Homosexual societies have always been secret for the simple fact that one could lose one's head ... if lucky, lucky because the usual means was the far more painful burning at the stake. If beheading was found too soft, a miscreant's hands and feet could first be lopped off. Another highly popular method had a man hanged until nearly dead, then lowered and disemboweled before his very eyes, and finally beheaded and the body cut into four pieces (drawn-and-quartered). He could also be castrated just before being gutted, and a popular variation, right up to this day, is having the castrated remains stuffed into his mouth, chocking him to death. Even when one escaped death, the consequences of boy-love were serious, the Oscar Wilde tragedy an example (fully covered herein), and more men than one chose suicide over scandal, from the richissime Alfred Krupp to General Hector MacDonald. The only sanctuary that existed was boarding schools, boys literally locked in their dormitories at night, totally free to practice hard-core Lord of the Flies sexual acrobatics and fag-inspired masochism, an experience that certainly started out in pain for many, but for most it was the imperishable, never to be regained, always wistfully regretted time-of-their-lives, as only first love can be. Boys left these schools for the secret Cambridge Apostles and the Bloomsbury Set, where under the likes of the economist Maynard Keynes they were chosen for their beauty and sexual receptivity. This fully-illustrated book begins with the Templars that flourished, homosexually, despite the sheath of lead imposed by Christianity, although in Rome popes and cardinals had access to vagrant lads so numerous as to beggar the imagination of sultans and their boy harems. Until the Stonewall Riots of 1969 American secret societies were far more muted, especially the Mattachine Society, its roots in California where they refused to rock the boat because busloads of lads were arriving in Hollywood daily, and until they were ''discovered'' they made themselves available at cut-rate prices, as stars have done since DeMille. A major section of the book concerns the Chaeronea Order, based on the Theban Sacred Band, the history of which will bring us full circle to that happier time where a Greek man and his boy could gain ultimate honor--before men and gods alike--by defending one another to the death.