The other day I read Plato's Symposium for the first time in some fifty years, and was quite taken aback.
I had entirely forgotten how gay and even enthusiastically pro-pederasty that dialogue is.
The dialogue is about love, a topic Plato's Socrates claims in the dialogue is the only thing he actually knows about.
A claim that lends additional weight to the philosophical content of Socrates' speech on the subject, on the whole just as gay as those of the others.
And that comprises the ideas of the philosopher as one who loves and pursues but does not have wisdom, of the philosopher actually achieving intuition of the Form of Beauty itself, and of the philosopher's special claim to political insight.
Alcibiades' speech comes last, right after Socrates', and paints him as having been - with Alcibiades, anyway - an annoyingly chaste homosexual lover of beautiful male youths.
It is interesting that the Catholic clerics of the Middle Ages preserved Plato, the enthusiastic advocate of pederasty, but lost the not so gay (if at all) Aristotle and pretty much stamped out the anti-sex Epicurus.
If I have that history right.
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