You are conflating gender with sexuality. It may be a recent thing to explicitly differentiate between them in discourse, but gender was still distinct at the time - to insult a man's masculinity would clearly not in all contexts imply you were calling him a homosexual. In fact I'm sure in a majority of cases it would not imply that, since insults to masculinity were and still are quite commonplace.
More specifically, hermaphroditism does not have any clear implication of homosexuality, and a neuter gender has an implication of no sexuality. That doubtful gender is the strongest possible insinuation, but still weak given it clearly targets gender.
These all seem to be immasculating insults, and much more convincing arguments would need to be made to infer the implication of homosexuality. In fact, even the article points to masculinity being the overriding theme.
If there were clearer contemporaneous examples of these phrases more unambiguously implying homosexuality, that would be more convincing.
> gender was still distinct at the time - to insult a man's masculinity would clearly not in all contexts imply you were calling him a homosexual
To the classical Romans, a man having sex with men was considered to be demonstrating greater masculinity (if he was topping) than one having sex with women; women were soft targets (as a Latin teacher of mine put it, "anatomically passive" and therefore not so much of an accomplishment).
More specifically, hermaphroditism does not have any clear implication of homosexuality, and a neuter gender has an implication of no sexuality. That doubtful gender is the strongest possible insinuation, but still weak given it clearly targets gender.
These all seem to be immasculating insults, and much more convincing arguments would need to be made to infer the implication of homosexuality. In fact, even the article points to masculinity being the overriding theme.
If there were clearer contemporaneous examples of these phrases more unambiguously implying homosexuality, that would be more convincing.