Some learned authors of the English Renaissance, such as Sir Philip Sidney, revealed a (disapproving) knowledge of the original texts, but awareness of the role male love played in Plato's teachings remained, in England at least, a secret to men not versed in Greek and Latin, and rare among them.

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The first English translation of the Symposium, published by Floyd Sydenham in 1767, was outrageously bowdlerized: Male references and pronouns were changed to female and Plato's "army of lovers" transformed into an army of knights and ladies. Alcibiades' speech was omitted as contrary to English morals.

To counter this travesty, Percy Bysshe Shelley prepared an accurate translation, but when it was finally published after his death, it too was bowdlerized so as to obliterate any homoerotic elements.

The first candid English version to reveal Plato's world in uncensored form was the Bohn Library edition of 1849.

Governments, publishers, editors, and even gay writers themselves have censored gay content in literature from the Renaissance to the present.

Homosexuality is writ large in English Renaissance literature, but its inscription is only rarely direct and unambiguous.

Since homosexuality was severely persecuted during the Romantic period, writers who treated the subject more or less positively were forced to encode it or leave it unpublished and were themselves frequently forced into exile.

Ancient Greece holds a unique place in the heritage of homosexual literature as it was a society that openly celebrated same-sex love in its poetry and prose.

Burned at the stake by the Roman Catholic Church, Italian philosopher Giordano Bruno has been seen as a martyr to religious intolerance; only recently has he also been recognized as a queer hero.

Goldsworthy Lowes Dickinson, a Cambridge classicist and friend of E. M. Forster, is significant for the glbtq legacy as the author of an immensely popular book on ancient Greece and a posthumously published, surprisingly frank autobiography.

The fifteenth-century Italian philosopher Marsilio Ficino introduced the phrase "platonic love," by which he meant a relationship that included both the physical and the spiritual.

Benjamin Jowett, classical scholar and translator whose bowdlerization of Plato illustrates the dishonesty made necessary by Victorian homophobia, was probably homosexual in orientation.

No ancient is more instructive about pederasty than the Greek biographer and essayist Plutarch.

Italian rhetorician and philosopher Antonio Rocco is author of an early classic of pederastic literature, L'Alcibiade fanciullo a scola (Alcibiades the schoolboy), which was written in 1630 and published anonymously in 1652.

Admired through the ages as one of the greatest lyric poets, the ancient Greek writer Sappho is today esteemed by lesbians around the world as the archetypal lesbian and their symbolic mother.

Athenian lovers Harmodius and Aristogeiton were remembered in ancient Greece as the great tyrannicides and celebrated as lovers, patriots, and martyrs.