Who was the first 'Lesbian'?

Summary

Betwixt The Sheets: The History of Sex, Scandal & Society
Episode: "Who was the first 'Lesbian'?"
Host: Dr. Kate Lister
Guest: Katherine Horgan (Sappho Scholar)
Air Date: April 21, 2026

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Episode Overview

This episode dives into the enduring legacy and mysteries of Sappho, the iconic ancient Greek poet whose name gave us both "Sapphic" and "Lesbian". Host Dr. Kate Lister welcomes Sappho expert Katherine Horgan to discuss what we know—and don't know—about Sappho's life, loves, poetry, and her pivotal place in queer history. The conversation explores everything from poetic fragments found in ancient Egyptian rubbish, to the complicated reception and reinterpretation of Sappho’s sexuality through the ages, and the ways Sappho’s myth continues to empower and shape LGBTQ+ imagination and identity.

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Key Discussion Points & Insights

1. Who was Sappho?

• Sappho: An ancient Greek poet from Lesbos, born around the 600s BCE, just after Homer ([06:09]-[06:16]).
• Known for composing and performing poetry with lyre accompaniment, attainined near-unrivaled renown for over 2,600 years ([06:44]-[07:07]).
• “She became really admired and well renowned and we still know who she is, which is crazy.” – Katherine Horgan ([06:44])
• Sappho appears throughout history as a "model of a poet or a model of an intellectual kind of woman", especially resonant for queer women through the ages ([07:11]).

2. How Much Do We Actually Know About Sappho?

• Despite her fame, historical knowledge is scant and mostly based on poetic fragments, recurring names in her poems and writings by others ([08:18]-[09:42]).
• “The thing that is most famous about Sappho is, of course, how little we know about her. That's mad. Yeah, it's crazy.” – Katherine Horgan ([08:18])
• “It's exactly like that [Shakespeare], except add a couple of thousand years on it.” – Katherine Horgan ([09:53])
• Sappho stands out amidst numerous female poets of the ancient world, whose work is almost entirely lost ([10:13]-[10:36]).

3. Survival of Sappho’s Poetry

• Only one complete poem of Sappho survives; most are tantalizing fragments (up to 600, some only one word long) ([10:43]-[11:02]).
• Huge cache of Sappho fragments was unearthed from an Egyptian rubbish dump (Oxyrhynchus) in 1914, revolutionizing Sappho studies ([12:09]-[12:59]).
• “I pray for this every night. So this is, you know, a prayer I have always in my mind. I think maybe. Come on. Yeah, come on.” – Katherine Horgan on hoping more of Sappho’s work is found ([13:04])

4. Piecing Together Sappho’s Life & Reputation

• Knowledge of Sappho is reconstructed not from direct facts but from the reverberations of her impact: “She was always crossing boundaries … between masculine and feminine, between the religious and the erotic.” – Katherine Horgan ([14:02]-[16:34]).
• Immediate and lasting fascination with Sappho, even from contemporaries and later writers: “People had to keep talking about her because they couldn’t figure her out.” ([16:34])
• Sappho's actual poetry and personhood are impossibly intertwined with myth, hearsay, and centuries of interpretation ([14:02]-[16:34]).

5. Authorship, Queerness, and the Voice of Sappho

• Authorship debates exist, but what matters is that tradition places a queer woman at the roots of Western poetry ([20:22]-[21:17]).
• Sappho writes explicitly about loving women: “The first poem of the collection is the Ode to Aphrodite, which is Sappho's prayer ... to help her with a girl who is not returning her affections.” ([22:26])
• Sappho names herself in her poems and addresses women directly, confirmed by manuscript evidence ([23:25]).
• “It's sort of like calling Christ a Christian . . . what they became as a movement is ... transcends what ... who they were originally.” – Katherine Horgan on the term 'Lesbian' ([21:27])

6. Sexuality in Sappho’s Time

• Sappho’s poems express desire rather than explicit sex. The focus is emotional and reciprocal, breaking with contemporary traditions of women as passive ([24:45]-[30:20]).
• Ancient and renaissance readers occasionally interpreted Sappho’s love as sexual, with explicit Latin texts from the 15th and 16th centuries ([25:54]).
• Sappho is both elevated and eroticized in ancient comedic and literary traditions ([26:50]).
• “Her relationships are characterized by reciprocity, this sort of fluidity of roles and genders...” – Katherine Horgan ([42:14])

7. The Mythography and Fluid Legacy of Sappho

• Sappho is sometimes depicted as married, with a child, or loving men such as Phaon, but always alongside her love for women. She is persistently ambiguous and fluid ([31:05]-[32:52]).
• “The question isn’t like, what are you, Sappho? Are you a lesbian? Are you bi? It’s more, what aren’t you?” – Katherine Horgan ([31:13])
• Her queerness paradoxically forces inclusion into literary tradition, expanding gender roles ([32:52]).

