Q: What was homosexuality like in ancient Rome?

A: Rather than give you my answer, I'll let some original sources speak for themselves. Here are several I've collected:

Petronius (c. 27-66 CE) (advisor to Nero on entertainment), Satyricon 75.11, "When I was fourteen, I became my master’s ‘favorite.’ I mean, what’s wrong with doing what your master wants? Of course, I was doing it for my mistress, too. You catch my meaning? I don’t publicize it because I don’t like to boast.”

Seneca the Younger (c. 3 BCE – 65 CE), Letters 47, "Yet another slave, the one who pours the wine, is decked out in feminine clothing and fights a losing battle against age. He is a boy approaching manhood, but he must present a boyish appearance. Thus, although he has the bodily build of a soldier, he remains beardless because his hairs are rubbed away or pulled out by the roots. He is awake all night, dividing his time between his master’s drunkenness and sexual desires. In the bedroom, he is a man; at the dinner table, he is a boy.”

Tacitus (c. 56-117 CE), Annals 14.42 "One of his own slaves killed Pedanius Secundus, the city prefect. The slave committed the murder either (1) because Pedanius Secundus refused him his freedom after agreeing to the ‘purchase price,’ or (2) because the slave was in love with some young man and could not tolerate his master as his rival.”

Tacitus (c. 56-117 CE), On Tiberius, the Caesar of Jesus’ day, 6.1 Tiberias’ Pederasty: "In the fashion of a despot he debauched the children of free-born citizens. It was not merely beauty and a handsome person which he felt as an incentive to his lust, but the modesty of childhood in some, and noble ancestry in others. Hitherto unknown terms were then for the first time invented, derived from the abominations of the place and the endless phases of sensuality.”

Catullus (c. 84 BCE – 54 BCE), Poems 93, 57 on Julius Caesar’s sexual appetite with his homosexual partner Mamurra: "They suit one another well, these two lewd lechers, Mamurra and Caesar with his unnatural lusts. And no wonder! They have both been stained with an equal number of blotches which cannot be washed away [i.e. venereal disease], one picking them up in the city, the other at Formiae [Mamurra’s hometown, south of Rome], equally diseased, equally debauched, like twins, both learned scholars in affairs of the bed, both renowned for their adulterous appetites, friendly rivals also of young girls. Yes, they suit one another well, those two lewd lechers.” Because of such behavior Caesar was mocked as "a man for all women and a woman for all men.”

Suetonius (75 CE – 160 CE), The Twelve Caesars, on Tiberius the Caesar of Jesus’ day: (3.44) "Some aspects of his criminal obscenity are almost too vile to discuss, much less believe. Imagine training little boys, whom he called his ‘minnows’, to chase him while he went swimming and get between his legs to lick and nibble him. Or letting babies not yet weaned from their mother’s breast suck at his breast or groin—such a filthy old man he had become.”

Suetonius (75 CE – 160 CE), The Twelve Caesars, on Nero the Caesar of Paul’s day: (6.28 & 29) "Not satisfied with seducing free-born boys and married women, Nero raped the Vestal Virgin Rubria. He nearly contrived to marry the freedwoman Acte, by persuading some friends of consular rank to swear falsely that she came of royal stock. Having tried to turn the boy Sporus into a girl by castration, he went through a wedding ceremony with him –dowry, bridal veil and all – took him to his palace with a great crowd in attendance, and treated him as a wife. A rather amusing joke is still going the rounds: the world would have been a happier place had Nero’s father Domitius married that sort of wife. He dressed Sporus in the fine clothes normally worn by an Empress and took him in his own litter not only to every Greek assize and fair, but actually through the Streets of the Sigillaria at Rome, kissing him amorously now and then. . . . Nero practiced every kind of obscenity, and after defiling almost every part of his body finally invented a novel game: he was released from a cage dressed in the skins of wild animals, and attacked the private parts of men and women to stood bound to stakes. After working up sufficient excitement by this means, he was dispatched – shall we say? – by his freedman Doryphorus. Doryphorus now married him – just as he himself had married Sporus – and on the wedding night he imitated the screams and moans of a girl being deflowered.”

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