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Nero married one of his male slaves, as did at least one other emperor. There were grand ceremonies throughout the empire honoring both. In some provinces in ancient China there were same gender marriages, both male and female. In the Sudan in Africa two women could marry, and one was considered the husband, in that she was the "head of the household."
There's a really long discussion involved in any story about marriage, same or opposite gender. The short discussion is that we tend to think that all cultures have had "marriage" like ours, but that isn't true. We label a wide range of relationships as marriage, no matter what other cultures called them. For instance, in pre-Islamic Arabia and other nomadic/tribal cultures, a man could often marry as many women as he wanted, and a woman could marry more than one man. In some cases (and it's hard to know how common these were because these are cultures without writing) a man could be married to several women, each of whom could be married to several other men. These arrangements could vary based on religious and tribal customs, so it wasn't even a uniform code, more of a series of traditions. Muhummad changed that, requiring marriage to be between a man and up to four women (who could only have one husband), and according to some interpretations only one wife was allowed. No same gender marriage, though.
In places like Rome and Greece, which were large, multi-cultural empires comprising myriad customs and legal systems, marriage could be purely secular, or it could have a religious element, or it could have both, depending on the regions laws, customs, and religions.
So the question of what cultures recognized same gender marriage is as complicated as what marriage even is. Rome before Christianity had several different arrangements which resemble marriage, including a formal, secular type of marriage that allowed opposite or same gender marriages (obviously sex between men or between women was never a taboo in Rome or Greece, and was often considered a more pure form of love than opposite-gender sexual relationships, as you can read in Plato's "Symposium," for starters). These unions created a sexual, social, and business relationship--basically what our current idea of marriage creates--and had to be formally dissolved to end. It is impossible to know how common it was because the sources don't survive, and worse, because Christians over the Middle Ages destroyed any source that didn't reflect it's values (The same impetus destroyed all western works of Aristotle, too, and we only know of Aristotle in the west from texts the Muslims preserved). Rome also recognized religious styles of marriage--basically in Rome, if your culture allowed you to marry, Rome would recognize it.
That changed when Christians took over. In 342 AD the marriage code was altered to fit Judaic law, and marriage was redefined as between a man and a woman. Anyone in a same gender marriage was to be executed (yeah, the Christians were bastards, but let's face it, the Romans weren't very nice to them, either). That alone should prove that there were legal same gender marriages before 342, because otherwise there would have been no reason to outlaw them and punish those who had done it.
Ancient Greece didn't have a formal legal structure for marriages (at least not that's been discovered). They just sort of shacked up, but the arrangement was considered binding and had legal consequences, as far as we can see, whether it was "gay" or "straight" (which is another interesting discussion--there was no word for "gay" or "straight" in ancient Greek, and not really for ancient Rome, because sex and love weren't differentiated by gender the way we do now.) Many of these were same gender marriages.
Early Christians, before Constantine legalized Christianity, had no formal definition of marriage, even. Marriage seems to have been private, and often a matter of two people declaring they were married. It's hard to say for sure that there wasn't something more formal, though, since early Christianity was illegal for the most part, and therefore they wouldn't have advertised their marriage customs.
Anyway, that's all disjointed. Sorry. Wikipedia has a decent discussion of marriage, and of same sex marriages. John Boswell wrote a lot about homosexuality in the ancient world and medieval Europe, if you feel like reading long books on the subject. Some of that was stuff I picked up in books on religion or culture that aren't really about marriage specifically. You major in history, you get a lot of weird tidbits floating around up there. :)
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