), acknowledges that it was only in boyhood that southern males were usually open to homosex.

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."

GREECE

NEW!   Marie-Christine Anest, Zoophilie, homosexualité, rites de passage et initiation masculine dans la Grèce contemporaine. Paris: L'Harmattan, 1985. Ethnographic study covering many topics including the rural custom of the oldest boys, aged 16-17, sometimes forming couples with the youngest, aged 7-8, and the survival in urban areas of fairly open and widespread pederastic relationships between married men and adolescents, distinct for the affection and material support given the boys, as well as boy prostitution (for which purposes boys were sometimes kidnapped). 

 

Sub-Saharan Africa

Stephen Murray & Will Roscoe, Boy-Wives and Female Husbands: Studies in African Homosexualities, New York: St. Martin's Press, 1998. A survey of some fifty African societies in which homosexuality of some sort flourished, with Greek love featuring prominently.

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.

Mark Minnie & Chris Steyn, The Lost Boys of Bird Island, Cape Town: Tafelberg, 2018. Alleged revelations (in a book notably soon withdrawn from sale) by a policeman and a journalist about three cabinet ministers in the Apartheid regime and other prominent men in the 1980s having sexual rendezvous with coloured boys on a South African island.

 

The Near East and North Africa from AD 381

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.

Karsch-Haack, Ferdinand, Die Rolle der Homoerotik im Arabertum (The Role of Homoeroticism in the Arab World), Hamburg: MännerschwarmSkript, 2005. Collected essays written in the 1920s, surveying then-current historical knowledge on same-sex sexuality among the Arabs, much of it pederastic.

J. W. Wright, Jr, and Everett K. Rowson (eds), Homoeroticism in Classical Arabic Literature. New York: Columbia University Press, 1997. Valuable collection of close studies of various aspects of pederastic belles-lettres.

Joseph Massad, Desiring Arabs. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2007. A study of "how Arabs have represented their own sexual desires", including much on Arab historians’ descriptions and explanations of their own cultures’ pederastic traditions, and how these evolved over the 8th to 20th centuries.

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.

Ahmad al-Tifashi,  أحمد التيفاشي, Nuzhat al-albāb fīmā lā yūjad fī kitābسرور النفس بمدارك الحواس الخمس , 13th century, translated by Edward A. Lacey from a French translation of the original Arabic as The Delight of Hearts, Or What You Will Not Find In Any Book, San Francisco: Gay Sunshine, 1988. Introduction with links to the Greek love content on this website. A large collection of erotic anecdotes arranged by subject into twelve chapters, of which four are devoted to Greek love and shed priceless light on its practice in 8th-13th-century Islamic lands.

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 of 13th-century ʿIrāqī.

NEW!   Kathryn Babayan, “Chapter 3: Disturbing the City” in The City as Anthology: Eroticism and Urbanity in Early Modern Isfahan, Stanford, California: Stanford University Press, 2021, pp. 108-136. A discussion of how the cleric and poet Aqa Mansur Semnani's popular 17th century guidebook to the Persian capital of Isfahan was in contrast to the Safavid regime's orderly and Islamic vision of the city.  Written in the Persian poetic genre of sharashub (city disturbance), Aqa Mansur's guidebook provides captivating descriptions of the many beautiful male youths that he observed in the city's bazaars, coffeehouses, and workshops.

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.

NEW!  Dror Ze’evi, Producing Desire: Changing Sexual Discourse in the Ottoman Middle East, 1500-1900, Oakland: University of California Press, 2006. A study of "sexual discourses manifest in a wealth of little-studied source material—medical texts, legal documents, religious literature, dream interpretation manuals, shadow theatre and travelogues", with much on the ubiquity of love and desire for beautiful beardless boys.

Joseph A. Boone, The Homoerotics of Orientalism. New York: Columbia University Press, 2014. A study of European and American contact with and depiction of Near Eastern and North African male homosexuality, with the expected prominence of pederasty, emphasising mutual exchange between the two regions and presenting much material for the first time.

