LOVING LOVE:


LESBIAN ROMANCE’S NAMESAKE FROM EONS PAST A FRESH SPARK


Love and sex between women in ancient times


has a similar, however distinct, history of its own. Dispensing first with the traditional reflex of invok- ing the Greek island of Lesbos as the namesake and home base of all things gay-and-womanly, a 2015 BBC documentary TV special labeled the island as “the sex tourism capital of the ancient Aegean.” But, said the program, far from being the female-only love nest we think of, Lesbos was a magnet for straight men looking for a sex tourism seaport. Ancient Lesbos truth and mythology notwith- standing (reality likely lying somewhere between the BBC episode’s take and ancient mythical tales), the island is nowadays better known as a Greek commu- nity whose modern-day residents’ hospitality toward refugees from North Africa and the Middle East dur- ing the ongoing crisis is unrivaled. However, the ori- gins of the term lesbian in the gay sense, according to Merriam-Webster and Oxford, is indisputably related to the island’s most famous resident of the ancient past. Webster puts 1567 as the year of its first-known English-language usage and refers to that resident in its definition—she, of course, being Sappho. Regardless of when the word “lesbian” was first as


used to describe gay, bi and pansexual women and girls, as well as more recently some gender-fluid people too, Sappho of Lesbos is singularly most meri- torious as the human namesake of pure feminine love in the 21st century.


sappho To say Sappho was an ancient Greek poet would


be like saying Aristotle was a pretty smart guy from the olden days in Greece. In fact, Daniel Mendelsohn wrote inThe New Yorker back in 2015 of Sappho’s body of work, much of which consists of the supremely po- etic and irresistible shares of an elder woman’s pining to hold and to caress the beauty of younger women, “extant corpus of antiquity’s greatest female artist.” To wit, a Sapphic example of what prompts such high praise from writers today:


Honest, I want to die, she said to me.


She was in tears when she went away, Said to me not once but many times: Sappho, why must we suffer so?


It’s not by choice; I don’t want to leave you here. And I, this is what I said to answer her: Farewell. Go in peace. But remember me.


Don’t ever forget how well I took care of you. If you do, let me recall to you


All the good days we had together,


The wreaths you wore, of roses and violets As we lay side by side, the necklaces


Woven for flowers to drape your soft shoulders, The perfume, precious, fit for royalty How much you used, to anoint yourself!


The soft bed (where) you would satisfy...desire... —poem 4 by sappho (translated by bernard knox)


It’s been said that Sappho was to the ancient


Greeks “The Poetess,” in the same way Shakespeare is to us now, “The Bard.” Homer, who wrote the Iliad, curried no favor from his female counterpart. In one poem she famously mocked Homer’s war-glorifying epic. If ancient Greek romance’s premier poet-lesbi- an has a message to us this Valentine’s Day—and in perpetuity, it’s best summed up by The Guardian’s Charlotte Higgins.


Of Homer’s Illiad as critiqued through the eyes and


counter-opposing poetry of the hopelessly romantic though never naive Sappho, Higgins writes, “There is no mention, let it be said, of Helen’s parents or children in the Iliad—Sappho’s poem personalizes, intensifies and romanticizes Helen’s experiences. And it likens Helen’s emotional world to that of the narrator: Her longing for Anactoria, whom she’d rather see “than all the chariots and armed men in Lydia.” Higgins continues, saying, Sapphos’s work is “the


original ‘make love not war’ poem, and it launched a thousand works of Roman lyric poetry (and beyond) that subversively prioritize the life of love and art above the military, civic, ‘establishment’ values of the moral majority.”


On a personal note, thanks to the research I was


fortunate enough to engage for this assignment, which was kindly and unexpectedly offered by my editor at The Rage Monthly, I will now walk eagerly into this Valentine’s Day, rather than flinching as it ap- proaches me, now middle-aged and still single. Why? Because I’ve gained a fresh-sparked love for the idea of gay love. For the month of February and this Valentine’s Day,


let it be remembered that it was Alexander the Great, a handsome king and the fiercest conqueror of the ancient world whose love of a slightly older man he wore as easily as you or I might wear a lightly fitting, favorite T-shirt, who reignited this writer’s romantic heart. But, let it also be known that I have a new and whol-


ly unexpected love: Sappho, the original lesbian, if you will. If you’re anything like me, The Poetess of the ancient Greeks has the power to make you fall in love with love all over again.


FEBRUARY 2018 | RAGE monthly 23


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