When Apollo met Hyacinth (Gay Greek mythology)

Gay love turns you into a real man, but you must die to be reborn. Greek myths such as this one, the story of Apollo and Hyacinth, his Spartan boyfriend, often feature beloveds who die, seemingly accidentally. But myth is symbolic, and the deaths of the beloveds stand for their passage from youth to maturity. The boy dies so that the man can be born.

These boys were not children, of course, but well built older adolescents who would be of legal age today in most First World countries. Their lovers were not older men, but young men in their twenties, who had not yet married. The stories that the Greeks wrote about love between males were all meant to teach an ethical way to enact what we today would describe as gay love.