The cultural impact of Classical Greek homoeroticism is a part of the history of sexuality. Later cultures have articulated their own discourse about homosexuality through the use of historic terms and concepts, such as "Greek love". The metaphor of "Greek love" becomes most vivid historically in periods when the reception of classical antiquity is an important influence on dominant aesthetic or intellectual movements.
'Greece' as the historical memory of a treasured past was romanticised and idealised as a time and a culture when love between men was not only tolerated but actually encouraged, and expressed as the high ideal of same-sex camaraderie. … If tolerance and approval of male homosexuality had happened once — and in a culture so much admired and imitated by the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries — might it not be possible to replicate in modernity the antique homeland of the non-heteronormative?
In his essay "Greek Love," Alastair Blanshard asserts that "Contrasting attitudes toward Greek love is one of the defining and divisive issues in the homosexual rights movement."
Read more about Cultural Impact Of Classical Greek Homoeroticism: Historic Terms, Ancient Greek Background, Ancient Rome, Renaissance, Neoclassicism, English Romanticism, Victorian Era, 20th and 21st Centuries
Famous quotes containing the words cultural, impact, classical and/or greek:
“Barbarisation may be defined as a cultural process whereby an attained condition of high value is gradually overrun and superseded by elements of lower quality.”
—Johan Huizinga (1872–1945)
“The question confronting the Church today is not any longer whether the man in the street can grasp a religious message, but how to employ the communications media so as to let him have the full impact of the Gospel message.”
—Pope John Paul II (b. 1920)
“Compare the history of the novel to that of rock ‘n’ roll. Both started out a minority taste, became a mass taste, and then splintered into several subgenres. Both have been the typical cultural expressions of classes and epochs. Both started out aggressively fighting for their share of attention, novels attacking the drama, the tract, and the poem, rock attacking jazz and pop and rolling over classical music.”
—W. T. Lhamon, U.S. educator, critic. “Material Differences,” Deliberate Speed: The Origins of a Cultural Style in the American 1950s, Smithsonian (1990)
“The poets were not alone in sanctioning myths, for long before the poets the states and the lawmakers had sanctioned them as a useful expedient.... They needed to control the people by superstitious fears, and these cannot be aroused without myths and marvels.”
—Strabo (c. 58 B.C.–c. 24 A.D., Greek geographer. Geographia, bk. 1, sct. 2, subsct. 8.