8. Historical Reception and Shifting Attitudes

• Sappho’s reputation waxed and waned, with different eras emphasizing her queerness or “straightening” her into a blameless schoolmistress ([36:05]).
• “When you've been around for 2,000 years, you go in and out of fashion like everyone else.” – Katherine Horgan ([36:05])
• The Victorians relished the myth of Sappho's suicide for love of a man but were ultimately fascinated by her as a lovesick, yearning genius ([37:07]).
• The major English translation of the 1880s canonized the interpretation of Sappho as queer, underpinning modern terminology ([37:22]-[38:27]).

9. The Words: 'Lesbian', 'Sapphic', and Historical Slang

• “Lesbian” used to describe women who love women as early as 1475 (in Latin); became widely formalized in the 19th century ([38:43]-[39:56]).
• Historical euphemisms for sex between women abound, commonly linked to grinding or tribadism (“tribad” from Greek for “to rub”), sometimes imagined with dildos in Roman/early modern texts ([40:08]-[42:13]).
• Male writers’ inability to imagine lesbian sex as “real sex” both dismissed and protected queer women historically ([42:28]-[45:09]).
  • “If you don’t think it’s possible for a crime to take place, then no one can get in trouble.” – Katherine Horgan ([44:07])

10. The Enduring Legacy of Sappho

• Sappho’s real legacy is offering a blank space for the imagination: queer survival, visibility, and triumph across centuries ([45:54]-[47:52]).
• “The fact that we can use her to imagine always will forever let us imagine and reimagine ourselves, which is the invitation of Sappho.” – Katherine Horgan ([47:54])
• Sappho as an emblem of what it means to envision new ways of loving and living, and as evidence that queerness can mean greatness.

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Notable Quotes & Memorable Moments

• “Sappho is the OG of lesbian history. She gives us the word Sapphic, she lived on Lesbos, and gave us the word lesbian.” — Kate Lister ([04:34])
• “Only one complete poem survives, and some longer ones. But some of the fragments, there are about 600 of them, are as small as one word.” — Katherine Horgan ([10:50])
• “Sappho's poetry was phenomenally influential... We know sod all. What we've got is fragments of her poetry and whispers and rumors and other people writing about her.” — Kate Lister ([04:34])
• “I like the word queer for Sappho, weirdly, more than lesbian... Calling Sappho a lesbian is sort of like calling Christ a Christian.” — Katherine Horgan ([21:27])
• “If you don’t think it’s possible for a crime to take place, then no one can get in trouble.” — Katherine Horgan ([44:07])
• “There’s this narrative of queer survival and victory and joy in Sappho that you can be queer and the most famous poet ever to live.” — Katherine Horgan ([47:54])
• “Who wants to be stabbed with a sword? That means you die... if you clash shields together, that means you live. And I personally want to live.” – Katherine Horgan on historical metaphors for lesbian sex ([43:12])

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Key Timestamps

• Sappho’s Era and Achievements: [06:09] – [07:07]
• Fragments & Survival of Poetry: [10:43] – [12:59]
• Queerness and Literary Role: [21:17] – [23:25]
• Sexuality in Historical Context: [24:45] – [30:20]
• Mythography & Fluidity: [31:05] – [32:52]
• Fashionability of Sappho: [36:05] – [38:27]
• Origin of “Lesbian”: [38:43] – [39:56]
• Historical Sex Slang: [40:08] – [42:13]
• Legal & Social Attitudes: [44:07] – [45:09]
• Sappho’s Legacy: [45:54] – [47:52]

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Conclusion

This episode stands as a vibrant, candid tour through the life and myth of Sappho, blending academic insight with humor and relevance for today’s listeners. Sappho’s scant biography is transformed into an exploration of the possibilities of queer identity across time—her poetic voice echoing down the centuries not just as an origin, but as an enduring invitation to imagine and to be ourselves.

For further explorations or to contact Katherine Horgan, visit her website or catch her teaching at Sarah Lawrence College beginning in Fall.

