We must remember that winners wrote the history books, and they tended to be male. Kinda always, actually. Boys being boys, they're wont to omit how they only conquered X due to their wives and mothers packing them a nice lunch and making sure they had a clean breech cloth and a spare toga. And various other things that kept everyone from killing each other before they even left port. Not all heroes wield swords.
I was itching to say something similar for a while now.
True to say, implanting modern conventions into a historical setting annoys me as much as it does for everyone else posting on this thread.
History has largely been written by men. Many of the contemporaneous records were written by men whose views on race, gender, class structure, etc was framed within their (privileged) positions. Traditionalist views on all these complex human experiences in modern writing is just as irritating to me as modern conventions in historical settings.
Women have largely been written out of history, so much so that fresh historian eyes are writing books about how that came to be. There's some revision redressing some of that, including greater recognition of the roles played by women in the Easter Rising, War of Independence (Ireland). The French Resistance wasn't by any means a boys' club and good luck writing ancient Rome without dealing with very powerful women. They may not have been in the Senate, but they were still hugely instrumental.
Another thing maybe to consider, did ancient civilisations have the same issues with non-binary sexuality or is that a construct of modern religious doctrine? My impression has always been that the orgies in ancient Rome were fairly indiscriminate.
Things were different back then, but I'm not sure human nature was. People resisted the restrictions imposed on them, whether by outward social activism or inward turmoil. I'm pretty sure Henry VIII's wives weren't just sitting around waiting to see what he might do next. Like all writing, intersting historical fiction will reveal the characters and not just the posed photograph of everyone looking stern and stoic in their formal suits.
