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Vaniver comments on Stranger Than History - Less Wrong
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No. There are 17 countries that allow it and 2 that allow it in some jurisdictions. A list may be found here: http://www.pewforum.org/2013/12/19/gay-marriage-around-the-world-2013/
There have been plenty of cultures where homosexuality was accepted; classical Greece and Rome, for example. Cultures where marriage is predominantly a governmental matter rather than a religious one are all, as far as I am aware, heavily influenced by the cultures of western Europe. One might also observe that all of these countries are industrial or post-industrial, and have large populations of young people with vastly more economic and sexual freedom than occured before the middle of the 20th century. One might also observe that China, Japan and South Korea seem to be the only countries at this level of economic development that were not culturally dominated by colonial states.
The fact that a history of Christianity is positively correlated with approval for gay marriage does not imply that Christian memes directly influence stances on homosexuality. Christianity spread around the world alongside other memes (such as democracy and case law). Those countries where European colonies were culturally dominant also received the industrial revolution and the immense increases in personal rights that came as a consequence of the increased economic and political power of the working class. One might also point out that thinking black people are inferior is a meme that arose from the slave trade in Christian semi-democracies.
There seems to be abundant evidence that the Abrahamic religions have strongly influenced societal views worldwide with regard to sexual morals; indeed, I cannot imagine a remotely plausible argument for this being untrue. I also wish to observe that Eastern Orthodox Christianity survived the USSR and still affects cultural values in Russia; it seems highly improbable that it did not influence Russian culture in the 1930s.
I get the impression that both China and Japan (I'm less familiar with Korea) are accepting of homosexual desire and activity, and assumed that bisexuality (of some sort) was normal, and almost all opposition to it stems from Christian influences in the 1800s. I think that none of them have gay marriage, or any sort of serious movement towards gay marriage, because of a conception of marriage as family-creating, rather than bond-creating, and under such a view obviously sterile marriages are a bad idea. (Why not just marry a woman and have a male lover?)
This was certainly the attitude of ancient Greece, to a first approximation anyway (they didn't even have a social category for gay relationships between two men of equal status).
I'm not sure how much this was the case in China. Given how fashionable it is in certain parts of academia to retroactively declare historical people gay, I'd take this claim with a grain of salt.
This is the way it was in Japan and China, and seems to be the societal default. Male-male relationships were typically between older and younger men, with some between two young men.
Which claim? The evidence for existence of socially acceptable sexual relationships between men seems as good for ancient China and Japan as it is for ancient Greece.
(Agreed that individual claims of sexuality- was Buchanan gay, or just asexual?- are dubious, because it's hard to get anything more definite than a "maybe," but it's much easier to be confident about aggregates: at least some of the historical figures suspected to be gay were gay.)
I've heard one suggestion that it might not even make sense to talk about people in societies with different sexual morals, such as the ancient Greeks or the Chinese and Japanese in these examples, as being "gay" or "straight" in the sense that modern Western countries talk about it. They certainly didn't see themselves that way. It's clear from examples like pederasty that cultural values have a lot of impact not only on how people act sexually, but on how they conceive of sexuality.
On the other hand, it's clear from the existence of "homosexuality" even amidst Christian moral values that humans also have innate tendencies on this that differ from person to person for some reason. But I'm not sure if we really know enough to say what those innate tendencies are like on a statistical level; we don't have any large data on a society with minimal enough influence on both sexual mores and the conception of sexuality that we can see how humans act as a result. Maybe studying a large number of hunter-gatherer societies would give us something similar; they'd all have societies with specific conceptions of sexual morals, but we'd avoid most arbitrary distinctions and get at some things that actually relate to natural human tendencies, even if they aren't the pure expression of them.