From: NewNowNext
You know Rosie and Ellen, Melissa Etheridge, Rachel Maddow and Jane Lynch—but the sad fact of the matter is that a lot of gay men are out of touch with lesbian history and culture.
And while we may have our differences (breasts might as well be elbows to me, my lesbian friends hate the smell of manstink), we are two sides of the same queer coin. Plus, our sapphic sisters have always had our backs: when many gay men were sick or dying during the worst of the AIDS crisis, lesbian activists were among our greatest allies.
From the historical to the contemporary, consider this just a starter-list of lesbians* whose names you’d better learn—and let us know who you’d add in the comments.
1
Sappho
c. 610–c. 570 BCE
We’d be remiss not to begin with the Ancient Greek poet Sappho, from whose supposed proclivities we derive the English words “sapphic” and “lesbian.”
The cunning linguist and lyrist lived on the Greek isle of Lesbos in the 6th century BCE, where it’s believed she may have run a school where she prepared young women for marriage and initiated them into the ways of erotic love.
While only fragments of her poems remain today—and scholarly debate continues about whether or not these are autobiographical—it’s certain that she wrote prolifically of love, woman’s beauty, and the exquisite pain of longing.
*For the purposes of this list, we’ve only included self-identified lesbians (with a few exceptions)
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