>When I picked up my 12-year-old son after soccer practice in Turkey, one of the other boys touched Alex’s cheek with his hand and said, “See ya, handsome.”
>I noticed macho police and secret service types holding hands. It’s not unusual to see male university students fawning over each other, but there is no indication they are homosexuals.
>One could say the lack of self-consciousness is refreshing, without the American need to put a label on certain behavior and judge it, even if I’m too Americanized to feel comfortable hugging and kissing other men.
>Before observing this phenomenon of male behavior in Turkey, I would have thought that it wasn’t “natural” for men to hug, kiss and dance with each other because that’s the way I was raised. In middle and high school in America, boys are taught what it is acceptable and unacceptable behavior. They are taught that it is “unmanly” and “unnatural” to show affection toward other men, and if you do so in junior high school or early high school at least, you are to be shunned and condemned as “gay.” But that is just culture speaking, not “nature.”

https://exploringeuropeandrussia.wordpress.com/2011/09/10/men-hug-kiss-dance-together-in-turkey-and-call-each-other-handsome/