🇬🇷 Welcome to Lesbos, Greece.
👩❤️👩 The Greek island is inhabited by 115,000 Lesbians, but has also given its name to women loving women worldwide.
🌈 For #InternationalLesbianDay, let's take a look at the history of the word "lesbian". 🧵
🏛️ From the Iliad to the Odyssey, Lesbos has had a central part in Ancient Greek history.
✒️ One of its most famous inhabitants was the 6th century B.C. poet Sappho, whose lyrical poems explored her love of women and their beauty – sometimes even venturing into the erotic.
👩 Sappho was regarded as one of the greatest poets of her time.
📜 Today, not much is known about her life, and much of her work has been lost over the centuries.
👩❤️💋👩 But Sappho's homoerotic writing – and possible personal life – has been discussed since Hellenistic times.
💘 Sappho wrote about loving women, but it's debated if these descriptions were romantic – and if she was attracted to women.
👬 While homosexual behaviour between men was accepted and documented in Ancient Greece, accounts of lesbian relationships are much rarer to come across.
👭 Irrespective of Sappho's sexuality, her name has ever since been tied to love between women.
✒️ It was in the 18th century her birthplace came into the equation, with William King defining "Lesbians" as women who "loved Women in the same Manner as Men love them".
🥼 In 1890, the term lesbian appeared in a medical dictionary describing sex between women.
📕 While lesbian was used interchangeably with 'sapphist' and 'homosexual' at the turn of the 20th century, it was recorded as a noun in 1925, as the female equivalent of a sodomite.
🤫 Gay – a 12th-century word meaning carefree – became an underground word for being homosexual in the early 20th century.
✊ But with the rise of second-wave feminism in 1960s and ‘70s, gay women wanted their own identification and the use of lesbian became mainstream.
✈️ Today, thousands of lesbians travel to Sappho's birthplace yearly.
🧑⚖️ Even if some of the locals unsuccessfully went to court to ban the word being used to describe gay women.
🍸 Eros, the village of Sappho's birth, has three lesbian bars – that's two more than London. 👇
🏳️🌈 As time has moved on, more young queer women are rejecting traditional labels and have stopped using the word lesbian to describe their sexual identity.
❓ If you are a #WLW, how do you prefer calling yourself?
👇 Share with us below!
Share this Scrolly Tale with your friends.
A Scrolly Tale is a new way to read Twitter threads with a more visually immersive experience.
Discover more beautiful Scrolly Tales like this.