@mal I'm really not a scholar or anything - just a bloke who spends too much time in the British Museum - but I've read that the "love E as he would a woman" bit is kinda famous for being an example of how Fertile Crescent folk used to talk about Platonic male relationships, and how male bonding worked back then?
And there was lots of awesome explicit pre-Christian (and *definitely* pre-gamer!) gay literature, so I'm pretty confident they did have ways to talk about it..