Following up from the "brother-making" book:
The sections on paired monasticism and teacher-disciple relationships was interesting, as was the explanation of homosociality in Byzantium. The footnotes were extremely useful, as they pointed to a number of books more squarely focused on male-male interactions in late antiquity.
One of these was an analysis of St. Gregory the Theologian's funerary oratory for St. Basil the Great:
5 J. Børtnes, “Eros Transformed: Same-Sex Love and Divine Desire. Reflections on the Erotic Vocabulary in St. Gregory of Nazianzus’s Speech on St. Basil the Great,” in Greek Biography andPanegyric, ed. Hägg and Rousseau, 180–93.
An excerpt from said oration:
Again:
I can understand why a lot of people today don't know that something like this is even possible.
This is a messy thought, but I wonder if part of the problem is that our culture assumes a crypto-"magical" world-view, where pursuit of the "highest principle" is self-directed and inherently involves the manipulation of sexual energies.