The Ancient Greeks Were Bisexual and Into Frottage!!

By the late twentieth century, the American landscape of homosexual discourse had become a tableau of contradictions: paraded freedoms on one side, dogmatic restrictions on the other, both shackled by a curious prudery when it came to rethinking the sex act itself. Enter Bill Weintraub--a man possessed not by a sex drive but a corrective instinct. A Jewish-American classicist and activist, Weintraub sought to rehabilitate an ancient practice into modern gay consciousness--frottage, the art (and joy) of genital-to-genital contact between men.

Frot, as Weintraub dubbed it, was not a kink, not a fetish, but--pace Plato--a form of eros as noble and Olympian as any. Like Sappho with her lyre, Weintraub sang to deaf ears. His argument was anatomical, historical, and--scandal of scandals--ethical. That anal intercourse had become the unexamined orthodoxy of modern male homosexuality was for Weintraub a travesty: one not just of health, but of history.

One need only look backward, into the sunlit gymnasia of Hellas, to find precedent. The Greeks, whom we now worship as fathers of democracy and tragically misunderstood marble-bound bisexuals, had a rich tradition of male-male intimacy, carefully bounded by age, status, and yes--preference. The erastes and the eromenos formed the cornerstone of what later thinkers, notably Plato in the Symposium, considered a spiritually and intellectually formative bond. "Fall in love with boys old enough to think for themselves," Socrates says, "and love becomes a teacher."*

But what did they do together? The vase paintings answer in stylized silence: embracing, touching, frotting--an entire culture of eroticism that eschewed (anal) penetration in favor of intimacy, immediacy, and mutual regard. "There was a right way to engage in such a relationship," notes Andrew Calimach in Lovers' Legends, "and a right time as well." That time, we now know, rarely involved what today is taken for granted.

The gods themselves modeled it--Apollo with Hyacinthus and Cyparissus, Hermes with Antheus, even Pan and his sweet Daphnis. Frottage, it seems, was the delight of the immortals--and, crucially, the safer route. Nowhere in Theocritus or Xenophon do we find Olympus ravaged by fissures or prolapses.

And what of the Sacred Band of Thebes? That elite corps of 300 lovers, formed not for orgy but for glory--warriors bound by affection, not dominance. James Romm, in The Sacred Band, notes that their very structure was built around asymmetrical but passionate pairings, where trust was as much a weapon as sword or spear. They fought and died together at Chaeronea, not for sodomy, but for each other.

Fast-forward to today's allegedly liberated gay world, and we find not gods or heroes but algorithms and influencers, many of whom scoff at frot as "just a fetish." That term--"fetish"--is the new slur, a way of dismissing any deviation from the norm, no matter how rational or pleasurable. Frottage is genital-genital, just like penile-vaginal, penile-clitoral, or lesbian tribadism. And yet, it is marginalized, dismissed by both reactionary conservatives and assimilationist gays as too quaint, too romantic, too... Greek.

And yet, what could be more radical today than touching? Truly touching. Without the violence, the risk, the compulsive penetration that often leaves behind not just blood but shame. Weintraub's crusade, if that's not too grand a word, was never prudish. It was, like all good classical revivals, a call to remember.

But remember what? That some acts build love while others destroy it. That intimacy does not require harm. That eros--real eros--is a teacher, not a conqueror. And that, perhaps, we've misunderstood what it means to be men.

One might even suggest that the Frot vs. Anal debate is the ultimate test of intellectual integrity among homosexuals and heterosexuals alike. The collective silence around it--this unspoken taboo among both bourgeois gay men and their equally bourgeois straight detractors--betrays a collusion of mediocrity.

Yes, lives hang in the balance. Not just of flesh and blood, but of soul and spirit. "Your own salvation above everything," said Nietzsche, whom I dare recruit here. And perhaps Bill Weintraub, quixotic though he may seem, was one of the few willing to save the soul of gay love--from itself.

So let the analist status quo tremble. Let the chorus of conformity jeer. The truth, like Apollo's lover, is beautiful. And like Hercules' countless beloveds, it cannot be ignored forever.

