A society in which at least 45% of men enjoyed pederasty with boys younger than the age of eighteen but also probably had sex with women and had children as well, as in the Florence of Cellini and Michelangelo, is very different from a society in which about one in ten men is a gay man, who is more strictly prohibited from having sex with boys than pre-modern Florentines and who is moreover not interested in having sex with women at all.
Sexual regulation has changed greatly over time. Today, in the richest nations, the most important legal and social boundary is the age of your partner, not his or her sex or gender, and the social expectation is that you had better have sex with either men or women exclusively and in any case build your social identity based on the gender of your love interest as well as your own race and gender (but not on your class), but that was not the case before modernity.
Learning about such dramatic differences, which are not common knowledge, and understanding diverse sexual practices of the pre-modern world as they actually were is an important weapon against those who seek to make homophobia and homosexuality timeless and universal.
<http://www.glbtq.com/arts/cellini_b.html> Cellini, Benvenuto (1500-1571)
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In the late fifteenth century, one in two Florentine men had come to the attention of the authorities on suspicion of sodomy by the time they were thirty.
In 1432, the "Office of the Night" was created to eliminate sodomy, but after seventy years it was disbanded as the task was deemed hopeless. About ninety percent of the cases reported involved boys under the age of eighteen. Sexual activity between men and boys was an integral feature of Florentine culture in the sixteenth century.
Cellini himself was convicted of homosexual sodomy in Florence in 1523 and in 1557. He was prosecuted but absolved of charges of heterosexual sodomy in France.
-- Yoshie