For centuries, men have been writing histories of antiquity filled with warlords, emperors and kings. …
Of all the many kinds of poem Sappho composed, it was the ones in which she expressed a romantic interest in women that proved the most memorable, especially in later years. Like ‘sapphism’, the word ‘lesbianism’ would come to be applied exclusively to relations between women only from the late nineteenth century and in the light of Sappho’s verses. Already in antiquity, a connection developed between Lesbos and subversive sexual practices. While the Greek verb lesbiazein, ‘to act like a woman of Lesbos’, could be used of oral sex performed on people of both genders, the island came to be associated particularly with women who refused to submit sexually to men. Homer’s portrait of Lesbos as an island of beautiful women was supplanted by descriptions of ‘masculine-looking’ women liking other women ‘as if they were men’. This was a subtle way of saying that women on Lesbos had sex with each other using dildos.