Third in importance and sequence is the marriage vow, a responsibility to be taken up in later life: Lysis marries Thalia amid general approval.

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These patterns are governed by two assumptions--one that men are capable of both homosexual and heterosexual responses, the other that (since this is the Athens of Socrates) the relationship seeks to evoke and exalt what is highest and most excellent in each partner.

In later novels, Renault moves to Hellenistic times to chronicle the career of Alexander the Great. The first of this series, The Mask of Apollo (1966), brings to imaginative life a body of careful research into the nature of Greek theater. Its protagonist-narrator, Nikeratos, has had his successes and failures as an actor, but he has achieved a firm union with the younger actor Thettalos.

At the end of the novel, the boy Alexander comes backstage after a performance in the provinces, and Nikeratos is struck by his beauty, presence, and power. Fire from Heaven (1970) goes back to recreate the young hero's childhood and boyhood. The Persian Boy (1972) is told by Bagoas, a beautiful young Persian eunuch who becomes Alexander's lover. The Persian Boy ends with the death of Alexander, and the ironically titled Funeral Games (1981) relates the bloodshed and power struggles that follow his death.

What distinguishes Renault's historical fiction is her ability to interweave seamlessly the fictive and the factual (the invented Nikeratos and the historical Thettalos, the effects of Socrates' teaching on imaginary young men); to expand mere hints in the historical record (Bagoas, for example) into plausible and circumstantially complex events or characters; and to create realistic and believable psychologies for her characters: not modern sensibilities in period costumes, but minds evidently molded by the culture out of which they spring and that they in turn influence.

Above all, Renault's work depicts with love and care an age and a culture in which homosexual love was neither deviance nor norm but part of experience.

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

Homosexuality, both male and female, has a rich, divergent, and increasingly open expression in the literature of the twentieth century.

Glbtq historical fictions creatively interweave fiction with facts in ways that have not only won them a large readership but also have offered that readership insightful illuminations of glbtq histories.

Since World War II, the gay male novel has progressively flourished in England and especially in America.

The diverse South African glbtq community both thrives and struggles amid the contradictions between a conservative traditional culture and some of the most progressive gay rights legislation in the world.

From ancient times, homoerotic writing has been a notable part of the literature of war.

One of the most fascinating men of all times, Alexander the Great was not only a great soldier and conqueror, he was also renowned for his love of Hephaestion.