Transcript

[Kate Lister]

Do you want even more shocking and scandalous history, like why the ancient Greek statues had such small manhoods, or what went on behind closed doors in the Georgian era? Well, sign up to History Hit where you can see me discover the scandalous side of history, as well as hundreds of hours of original documentaries, plus new releases every week covering everything from prehistoric Scotland to the Treaty of Versailles. Sign up to join me in locations around the world and explore the past. Just visit historyhit.com subscribe.

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[Kate Lister]

hello my lovely betwixters. Welcome back to Betwixt the sheets. Thank you for dropping by once again. I know that there's an array of podcasts that you could be listening to and I'm frankly stoked that you've chosen to listen to this one. But before we can go any further, I do have to tell you, I. This is an adult podcast. It's spoken by adults to other adults about adulty things in an adulty way, covering a range of adult subjects. And you should be an adult too, right? Can you tick all of that off? Can you?

[Katherine Horgan]

Can you?

[Kate Lister]

Well, if you can't be off with you, you're just holding things up, right? For the rest of you, on with the show. He seems to me equal to the gods. That man, whoever he is, who is opposite you, sits alone and listens close to your sweet, speaking, lovely, laughing. Oh, it puts the heart in my chest on wings for when I look at you Even a moment no speaking is left in me. We've all been there, haven't we? When you're at a party and you see the person that you've got a crush on and they're only talking and laughing with somebody else and it's driving you absolutely insane. Of course, jealousy is a universal experience, but this poem about jealousy, this one, this has been written and rewritten and passed on and translated and retranslated for over two and a half thousand years. This is the worker Sappho, and she knew about the green eyed monster only too well.

[Katherine Horgan]

Foreign.

[Kate Lister]

Welcome back to Betwixt the Sheets, the history of sex scandal in society with me, Kate Lister. Ah, Sappho. Sappho. Sappho, Sappho, Sappho, if you don't know her, is the OG of lesbian history. She gives us the word Sapphic, she lived on Lesbos and gave us the word lesbian. And what with her clearly being so influential in lesbian history, we know loads about her, don't we? Don't we? Do we? No, we don't. We know sod all. What we've got is fragments of her poetry and whispers and rumors and other people writing about her. So how do you go about piecing her life and her work back together? Well, today I'm joined by Sappho scholar Katherine Horgan, and she is gonna help us start to put some of this back and answer some of the burning questions that we've all got about Sappho, about her poetry, about her life, and of course, about the girls that she fancied. Right, let's do it. Well, hello and welcome to Betwixt the Sheets. It's only Katherine Horgan. How are you doing?

[Katherine Horgan]

Thank you, I'm well, I'm happy to be here.

[Kate Lister]

Well, I'm thrilled that you're here because you, well, you're an expert in a lot of things but Sappho is your girl. And it's so bizarre, we haven't done an episode on Sappho just yet. So as a first question, there will be people listening going, who? Could you just tell us who is she and how did you become interested in studying Sappho?

[Katherine Horgan]

Yeah, well, Sappho is an ancient Greek poet.

[Kate Lister]

She's really ancient, really ancient.

[Katherine Horgan]

So she's just. Sometimes Homer is a useful benchmark. She's just a little more recent than Homer. So she's like in the 600s, but B.C. about 600 years older than Christ is another good bench art. So she's very old and she was writing poetry. Well really, she was singing poetry, so she was composing poetry and accompanying herself on her lyre, which is a kind of harp in ancient Greece.

[Kate Lister]

Singer songwriter.

[Katherine Horgan]

Yeah, and very quickly became a quite well renowned poet. She's possibly one of the most successfully famous poets ever. 2,600 years is a really long time, you know, to have any kind of transmission, to have people even know your name. And so she became really admired and well renowned and we still know who she is, which is crazy.

[Kate Lister]

How did you first hear about or discover Sappho?

[Katherine Horgan]

I think that when you're sort of a little girl who loves books and you start to love books professionally at a certain point, you know, you start going to school and college for reading Sappho starts to come up as like a model of a poet or a model of an intellectual kind of woman. And then as I grew up and became a queer woman, you know, she comes up quite a lot as a poet who writes love poems about other women. And at a certain point in my dissertation, she just sort of kept coming back as I was doing my studies in English literature and she became my life's work up until this point. So that's how that happened.

[Kate Lister]

So Catherine, here's the thing about Sappho, right? Her name has given us the word Sapphic and she was on Les Boss, which is where we get the name, the word lesbian from. As you've already said, her poetry was phenomenally influential. She was so famous, so obviously somebody that was that influential and that's given us words to describe same sex attraction. We must know loads about her. We must like have really detailed accounts of her personal life with which to understand her, right?

