It was considered manly to top, and unmanly to bottom. Yet there were a lot of bottoms. Both secret and public. Just like today. They faced stigma (hence secrecy; or acceptance of their status), that’s all.

This should be obvious if you think about it. Lots of gay sex back then, means there had to be as many bottoms as tops. Stigma be damned. And the same then holds for heterosexual and bisexual men.

Where is the evidence that pegging was “popular”? I don’t think it was popular as it would have been regarded down because of how manhood was defined back then. Such act would have been considered “unmanly”.

Thank you!

The story is of course fake (it’s a symbolic rewrite of a story in Kings). But that doesn’t matter for this point since it would still be significant to be communicating such a message even with a fiction.

It’s possible but uncertain.

The case for that interpretation is that the author doesn’t qualify, yet it was so common for men to make lovers of their “boy” (even a slave boy), that the suspicion would certainly properly attend no matter what the real situation was. And Luke does seem to be whitewashing that by correcting the word to “slave” (a covert way of trying to neutralize the suspicion). This makes it similar to the Pericope of the Adulteress and the Parable of the Good Samaritan and many other instances of Jesus having mercy on wretches or telling stories about such.

The case against is that “boy” can mean also son, not just servant or slave, and the story in Kings this emulates indeed is about a son, and this would be a man-son pair to match the man-daughter story of Jairus (also in Mark). Plus, the ambiguity. The article you link to is incorrect in this one point:

Now, could pais really just mean “servant”? There are several reasons why this makes no sense. First, one would not expect a Roman centurion to intercede, let alone “beg” (parakaloon), on behalf of a mere servant or slave. Second, while Luke refers to the young man as a doulos (slave), the centurion himself specifically calls him a pais; this strongly suggests that the distinction is important. Third, we know that the erastes-pais intimate relationship was common practice among Roman soldiers, who were not allowed to take wives, and whose life was patterned on the Greek model of soldier-lovers. If pais just means “servant,” none of this makes any sense.

That’s culturally incorrect. There were a lot of very intimate friendships between master and slave that were not sexual. Masters often cared a great deal about them. And vice versa. Cicero’s slaves literally died to protect him against a murder squad, their love for him was so great. It’s unlikely they were all his lovers. It was not unusual to have Platonic love for a slave, as a good friend. (A likely reason the Epistle Philemon, in which Paul and the master he is writing to are both gaga for the slave he is writing on behalf of; though some people assume this then means this is a love triangle and Paul was bi/gay, that’s unlikely—if the letter is genuine—since Paul was, if anything, anti-sex, and not at all a fan of gay sex—though again, some have claimed the “thorn in his side” that he said the Devil tormented him with might have been his homosexual urges, but again, that’s still speculative. We don’t know.)

So I’d say it’s 50/50 or thereabouts: this could be the intention of the story, but we can’t be sure. At worst, it’s an allowed interpretation, because the author says nothing to exclude it. So we can’t rule it out. But we can’t confirm it either.