EGYPT

Caroline T. Schroeder, "Homoeroticism, Children, and the Making of Monks", being Chapter 3 of her Children and Family in Late Antique Egyptian Monasticism, Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2020. A discussion of monastic pederasty in the 4th to 7th centuries.

TURKEY

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.

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.

W.A. Andrews & Mehmet Kalpakli,  The Age of Beloveds, Durham, North Carolina: Duke University Press, 2005. An academic study of pederasty in early modern Ottoman literature and its wider background, scholarly but a little spoilt by a politically-correct tone, including a certain amount of gaywashing.

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.

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.

PERSIA

Willem Floor, “Chapter Four: Homosexual Relations: A Common Affair” in his A Social History of Sexual Relations in Iran, Washington DC: Mage, 2008, pp. 279-365. A discussion of the prevalence and nature of homosexual relations (almost entirely pederastic and not exclusive of heterosexual activity) in Iran over the last 2,500 years.  Includes biographical information about the attraction to boys of many political leaders, poets, philosophers and Islamic clerics.

"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.

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.

OTHER NEAR EAST

Hugh Kennedy, "Al-Jahiz and the Construction of Homosexuality at the Abbasid Court", being chapter 10 of Medieval Sexuality: A Casebook edited by April Harper and Caroline Proctor, New York: Routledge, 2008, pp. 175-188. An introduction to Al-Jahiz's dialogue Boasting Match between Slave Girls and Page Boys, about whether woimen or boys were sexually preferable, explaining well its 9th-century cultural background.

 

India and Central Asia

NEW!   José Ignacio Cabezón, Sexuality in Classical South Asian Buddhism. Somerville: Wisdom Publications, 2017. Chapter 1, "The Cosmology of Sex", discusses the penalties a particular scripture describes being inflicted in the afterlife on those who rape boys; clearly this was a prevalent enough problem to warrant being addressed at length.

CENTRAL ASIA

Nil Segeevich Lykoshin, "Away with Bachi", a chapter of his Polzhizni v Turkestane (Half-life in Turkestan), Petrograd: Sklad t-va V.A. Berezovskii, 1916. A former military governor's account of the Russian administration's gentle handling of pederasty in Turkestan following its conquest of it.

Ingeborg Baldauf, Die Knabenliebe in Mittelasien: Bacabozlik (Boylove in Central Asia: Bacabozlik), Berlin: Das Arabische Buch, 1988. In German only. A scholarly monograph on pederasty in 20th-century Central Asia, specially bacha bazi in northern Afghanistan.

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.

INDIA

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.

Shad Naved, The Ghazal Eros: Lyric Queerness in History, New Delhi: Tulika Books, 2025.  An examination of the presence of boylove in classical Persian and Urdu ghazals (short amatory poems) from the 18th century Indian subcontinent.

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. 

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.

 

The Far East

Karsch-Haack, Ferdinand, Das gleichgeschlechtliche Leben der Kulturvölker - Ostasiaten: Chinesen, Japaner, Koreer (The Same-Sex Life of the Civilised Peoples - East Asians: Chinese, Japanese, Koreans), Munich: Seitz & Schauer, 1906. Comprehensive compilation of primary source materials on male same-sex sexuality among North-East Asian peoples, much of it pederastic. Believing sexual norms and behaviour often to be socially constructed rather than arising from an innate drive, the author argued it was less important to understand the etiology of same-sex sexuality than to understand its manifestations, which motivated his survey.

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.

JAPAN

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.

Or Porath, “Chapter 14: The Consecration of Acolytes (Chigo Kanjō): Ritualizing Male-Male Sexuality in Medieval Tendai” in Rituals of Initiation and Consecration in Premodern Japan: Power and Legitimacy in Kingship, Religion, and the Arts, edited by Fabio Rambelli and Or Porath, Berlin: De Gruyter, 2022. pp. 343-376. A discussion of the Tendai Buddhist consecration ritual chigo kanjō practiced in Tendai monasteries across central and eastern Japan during the 15th and 16th centuries.  Chigo kanjō was a sexual intercourse ritual between a priest and an acolyte that resulted in the sanctification of the boy and his initiation into secret Tendai teachings.