[Katherine Horgan]

Well, I think that's. I mean, yes, of course, Sappho, of. The thing that is most famous about Sappho is, of course, how little we know about her. That's mad. Yeah, it's crazy. I mean, honestly, my take on it is actually that we know a surprising amount about her, given how old she is. I mean, you know, if you think how little we know even about our own grandparents or great grandparents a lot of the time that's true. You know, I feel pretty good in some ways about what we know about her, but it's true. We don't really understand the context in which the songs were composed or performed. We have some biographical details. We know she has a brother that she's mad at. We know the names of some girlfriends. We know some people who come up again and again. I think the one thing that we do know, though, is that we know that people were fascinated by her. We know that she was a phenomenon. You know, she must have been so striking, I think, is what we do know to have garnered that much attention and that much interest, and people for thousands of years think about her and write about her and imagine her very quickly she becomes even sort of a character in drama and poetry, so even beyond the poetry itself. So I think that that's the weird contrast is that while we don't know a lot about her in particular, we know what people thought about her, and it's less like that those things are facts and more that they really indicate how exciting she must have been.

[Kate Lister]

It's kind of like William Shakespeare, like, considering how influential his work is, we don't actually know that much about him. Only in Sappho's case, we know even less. Right.

[Katherine Horgan]

It's exactly like that, except add a couple of thousand years on it.

[Kate Lister]

Right, right. Yeah, But I mean, the fact that we know about a woman from this period at all is. I mean, it's not true that we have no records of women. We certainly know that they were there, and there's scholars doing amazing work recovering that history, but even so. That's incredible.

[Katherine Horgan]

Yeah, it's unusual. There aren't a lot of them. There are some other women poets who are mentioned especially in sort of other texts about Greek poetry and things like this. There are other women like Myrtis and Gnosis and Irinna, but we don't really know their names today. And almost all of their poetry is totally lost. So Sappho is really the big dog in women's poetry.

[Kate Lister]

And most of Sappho's poetry is lost. Am I right in thinking that some of it survives even as just a couple of words?

[Katherine Horgan]

Yeah. Almost all of Sappho's poetry is lost. Only one complete poem survives.

[Kate Lister]

Oh, it's so frustrating.

[Katherine Horgan]

I know. It's so frustrating, isn't it? So frustrating. Only one complete poem survives, and some longer ones. But some of the fragments, there are about 600 of them, are as small as one word.

[Kate Lister]

Catherine. How did they know that Sappho wrote that then, if it's from one word?

[Katherine Horgan]

Okay, so this is sort of one of those great 20th century archaeology stories. So I'll give you a little overview of what happened. Sappho lives, she sings poems, the girls love her. Sappho dies at some point in the 600s B.C. people are copying her poetry. There's no printing press. Right. There's no computers. So people are copying the poetry again and again and again. And this goes on for about a thousand years, which is very respectable. Very respectable at some point during that period. So about the 7000 A.D. so after the fall of Rome, it's gone. We don't know where it goes. Probably fires, wars, you know, people losing interest, changes in fashion, religious intervention, we're not really sure what happens. It crops back up in around Shakespeare's time in, like, manuscripts. So we get some quotations from Sappho's poetry, we get some quotations, and there are only about 60 of those. And that's all we have until about 1914, when a huge number of papyruses, like, so the original copied shards are unearthed outside the ancient Egyptian city of Oxyrhynchus in the trash heaps in the dump.

[Kate Lister]

No.

[Katherine Horgan]

Yes. And so the archaeologists have pieced them together based on what surrounds them, based on the poems that we already knew, that we had heard, that we were suspicious might have existed, and they pieced them together. And that was sort of the huge explosion of Sappho fragments we have today. So it really multiplied what we have now.

[Kate Lister]

Incredible.

[Katherine Horgan]

Yeah. And that's where we get the sort of iconic image of the fragment of papyrus that you see on the COVID of books and things like that. So that's kind of the great lost and found story of Sappho.

[Kate Lister]

Do you think they'll find any more? Do you think there's like an urn somewhere buried with like a load of books by Sappho?

[Katherine Horgan]

I have to tell you, I pray for this every night. So this is, you know, a prayer I have always in my mind. I think maybe. Come on. Yeah, come on. Yeah. I want to know what they were. So yeah, but that's sort of what happened, which is honestly kind of impressive that we have anything at all. But I think that all the holes, they're so frustrating, like you said, that we are very tempted to only think about what we don't have. But it is sort of this really fascinating combination.

