Lesbos, a rocky,
mountainous island about 138 miles around, rises above the Aegean Sea,
between Greece and Turkey. Once, Lesbian referred to the people
who lived there, but Sappho, the island's most famous native, gave the
term a new meaning. Sappho was born around 630 B.C., though no one
knows exactly when, and earned a reputation as a poetess of talents so
great that the ancients compared her with Homer, the most renowned poet
in Ancient Greece.
Most of Sappho's work has
not survived, but the remaining fragments attest to a poetry suffused
with sensuality and simple pleasures, and to Sappho's own romances with
the young women she admired. At the end of the 19th Century,
doctors seized on the term lesbian as a label for women with Sappho's
sexual inclinations, and thus introduced the term into popular use.
