Were the greeks cute twinks? @Miffin and @GigaNew2024Account have a 20+ comment long slapfight about it, featuring many a longpost.

The given excerpt is serious about something actually occurring in real life. Xenophon claims to have attended, it's a work partly apologetic of Socrates, why would he tarnish the legitimacy of such a work with an off-hand comment? What use would there even possibly come from making up such a story, when there were already stories of pederasty involving Thebes? So, it's still not something made up by a gay, or not gay dude, from the 1970s. You even have material evidence, which is rare for such a thing, which I alluded to with the picture- the Chaeronean grave. There is much more evidence for the view of its existence, and some kind of homosexual practice, than that it was somehow single-handedly made up by Plato, and his circle; certainly not by a dude from the 1970s.

You can criticise the work, but Dover did not originate the idea of the homosexual Sacred Band, and similar. Those are directly from classical texts. To say they're all somehow made up (even if we reject eg. the Sacred Band), is just conspiratorial.