A Wordy, Nerdy History of ‘Lesbian’

Tracing words through history, from adjectives to identities

Artwork “Sappho of Lesbos” by the author, Joe Duncan. Map of Ancient Lesbos by Yanisbonos, licensed under Creative Commons 4.0. Bust of Sappho by Mary Harrsch, licensed under Creative Commons 4.0. Mosaic (right) by TimeTravelRome, licensed under Creative Commons 2.0.

In July 2008, while the United States was on its way to electing the first Black President in U.S. history, a court battle was wrapping up partway across the world over the use of the word “lesbian” as an identity describing gay women. The Greek courts dismissed a case brought by three Greeks seeking to “prohibit the use of the word lesbian to describe gay women,” as Reuters via the New York Times reported:

Three residents of Lesbos, the birthplace of the ancient Greek poet Sappho, whose love poems inspired the term lesbian, filed suit last month, contending that their identity was insulted by the use of the word in reference to gay women. The court said that the word did not define the identity of Lesbos residents, and so could be used legitimately by gay groups in Greece and abroad.

Nations across the globe were reckoning with longstanding anti-LGBTQIA+ discrimination that had been present in every facet of societies around the world, and the transition from deeply prejudiced societies to open ones was slow and incremental. Like the rainbow colors representing the range of LGBTQIA+ identities that bleed slowly and seamlessly from one to the next, social progress also happens in slow gradations.

Battles for equality were fought in the courts, as activists worked tirelessly to raise public consciousness around the ubiquitous discrimination that had been manifest to LGBTQIA+ folks since time immemorial, but invisible to nearly everyone else.

We need only retrospect to see how far we’ve come since 2008. With the gift of hindsight, we see the changes that felt so subtle at the time. Sexuality was much more rigid then, less fluid—at least in most Americans’ minds. The soon-to-be President Obama said something remarkably conservative by today’s standards — that marriage is “between a man and woman.”

While Obama was unsupportive of LGBTQIA+ marriage during his campaign, he later came out supporting it in 2012. In 2015, three years after Obama announced his support for LGBTQIA+ marriage, the United States Supreme Court declared state bans against LGBTQIA+ marriage unconstitutional with the Obergefell v. Hodges decision. The evening the decision was announced, the White House was lit up in the rainbow flag colors, an open declaration of Obama’s support.

Image of the White House with rainbow light via the Executive Office of the President of the United States. Public Domain.

Greece, too, has come a long way regarding LGBTQIA+ rights. In February 2024, Greece became the first Orthodox Christian country to legalize LGBTQIA+ marriage. This year, they became the 16th country in the European Union to legalize marriage equality and the 35th country worldwide to do so. Progress is slow but steady.

In 2008, when the Greek courts rendered their verdict, headlines were penned, declaring, “Lesbians are not just from Lesbos.” The premise of the lawsuit brought to the Greek courts in 2008 tracks with a longstanding idea that the word Lesbian comes from Lesbos after the Ancient Greek poet Sappho (pronounced Sap-fo), wrote vivid, erotic poems dealing with women’s desire in 6th-century BCE Greece. But is it true?

I’ve covered the lengthy history of the word “gay” across 2,800 years, spanning multitudinous cultures and countless lives. Let’s trace the history of “lesbian” as it transitioned from an adjective to a global identity. Heads up, we’ll have to cover some naughty ancient words to do it, but I’ll keep it as clean as possible. Click any underlined Greek word to hear me say it.¹

A Wordy, Nerdy, History of ‘Gay’

Lesbians and Lesbos: Toponymic Adjectives

Most etymology sites tell us “lesbian” (meaning “female homosexual” — their words, not mine) dates from 1890 onward, first appearing in extant written texts in 1925. But “lesbian” has a much longer history, taking on numerous contexts across thousands of years. Like “gay,” the word lesbian has seen the rise and fall of several empires.

The first recorded use of “lesbian” dates back to the first complete work of Western literature — Homer’s Iliad, from the 8th-7th century BCE. Though the word refers to the inhabitants of Lesbos, it’s loosely associated with women immediately. Achilles had just quit the war against Troy, so King Agamemnon is trying to convince him to rejoin the fighting by offering women from Lesbos (Homeric Greek with English translation):

δώσω δ᾿ἑπτὰ γυναῖκας ἀμύμονα ἔργα ἰδυίας
Λεσβίδας, ἂς ὅτε Λέσβον ἐῠκτιμένην ἕλεν αὐτὸς
ἐξελόμην, αἲ κάλλει ἐνίκων φῦλα γυναικῶν

I will give him seven women of Lesbos, whose hands’ work is
blameless, whom when he himself captured strong-founded Lesbos
I chose, and who in their beauty surpassed the races of women.

It’s creepy that men are talking about handing out women like Christmas gifts, yes, but stick with me here. The hidden context of this passage won’t be immediately obvious to the modern reader. The women of Lesbos were distinguished for their beauty throughout Ancient Greece. Homer—and later Athenian poets—used “lesbian” as an adjective meaning “beautiful woman.” Saying, “the lesbian” meant, “the beautiful woman.” In linguistics, this is a “toponymic adjective” — a word derived from the name of a place.

We still do this today, and I can’t think of a better modern toponymic adjective than “Florida Man.”

As Kate Gilhuly, Professor of Classical Studies at Wellesley College, writes:

Places, it seems, can be put into words, and thus given identities. In contrast to the porous quality of place, however, language has a way of fixing boundaries, containing meaning. Often, the intricate knot of meaning that a place has gets condensed and communicated through a concise tag. The Athenians, especially the comic poets, were especially prone to speaking through geography, and by way of them, though not necessarily directly, we can speak of Spartan accommodations, Corinthian leather, Sybaritic pleasures, and Lesbian women. Encoded in each one of these characterizations is a range of significations, a collocation of perceptions that could be understood as just an image, or perhaps a brand, or even slander of the various coordinates that give a place an identity.

It’s hard to overstate how common this practice was in ancient literature. Ancient writers readily employed euphemisms for touchy subjects. I’ve discussed this at length, covering such euphemisms in Ancient Greece, Rome, and the Hebrew Bible. This makes understanding ancient words — like “lesbian” — a Herculean task. Yet, these toponymic adjectives played a key role in the history of “lesbian,” so understanding them is essential.

This brings me back to Sappho.

The Lyrist of Lesbos

A century or two after Homer, in the 6th or 7th century BCE, Σαπφώ (Sappho) would construct poems that linked her name with the word lesbian thenceforth. Though, she would have been bewildered if you called her Sappho. Her name was Ψάπφω (Psappho, pronounced Psap-fo), in her native Aeolian dialect of Ancient Greek, which was distinct from other dialects of Ancient Greek (Doric, Attic, Cypriot, Ionic, etc.).

Her poems on social issues have moved readers for nearly 2,600 years, speaking directly to the heart, even today. Unfortunately, her works were later burned by offended Christian patriarchs. One such patriarch condemned Sappho, saying she was “A sex-crazed whore who sings of her own wantonness.” Typically, only fragments of complete poems remain.