History of lesbianism

Lesbianism is the sexual and romantic desire between females. There are far fewer historical mentions of lesbianism than male homosexuality, due to many historical writings and records focusing primarily on men.

The evidence about female homosexuality in the ancient Greek world is limited, it being hardly mentioned in extant Greek literature. Most surviving sources from the classical period come from Athens, and they are without exception written by men. At least among these Athenian men, the discussion and depiction of female homosexual activity seems to have been taboo.Kenneth Dover suggests that, due to the role played by the phallus in ancient Greek men's conceptions of sexuality, female homosexual love was not conceivable as a category to the authors of our surviving sources.

Nonetheless, there are a few references to female homosexuality in ancient Greek literature. Two poets from the archaic period, Sappho and Alcman, have been interpreted as writing about female homosexual desire. Alcman wrote hymns known as partheneia, which discuss attraction between young women. Though it is ambiguous, historians have considered the attraction in question to be erotic or sexual. At roughly the same time, Sappho's poems discuss her love for both men and women. For instance, in Sappho's Ode to Aphrodite, the poet asks Aphrodite for aid in wooing another woman. It is noticeable that the fragment describes Sappho both giving to and receiving from the same partner, in contrast with the rigid active/passive partner dichotomy observed in Greek male homosexual relationships. Only one fragment of Sappho's poetry, Sappho 94, contains a clear mention of female homsexual acts.

In classical Athens, the idea of homosexual women is briefly mentioned in the Speech of Aristophanes in Plato's Symposium. Later references to female homosexuality in Greek literature include an epigram by Asclepiades, which describes two women who reject Aphrodite's "rules" but instead do "other things which are not seemly". Dover comments on the "striking" hostility shown in the epigram to female homosexuality, contrasting it with Asklepiades' willingness to discuss his own homosexual desire in other works, suggesting that this apparent male anxiety about female homosexuality in ancient Greece is the reason for our paucity of sources discussing it.

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