Dover, Percy, Williams

I would second Diogenes in recommending Kenneth Dover's Greek Homosexuality above all for Greek boy-love. I think he's much more authoritative than anything written since and unusually free of bias, and he has a clear-headed and intuitive understanding of what it was about. William Armstrong Percy's Pederasty and Pedagogy in Archaic Greece (1996) is good on the aspects it covers and clearly sympathetic, linking pederasty to the Greek miracle. For Rome, Craig A. Williams's Roman Homosexuality: Ideologies of Masculinity in Classical Antiquity (2nd edition, 2010) stands head and shoulders above anything else I've come across for insights into Roman thinking. Once you've read those, or perhaps before, I'd say it is much more rewarding and fun to let the ancient world speak for itself by reading the primary sources. No need to feel intimidated: the ancient writers tended to be much livelier writers than modern ones. www.amazon.com/dp/1481222112