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. A useful summary making it clear pederasty was the prevalent form of homosexuality and ubiquitous in pre-Meiji Japan, but lightweight and since superseded even just in English by much more thorough works.

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.

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. Wide-ranging in its sources, a profound study of how pederasty came to be a prominent feature of Togugawa society, not just for monks and samurai (as before), but for ordinary city dwellers.

Gregory M. Pflugfelder, Cartographies of Desire: Male-Male Sexuality in Japanese Discourse, 1600–1950, Berkeley, California: University of California Press, 1999. A sophisticated study of changing Japanese attitudes to male homosexuality from being (in an almost purely pederastic form) a part of popular culture, to becoming in turns a subject for jurisprudence and medicine.

Angelika Koch, “Between the Back and the Front: Male Love in Humorous Tales of the Edo Period” in Vienna Graduate Journal of East Asian Studies, Volume 1, 2011, pp. 1-32. This article explores representations of sexual behavior between men and adolescent boys in the showa (humorous tales) published during Japan's Edo period (1603-1868). Sex in them being mostly limited to pedication and kissing, other sexual acts were topics for humour. With no notion then of fixed sexual orientations, the terms back (boys) and front (women) referred to the sexual possibilities available to all men.

Timothy Screech, Sex and the Floating World: Erotic Imagery in Japan 1700-1820, London: Reaktion Books, 1998. 2nd edition, 2009. The popularity of shunga, erotic paintings and prints explained in its cultural context, with due prominence given to the pederastic variety.

NEW!  Jim Reichert, In the Company of Men: Representations of Male-Male Sexuality in Meiji Literature, Redwood City: Stanford University Press, 2006. A study of literary texts indicating the persistence of the pederastic tradition in the popular imagination during the rapid changes of the Meiji period (1868-1912), despite official attempts to consign this tradition to the past.

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.

CHINA

Fang Fu Ruan, "Male Homosexuality"  in chapter 7 of his Sex in China: Studies in Sexology in Chinese Culture, New York: Plenum, 1991, pp. 107-34. A brief textbook-style historical survey followed by a longer study of homosexuality in 1980s, both of which fail to draw any distinction between androphilia and the formerly-prevailant pederasty.

Bret Hinsch, Passions of the cut sleeve: the male homosexual tradition in China, University of California Press, 1990. The first serious history of homosexuality in China, albeit short for the length of time covered. Makes it clear that homosexuality of a broadly pederastic kind was common and accepted in most periods.

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.

JAVA

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. A fascinating study by a Dutch colonial of a peculiar form of institutionalised pederasty in one area of Java, involving boys of 9 to 12 and some magical beliefs.

Jerome Weiss, "The Gemblakan: kept boys among the Javanese of Ponorogo." Ph.D. dissertation, American Anthropological Association Meetings, Mexico City, 1974. A small and comparatively disappointing update to the preceding.

THE PHILIPPINES

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.

Karl Andersson, Impossibly Cute Boys: The Healing Power of Shota Comics in Japan, Berlin: Breakout Bits, 2024. An ethnographic study of the shotacon (erotic attraction to boys) comic genre in Japan based on surveys and interviews with the readers and creators of shota comics.

 

Oceania

AUSTRALIA

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. A study of the criminal records of always-illegal homosex in Queensland (where 28% of cases 1901-54 involved boys under 14 [!]), exploring honestly the wide variety of circumstances that could lead to pederastic liaisons.

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.

Anne Manne, Crimes of the Cross, Melbourne: Black, 2024. Yet another book catering to the thirst for stories about boys saying decades after the event that they had been sexually abused by Catholic priests, in this instance in Newcastle, New South Wales, allegedly for half a century but concentrating on the 1970s.

MELANESIA

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.

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

NEW!   Gilbert Herdt (ed.), Ritualized Homosexuality in Melanesia. Berkeley: University of California Press, 1984. Essays by seven anthropologists on institutionalised pederasty in this region.

NEW!   Gilbert Herdt, The Sambia: Ritual and Gender in New Guinea. San Francisco: Wadsworth Publishing, 1987. A detailed study of ritualised pederastic fellatio among the tribe in question.

