The beautiful island of Lesbos
Short history lesson: the name “Lesbian” referring to gay women is a reference to the Greek poet Sappho, who wrote love poetry about both men and women and was born on the island of Lesbos. Early uses of the word did not distinguish between men and women, but perhaps it stuck to women because Sappho herself was female.
In any case, the word has been dated back to the early eighteenth century, and after three hundred years, the inhabitants of Lesbos have had enough. A group of three women sued in an Athens court in an attempt to have the word banned as a term for gay women, saying that it insulted their national identity. The Court disagreed, and in fact ordered the three Lesbos women to pay legal fees.
This is one of those cases where I’m completely unsurprised by the outcome but can’t help but wonder what would have happened if it had come out the other way. Would they have started on other countries next? Could they have? Would banning the use of the word in Greece have even done that much good?
And of course, all I could think about when reading this was an episode of the BBC show Coupling, in which a character is talking on the phone to a friend of his who just randomly hopped a plane to Lesbos:
“And the name of the island is pronounced Lesbos.” Pause. “Yes, well, that was fairly optimistic of you, wasn’t it?”
Coupling (the UK version, let’s not speak of the other) had some of the best writing/dialog that I’ve ever seen on television. The fact that Steven Moffat is taking over Doctor Who makes me kind of giddy with anticipation.
