...why the Greeks of the Classical period accepted homosexual desire as normal is an easy question: they did so because previous generations had accepted it, and segregation of the sexes in adolescence fortified and sustained the acceptance and the practice. Money may have enabled the adolescent boy to have plenty of sexual intercourse with girls of alien or servile status, but it could not give him the satisfaction which can be pursued by his counterpart in a society which does not own slaves: the satisfaction of being welcomed for his own sake by a sexual partner of equal status. This is what the Greek boy was offered by homosexual relations. p.26