> However, if I'm even vaguely correct about the general attitude
> of crossdressing in proto-IE cultures, then I have to think that
> anal sex would be tainted with similar machismo attitudes that see
> a penetrated man as a woman, and as such, a lesser creature
> from a "true" man who always makes sure to penetrate.
There are signs of this in Hebrew culture - penetration was a way of
humiliating the conquered - but as far as we can guess it is not true in the
same way in Greece or Rome. In fact, it's quite hard (as it were) to work
out exactly what went on between Achilles and Patroclus, or what Alcibiades
wanted from Socrates. The erotic poetry from Greece treats young men as sex
objects equivalent to women, and there are enraptured descriptions of their
parts ("how lovely it is to see the imprint of your arse on the sand...")
but alas it doesn't go into the mechanics of what goes where, and some
scholars suggest anal intercourse was not on the menu. Vase paintings show
oral sex between men, and some kind of genital activity, which can be
interpreted as "intercrural" as one writer puts it, rather than anal. My
theory is that the Greeks were not stupid, and they knew the best place to
put their particles.
Effeminacy, on the other hand, was derided in Aristophanes and elsewhere.
If you do take it up the bum, you have to take it like a man.
In Rome, we have the example of Caesar ("husband to every woman, and wife to
every man"). His soldiers also called him the "wife" of an eastern
potentate he shacked up with for a bit. In context, this appears as
affectionate derision - so merely being buggered is not shameful. Another
example appears in Catullus, who leaves his boyfriend with his two co-eval
friends, and threatens "to bugger the both of them" if they touch him.
Perhaps that does suggest humiliation a bit? Tibullus has a male sexual
partner, and makes no secret of it, but we don't know who played what in
that relationship.
So all of that indicates that we can't just dump Hebrew or modern taboos
back onto the IEans. Perhaps Greece and Rome lost the taboo to some
extent, or perhaps it has come into IE culture through Christianity. I
don't think we can be certain of attitudes that far back.
Peter