Before it named women who love women, lesbian could describe a wine
Until the middle of the nineteenth century, calling something lesbian simply meant it came from Lesbos, the Greek island, and one thing it could describe was a type of wine. The modern meaning grew from the island's most famous resident, the poet Sappho, who wrote of her love for other women around 2,600 years ago.
Sappho lived on Lesbos in the sixth century BCE, and fragments of her verse survive. They are among the earliest records of love between women, which otherwise went largely undocumented because women's lives in general were so rarely written down. Plato's Symposium touches on it, and Roman writers such as Lucian included such characters in their works. The shift in the word's meaning is traceable: by 1870 it was being applied to erotic relationships between women, in 1875 a critic used it for a Baudelaire poem about two lovers that never mentions the island, and medical dictionaries adopted it in 1890. By 1925 it had become a standard noun.
The idea of lesbians as a distinct category of person, rather than a set of behaviours, only took shape in Europe around the start of the nineteenth century. Before that, attitudes swung widely. From the seventeenth to the nineteenth centuries it was actually fashionable in the West for a woman to profess passionate love for a female friend, and plays such as Twelfth Night used cross-dressing seductions as comic plots. Later sexologists, including Richard von Krafft-Ebing and Havelock Ellis, labelled same-sex attraction a form of insanity.
The twentieth century saw bursts of visibility and repression. Berlin in the 1920s had some 50 lesbian clubs, a scene that vanished after 1933. Radclyffe Hall's 1928 novel The Well of Loneliness, meant as a plea for tolerance, was tried for obscenity, and one historian calls that trial the moment a visible English lesbian subculture crystallised. Between 1955 and 1969 more than 2,000 lesbian pulp novels were published in North America.
Other cultures have their own histories. Marriages between women and cross-gender roles have been recorded in over 30 traditional African societies, and premodern Chinese sources describe relationships that scholars stress were understood differently from today. Modern polls estimate that 1 to 2 percent of women identify as lesbian.
Source: Lesbian