NEW ZEALAND

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.

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.

TAHITI

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.

 

The Americas

PRE-COLONIAL 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.

COLONIAL LATIN AMERICA

NEW!  Zeb Tortorici (ed.), Sexuality and the Unnatural in Colonial Latin America, Berkeley: University of California Press, 2016. Chapter 1 is Nicole von Germeten's "Archival Narratives of Clerical Sodomy and Suicide from Eighteenth-Century Cartagena", a study of the scandal, leading to his suicide, that arose when a Mercedarian friar was found to have been sexually involved with a series of women and boys. Chapter 7, "Sodomy, Gender and Identity in the Viceroyalty of Peru" by Fernanda Molina and translated by Lucía Cordone, is a study of 16th- and 17th-century cases a high proportion of which involved teenage boys.

Pete Sigal, “The Politicization of Pederasty among the Colonial Yucatecan Maya” in Journal of the History of Sexuality, Volume 8, Number 1, July 1997, pp. 1-24.  Through an analysis of several Mayan-language texts, the author demonstrates that a close relationship existed between political power and pederastic desire among the Mayan noble elite of the 17th-18th century colonial period.

ARGENTINA

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.

BRAZIL

Don Kulick, Travestí: Sex, Gender, and Culture among Brazilian Transgendered Prostitutes. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1998. Interviews of males (few of whom actually "identified" as women), of whom the youngest was 11. Childhood is generally recalled as a time of homoerotic play culminating in being pedicated by other boys or men, leading to experimentation with female clothing etc., itself resulting in leaving or being expelled from home. Several experiences of boyhood attraction to and sexual involvement with men are recounted in some detail.

COSTA RICA

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.

MEXICO

Joseph Carrier, De Los Otros: Intimacy and Homosexuality Among Mexican Men. New York: Columbia University Press, 1995. Much of this book is devoted to profiling in detail four homosexually active males from Guadalajara, three of whom recall enjoying sex with older boys and men from an early age.

THE UNITED STATES OF AMERICA

NEW!   Jim Elledge, The Boys of Fairy Town: Sodomites, Female Impersonators, Third-Sexers, Pansies, Queers, and Sex Morons in Chicago's First Century. Chicago: Chicago Review Press, 2018. A chattily-written, wide-ranging history, as the title suggests. Chapter 5 briefly mentions sexual involvement between a boy of 12 and a man boarding in his family home; chapter 8 is a fairly open-minded discussion of pederasty among hoboes and of boy prostitution; chapter 15 is the story of a man of 48 who got into hot water for entertaining naked youths aged roughly 16-21 in his apartment, which was regularly visited by other older men.

Thomas P. Lowry, The Story the Soldiers Wouldn't Tell: Sex in the Civil War, Mechanicsburg, Pennysylvania: Stockpole, 1994. Briefly touches on pederasty with the story of a ball where drummer boys dressed as girls attracted much attention and, according to an older soldier's letter home, "some of them did get laid with".

Peter Boag, Same-Sex Affairs: Constructing and Controlling Homosexuality in the Pacific Northwest. Berkeley: University of California Press, 2003. A study of the growing awareness and policing of homosexuality in the Pacific Northwest of the USA ca. 1890-1930, of which the first two chapters concern working-class pederasty among both migratory workers and city dwellers.

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. A dully-presented survey of changing and increasingly severe attitudes to boy prostitution in early-20th century American cities.

NEW!   George Chauncey, Gay New York: Gender, Urban Culture, and the Making of the Gay Male World, 1890–1940, New York: Basic Books, 1994. Largely concerned with the emerging man-on-man sexual subculture, but pederasty inevitably appears as well, anecdotes including: a seaman who liked boys of 15 or 16 and was open and unashamed of living with one. An important statistic to emerge is that a large proportion of the generally increasing prosecutions for sodomy "stemmed from the efforts of the Society for the Prevention of Cruelty to Children", mostly directed against the poorest immigrants. 

NEW!  Nels Anderson, The Hobo: the Sociology of the Homeless Man. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1923. Read the Greek love content. In this study of Chicago tramps, the second half of Chapter X, "Sex Life of the Homeless Man", is a disapproving but informative discussion of the pederasty then prevalent amongst them.

