hello, darling~ welcome to my sapphic-loving corner. here, you'll find an infinite database filled with all the media i know of (and consume or plan on consuming) containing wlw relationships. everything is being added manually and will, of course, be mainly focused on what i enjoy and would like to share with everyone else. some content, like angst or things containing heavy topics (such as homophobia, self-harm, etc.), will be excluded for my own comfort. you can feel free to e-mail me all your recs, too!
p.s.: i'm a lesbian, but i want this page to be a safe space for every wlw relationship, so of course this database isn't exclusively made of lesbian characters or stories.
the longstanding history of the words “sapphic” and “lesbian” come from the aforementioned greek poet, sappho of lesbos. her poems were not only self-reflective but also detailed in their description of her attraction to fellow female students attending the school she conducted on the island of lesbos. the words — ”lesbian” from lesbos and “sapphic” from sappho — stem from the poet’s passion for other women, and the terms are now used to describe female homosexual attraction (lesbos world history). since the 1950s, the word “sapphic” became specifically used to describe all non-men attracted to non-men. yasmine hamou from them defines sapphic as “an umbrella term that includes lesbian, bisexual, and pansexual trans femmes, mascs, nonbinary folks, and cis women”. according to the trevor project, the word “lesbian” is typically used to describe “people who identify as women or feminine of center, whose attractions are to some other women.” the trevor project further states that “some nonbinary people who were assigned female at birth use this term to describe their attraction to women, despite not identifying or not solely identifying as women”.
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lesbian is also the first letter in the lgbt acronym because of the work lesbians did during the aids epidemic in the 1980s. thousands of men and transwomen within the lgbt community had died, and many healthcare professionals were terrified to provide care for, or even touch, those who were affected.. lesbians, however, were advocating heavily for their care and acted as nurses for many patients, fostering solidarity between gay men and lesbians that had never been seen before. this activism and solidarity shown by lesbians in the 80s is what pushed the acronym change from glbt to lgbt – it was the queer community’s way of showcasing their solidarity with the lesbian community and adding visibility to the identity as a whole (medium, why l is first).
as queer women, we’re naturally linked by our shared history. the origins of the terms a lot of us use now to understand our identities have bloomed from the same seed - the term ‘lesbian’ came after ‘tribade’ fell out of use, and began as a way to refer to sexual acts rather than any identity or label a person took on. the term ‘bisexual’ had similar origins, when in 1892 it was created and used in a completely medical sense up until the 1970s. we only really began to reclaim ‘lesbian’ from its medical context in the 1920s, and the meaning didn’t make any distinction between who was exclusively attracted to women, and who wasn’t. this means that in almost all historical contexts and uses of the term ‘lesbian’, it refers to all queer women.
“but usually what writers comment on [in the 17th and 18th centuries] is the quality of passion between two women, not their personal histories. lesbian culture seems to have been understood as a matter of relationships and habitual practices rather than self-identifications. whether or not a woman also had loving relationships with men, her passionate connections with women were worthy of comment.”
emma donoghue, passions between women: british lesbian culture 1668–1801 (1993).
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