Who are the real lesbians?
Ever since Sappho wrote of her feelings for other women, the Greek island of Lesbos where she lived has had its own place in the dictionary. But now its modern residents have begun a campaign to reclaim the term for themselves. John Walsh reports
Tuesday, 6 May 2008
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When is a lesbian not a Lesbian? The answer's in the capital letter – it's when you are a woman who loves women, rather than an inhabitant of the Aegean paradise of Lesbos (or Lesvos in the modern spelling). For decades, foolish and unsophisticated tourists have giggled about the coincidence of the Greek island and the sexual orientation. Now it's become the crux of a legal dispute whose implications are global.
It began when a gay rights group, calling themselves the Greek Gay and Lesbian Union (Olke) came to the ears of Dimitris Lambrou, a publisher of a small, serious magazine devoted to ancient-Greek religious issues, and an islander on Lesbos. He objected to the casual appropriation of his island's name, co-opted two local women, Maria Rodou and Kokkoni Kouvalaki, and filed a lawsuit on 10 April. Olke responded stoutly, claiming that the proposed injunction is a groundless violation of freedom of expression.
Mr Lambrou and his friends seek to remove the word "lesbian" from the group's name. "It's not an aggressive act against gay women," he said. "Let them visit Lesbos and get married and whatever they like. We just want them to remove the word lesbian from their title." His emollient words hide an old-fashioned distaste for sexual unorthodoxy behind a simply territorial objection. "My sister can't say she's a Lesbian," he complained. "Our geographical designation has been usurped by certain ladies who have no connection whatsoever with Lesbos."
Mr Lambrou's magazine, Davlos (Torch) has been campaigning against the nomenclatural confusion for years, ever since gay women from all over the globe made the island a place of pilgrimage: the island's pleasant town of Eressos is well-known as a world lesbian conference centre. It's there that Olke has argued that Greek lesbians should have a right to same-sex marriage: an uphill struggle in such a conservative country. But their deliberations have encountered opposition and scorn from nervous parents and church organisations.
Mr Lambrou claims the islanders have for years suffered "psychological and moral rape" by having the place's name pinched by the sisterhood. He likes to point out that the sexual meaning of "lesbian" has been around only for a few decades, while he and his fellow-islanders "have been Lesbians for thousands of years". The Greek Gay and Lesbian Union denies it. "It's nonsense," said Evangelia Vlami, its spokesman. "The term has been in use to denote gay women for thousands of years."
This may be true, but the Oxford English Dictionary included the word with its modern usage only from the 1950s. Mr Lambrou is being stoutly British in his objections. The Greek legal system is taking the matter seriously, and the case will be heard in Athens on 10 June. But it raises all kind of questions: if the Olke organisation can be stopped from using the word with its familiar connotations, can the islanders stop other people – people in Greece, in mainland Europe, in America, in the world – using the word to mean anything except "descended from the inhabitants of Lesbos"? Can Lambrou fight the use of "lesbian" internationally and insist that – in its capitalised form – it can be used only by the 100,000 islanders and a further 250,000 expatriate Lesbians all over the globe?
Can the name be branded, never to be used in the public prints except with an initial capital – like Sellotape, and Hoover and Biro, all of which have been the centre of course actions brought by sensitive manufacturers? In modern dictionaries (50 years after the OED led the way), the primary meaning of "lesbian" is "(of women) homosexual" while "(with cap) of the island of Lesbos" comes a poor second. How could the copyright be enforced worldwide?
The reason why Lesbos is blessed, or cursed, with connotations of homosexuality is the presence on the island of one of the ancient world's great lyric writers: Sappho. She was born somewhere between 630 and 612 BC, married a rich merchant and had a daughter called Cleis. She seemed to have money to burn, and spent her time communing with the arts. She took to writing poetry – lyric poetry, created to be sung to lyre music – and revolutionised the tradition by writing about her own thoughts and feelings, rather than about what the gods and Muses might be thinking.
She was an innovator: among her ground-breaking work was her predilection for writing tender love poems to women – often of elegy and yearning for a departed lover: "Come back to me, Gongyla, here tonight," reads one fragment. "You, my rose, with your Lydian lyre/ There hovers forever around you delight:/ A beauty desired."
Her poetic voice did not suggest a woman in the grip of a schoolgirl crush. These were heartfelt love poems of erotic adoration to the pupils sent to her to learn the arts of verse. When the girls left her febrile embrace, she went on writing to them and, when they got married, wrote their epithalamia, or wedding songs.
It was rare to find women writing poetry at all in ancient Greece; rarer still to find one uttering sexually charged feelings for other women. But nobody seems to have condemned her, or even judged her odd or perverse, for her expressions of desire and loss. Plato thought so highly of her lyric gift that he spoke about her as one of the Muses. It seems a shame that, although her poetry ran to nine volumes, all we have left is a single poem and a lot of fragments. Many bits of papyrus containing pieces of her work were found in the Nile valley in the 19th century: they had been used to wrap mummies and coffins and stuff sacred animals, a rather pathetic fate for the oeuvre of such a proto-romantic. But one thing she handed down to posterity was her name – or at least the adjective that derives from it.
Type "Sapphic" into an internet search engine and you'll be knee-deep in hot-babe-action websites with names like Sapphic Traffic. Legitimate fields of Sapphic inquiry – such as the "Sapphic stanza", a four-line metre used by poets as far removed as Swinburne and Ginsberg – receive, by comparison, very little attention.
Back at Lesbos, the indefatigable Mr Lambrou has been pointing out, as a clincher to his many anti-lesbian arguments, that Sappho wasn't actually gay anyway, since she got married and gave birth to a daughter. He also claims, more controversially, that new historical research suggests she killed herself because of unrequited love for a man. The whole semantic structure of the word "lesbian", therefore (he claims) is based on a misunderstanding. The Olke group responded with spirit. "This doesn't mean anything," said Evangelia Vlami. "Thousands of lesbians are in married situations with children, and the story of her suicide is not founded in fact."
So the trial of lower-case lesbian vs upper-case Lesbian is going ahead. Now, an on-line magazine called The Register has put forward a solution. It suggests that Greek lesbians henceforth call themselves Sapphists, non-Greek gay women continue to call themselves (small l) lesbians – and islanders call themselves Mytilenians, after the name of its capital, Mytilene. It is, after all, the name used in common Greek parlance when talking about Lesbos. Whether this will cut any ice with the extremelyliteral-mindedMr Lambrouremains to be seen.