* "Alcetas, according to Xenophon, had struck up a love affair with a male Orean renowned for virtue and beauty. Xenophon calls this beloved a pais, a boy, but like the British term lad, this need not imply extreme youth; the word was often a synonym for erômenos, a male who might well be adult but was younger than his erastês.*

*For this reason paiderasteia, the Greeks' term for an erotic bond between males of unequal ages, must be distinguished from our pederasty; the Greek word does not imply a child was involved. The Greeks felt that age asymmetry was essential to same-sex relationships, and the term pais, like erômenos, helped establish that imbalance." [James Romm, 66-67]

The Burning Touch -- A Meditation on Ancient Eros and the Forgotten Art of Love

There is, in the present, a kind of noise--shrill, fractured, nervous--that rings across the lives of men who love men. It is a noise that silences feeling. That cloaks the body, the animal body, in shame. And it was against this noise, and from a yearning for something deeper, that Bill Weintraub began to speak.

Bill, a Jewish-American man who read the classics not with the dead mind of the scholar but the aching heart of a lover, proposed something that startled many: that men might, as the ancients once did, delight in the pressure of skin to skin, in the rhythm of rubbing--what he called frot, or frottage--rather than in acts that often wound and punish the body. Not out of fear. Not out of morality. But from desire for a more mutual, more feeling-centered, more beautiful communion.

And how quickly the world dismissed him. They called it a fetish, this touching of flesh to flesh, this dance of groins. A fetish, though it is no more a fetish than tribadism among women, no more a fetish than penile-vaginal love among men and women. And the animals do it, too--fur and muscle brushing and humping under stars and sun--without shame.

Bill did not speak in hatred. He spoke in care. Because he saw, and he knew, that anal sex--though desired by some--could bring harm: torn tissue, infections, pain, diseases, even death. And he saw how silence about alternatives--how the absence of choice--could lead men to hurt themselves in the name of love. He ached for something else. He longed for a return to the ancient kindness of the Greeks.

Yes, the Greeks. We look at their statues, their vases, their myths--but we forget their hearts. In the time of Apollo and Hermes, of Pan and Dionysus, love between males had a rhythm, a season, a form. An erastes--a man--and an eromenos--a youth awakening--met in longing and responsibility. They touched. They taught. They brushed thighs and bellies. They embraced. They didn't rush to wound or dominate.

From Calimach's Lovers' Legends, we learn that Apollo loved Hyacinthus. That Hermes, guardian of games, had his Antheus. That Pan played his pipes for Daphnis. The gods themselves sought touch and tenderness. They taught, perhaps, that eros is not conquest but communion.

And then, in the world of men, there were the Thebans--three hundred pairs of lovers, the Sacred Band, who stood against Philip at Chaeronea. They were not beasts, not monsters. They were warriors of the heart, bound by love and trust, by the deep belief that to know another man in the soul and body makes one braver, not weaker. James Romm reminds us that they were not mocked for touching, but honored for dying together.

But now? Now we have shame where once there was celebration. Now we have silence where once there was song. When Bill speaks of frottage, he is met not with curiosity but with mockery. The Right calls all male love sin. The (more "honest" or "traditionalist") Left deems it perversion. The middle shrugs, too tired or too afraid to think anew.

But I ask: Must men always follow the path of pain? Must they be bound to habits that harm, simply because a chorus of the familiar sings them to sleep? The touch of penis to penis, the embrace of equal skin, can hold more than pleasure. It can hold love. The heroic love. Presence. Recognition. It can hold the fire of eros without the violence of breaking.

And I wonder, as D. H. Lawrence might, if men today are afraid of real love--of tender love--of love that does not disguise itself in irony or conquest or shame.

This is not a call for rules or purity. It is a yearning for awareness. For choice. For the freedom to ask: What brings life to my body? What brings dignity to my soul? What kind of touch makes me feel more human--not less?

And perhaps that is the heart of the question: not frot or anal, not tradition or taboo, but this--what makes me feel whole?

Bill asked that question. Many mocked him. But some listened. And I, in writing this, want to say--I am listening still.

WORKS CITED

Calimach, Andrew. Lovers' Legends: The Gay Greek Myths. 1-3, 4.

Romm, James. The Sacred Band: Three Hundred Theban Lovers Fighting to Save Greek Freedom. 66-67.