Tag: history

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which is even funnier because she’s the reason lesbians are called lesbians. she was know as sappho of lesbos and her poems were all about her love for women

no im totally not a lesbo my super actual husband is dick allcocks from man island i’m megahet

“I don’t always sleep with dudes but when I do, it’s Dick from Man Island.” 

– fragment 32

Fun facts about Sappho that we need to remember pls

• her poems were not ‘all about her love for women’. Sappho wrote about love and lust for both women and men, although it’s true that more works about her love for women seem to have survived (it’s also very important to realise that hardly any of her work did survive; we literally have one complete poem and a load of fragments). While it’s important to remember that societal constructs of sexuality were emphatically not the same in Ancient Greece (600 BC, yo) it’s very likely that, if concepts of sexuality were comparable (which they aren’t), she would be identified as bisexual or pansexual. Close-knit erotic friendships between people of the same sex were the norm. It wasn’t until later, with the advent of Christianity, that the concepts of love as being between a man and a woman became the ‘standard’. 
• the term ‘lesbian’, coined in the 19th century to mean ‘a woman who loves / is attracted to women’, didn’t then explicitly mean a woman who was only attracted to women. Our modern attempts to paint Sappho as entirely homosexual are no better than the attempts of archaic historians to paint her as heterosexual. It still erases her actual identity and paints over it with what we want her to have been, or to be.
• the first written record (Suda, 10th century AD) of Sappho’s husband being named Kerkylas of Andros is way too late and unverified to be anything but a hilar joke. Despite writing biographically about her brothers and potentially her daughter (although she may have been a young slave) there’s no mention at all of anyone called Kerkylas / Cercylas in any of her poetry. Oh, the Greeks and their witticisms. 
• the idea of Sappho as a lesbian is a comparatively recent one. Over the years, Sappho has basically been reinterpreted by subsequent generations to fit the mould of what that generation wanted her to be. For example, in the Victorian era in Britain, it became fashionable to imagine her as a virgin schoolmistress. There’s literally no record of Sappho having worked at a school, and the concept of virginity also doesn’t really apply to Sappho and her contemporary society, but for decades this was the accepted version of Sappho; it explained why, from a Victorian perspective, she would have had the time to write her poetry, and why she might never have married, as well as why she surrounded herself with women (the Victorians emphatically did not believe that she felt lustfully towards women; rather that she wrote her poetry from a male perspective; again, judging by her other biographical references in her poetry, this seems unlikely). Long before that, from 40BC onwards, the common belief about Sappho was that she had fallen in love with a male boatman named Phaon (who was a Greek mythological figure himself) and killed herself for love of him. This image of Sappho was the dominant poetic image all the way through the Renaissance and well into the 1800s.

tl;dr Sappho wasn’t gay, she didn’t only write about women, but she also wasn’t straight, because concepts of gay and straight are not applicable to her and the society in which she lived. She existed as something else entirely; something for which we as a society don’t have a concrete term or understanding.

I was just gonna comment with a joke about how great it would be if there actually was a dude named Dick Allcocks from Man Island, but then all sorts of fascinating history lore happened.