One of the things that is implicit in Boehringer's analysis, but not (yet) stated overtly (perhaps because she assumes her readers are aware of it?), is that there is a major shift in the development of "gender categories" between the earlier Greek evidence and the Roman evidence. Under Greek pederasty, the erastes and eromenos took on categorically different roles in the relationship, but they were not viewed as inhabiting distinct life-long identity categories. The eromenos is expected to participate in the relationship as part of the mentoring necessary to become an adult male citizen, not because he has a specific desire to be a "passive" partner in sex. He is, in turn, expected to become an erastes himself. And despite some hints of a pederastic element in f/f relations, the primary model is a different one: two equal partners in the relationship.
But the Roman sexual system established the possibility of a free adult man who, due to some inherent nature, had a lifelong attraction to taking a "passive" role in sex. Within Roman philosophy, this made him a less virtuous man, but it was an identifiable and defined category that was distinct from those males who might be forced into being the "passive" partner of another man due to their dependent social status. Similarly, the Roman sexual system had a role for an assigned-female person whose sexual desires and activities were categorized as masculine, whether or not that person had female partners. This was not an aspect of the Greek depiction of women in same-sex relations (to the extent that we have evidence). Greek myth did have a "stock type" of women who participated in male-coded activities, such as the followers of Artemis, but that element was not conceptually tied to certain sexual preferences.
The book will, no doubt, get into this development in more detail as the chapter goes on. But it's useful to keep in mind that this distinction in a Roman context is sometimes anachronistically projected onto Greek culture, as when Sappho is later portrayed as "masculine."
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