NEW!  George W. Henry, Sex Variants: A Study of Homosexual Patterns. New York: Harper and Brothers, 1948. Amidst pseudoscience, an extensive and valuable collection of oral histories including many accounts of boyhood sexual involvement with older boys and grown men, more the rule than the exception among the male subjects. One adult interviewee liked women, but preferred still androgynous boys of 14 to 17.

Bruce Rind, “First Postpubertal Same‑Sex Sex in Kinsey’s General and Prison Male Same‑Sex Samples: Comparative Analysis and Testing Common Assumptions in Minor–Adult Contacts” in Archives of Sexual Behavior 48, 2019, pp. 1239–1259. An academic essay examining how in Alfred Kinsey’s study of homosexuality conducted 1939-47 but including much earlier cases, the youngest adolescent boys (including those who later identified as heterosexuals) having their first sexual experiences with men enjoyed them more than the mid-teen boys, and both remembered them more positively than men having their first experience with men.

NEW!  Peter M. Nandi, David Sanders and Judd Marmor, Growing Up Before Stonewall: Life Stories of Some Gay Men. Milton Park, Oxon.: Routledge, 1994. Part II is the oral histories of "11 American gay men", of whom "Andrew" recounts a positive and affectionate first sexual experience with a kindly Depression-era hobo on his family farm when he was 8, "Danny" at 16 was briefly courted by a young man of 22, and "George" as a delivery boy of 13 or 14 had a sexual relationship with a doorman.

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 Jay College of Criminal Justice, The Nature and Scope of the Problem of Sexual Abuse of Minors by Catholic Priests and Deacons in the United States 1950-2002, Washington, D.C.: United States Conference of Catholic Bishops, 2004. A substantial statistical study which uncovered a predominantly pederastic phenomenon, with 81% of the minors involved being boys, and 80% aged 10 to 16; it could have shed seriously useful light on Greek love if only it had not been wilfully blind to any distinction between rape and sex with willing boys.

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.

Dennis Harmon  (editor), The Boy-Lovers. Four Sociological Case-Histories of Men Who Loved Boys, New York: Jumeaux, 1969. PDF.  Four erotically-explicit and allegedly 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.

Robin Lloyd, 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.

Dr. Charles Silverstein, "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.

NEW!  John Heilemann, “The Choirboy” in New York, New York City: New York Media, 19 May 2005. Read online. An interestingly layered account of large-scale mostly consensual sexual interactions between staff and pupils at a New Jersey boy choir school 1968-81, concentrating on the stories of two of the boys who later sued the school, one of them Lawrence Lessig, a distinguished law professor.

James Spada, The Spada report: the newest survey of gay male sexuality. New York: Signet, 1979. Short quotations arranged by topic from interviews by a journalist of more than a thousand American gays. About 4 of its 338 pp. are of Greek love interest: eight positive accounts by younger partners, four negative ones and five descriptions by pederasts of their feelings and relationships.

Jennifer Terry, An American Obsession: Science, Medicine and the Place of Homosexuality in Modern Society. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1999. A study of changing attitudes to homosexuality in the USA, with occasional short mentions of Greek love, especially in Chapter 7.

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.

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.

Kathryn Medico & Mollye Barrows, A Perversion of Justice: A Southern Tragedy of Murder, Lies and Innocence Betrayed, New York: Avon, 2004. The story of two boys of 12 and 13 who murdered their father with a baseball bat in Florida in 2001, so that they could go to live with the man who had recently become the lover of the younger boy, and of the consequent trials of all three.

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.

CANADA

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.

Darcy Henton & David McCann, Boys Don't Cry: The Struggle for Justice in Canada's Largest Sex Abuse Investigation, Toronto: McClelland & Stewart, 1995. An account by a journalist and a former inmate of the cruel punishments and rape inflicted on boys of 7 to 17 by Catholic monks at a reform school in Ontario in the 1940s-70s. Such non-vicious pederasty as may have gone on is unsurpringly beyond the book's remit.

 

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