[Kate Lister]

That's true. We will be grateful for what we do have. So what do we know? Because something else that happens when you don't have sources and facts is people are quite happy to fill in those blanks with anything and whatever they fancy. And also a lot of the information we've got about Sappho is people writing about her or later on. So how do you sift through that? What do we know happened?

[Katherine Horgan]

Well, I think a lot of. I think the thing that we know is that she existed, which is first of all spectacular, right. That this sort of woman who was so exciting as to inspire so much chatter, existed at all, which for me, I think, as a queer person, is extremely affirming and exciting, that she was this person who was so attractive and interesting that she had to be talked about. Even when people disapproved of her, which they occasionally and often did, they had to talk about her, it was impossible not to talk about her. So that I feel good about. We also. We have some rough dates and we know, I think, that everyone thought she was superb at it. People tend to say rave reviews, rave reviews. And also we know that from sort of a like, kind of emotional fan, fan kind of level, but also on a critical level, that people have been talking about the excellence and the learning of her poetry for a really long time, since it was composed, really. And so I think that we're very used to, as modern people, knowing things, you know, Virginia Woolf has, you know, a bank account, right. You know, and things that we can trace and a mortgage and all sorts of wonderful documentation. But I think that with Sappho, what we know is that whatever she was, she was fascinating. And in that blank space, it gives us a lot of room to imagine. So I think, in my view of Sappho, I tend to focus on almost reverse engineering what she might have been based on the way people thought about her. And I think that she meant a lot to people and has always meant a lot to people. So in contrast to what we know, which is, quite frankly, absolutely nothing, if you're asking me what we absolutely know for sure, we do not know anything for sure, but, yes, I know. But what we suspect about Sappho and what we. In the debate and what we think about. I think the thing that emerges from all of the complicated contexts is that she was always crossing boundaries because it's never clear to pin her down. It's not an easy thing to place her. So she's always sort of crossing boundaries between masculine and feminine, between the religious and the erotic, between all sorts of places. And so as a result, I think people had to keep talking about her because they couldn't figure her out.

[Kate Lister]

I'll be back with Catherine and Sappho after this short break. May, it's time to come out of hibernation. Walk, run, cycle, skip. If the mood takes you with a sense of renewal in the air, it's also a good time to pause and hit refresh on your emotional well being. That is why May is mental health awareness this month, where the goal isn't just to talk about mental health, but to take action and get real support. But when you try and do that, it's still way harder than it should be. A lot of online therapy doesn't accept insurance at all, which means even during a month focused on mental health, you're stuck paying out of pocket. Ruler does things differently. They partner with over 120 insurance plans, making the average co pay just 50, $15 per session. That's real therapy from licensed professionals at a price that makes sense. Ruler sticks with you throughout your journey, checking in to make sure your care is actually helping you move forward. Mental Health Awareness Month is your reminder to finally take that first step. This is one of the easiest ways to actually follow through. No wait lists, no frustrating back and forth appointments can be available as soon as tomorrow. Go to rula.com sheets to get started today. That's R U L A.com sheets for quality therapy that's covered by insurance.

[Katherine Horgan]

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[Kate Lister]

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[Kate Lister]

How do we know? And I guess we don't, but it's not a situation where it's like it's a brand name that's being used like Hippocrates. Because people used to say, oh, these books are by Hippocrates. And then later on scholars went, actually I don't think they are all by the same guy. I think it's just people using the pen name Hippocrates.

[Katherine Horgan]

Yeah, there's a lot of that going on in Sappho literature, you know. Yeah, the deep dive and the deep cut. People argue about whether or not the fragments are authentic or this fragment or that fragment is authentic. I think that it mostly matters to me in just terms of tradition and women's poetry and queer poetry that people were talking about the poetry and its excellence regardless of whether it belongs to her. Right. Is the sort of idea that women can be great poets. And in fact, one of the earliest women poets who like defines what really Western poetry means for a lot of people, is a woman poet and a queer woman poet who sort of sits at the very beginning of our literary traditions, which we often forget. We think that Shakespeare sits at the beginning of our traditions or something, but actually Sappho really sits there. So we find our the origins of poetry actually in queer women, which is Stunning.

[Kate Lister]

How do we know she was queer if we know so little about it? I mean, you might one day find a diary from Sappho being like, look, I just love boys. I don't know what everybody's on about.

[Katherine Horgan]

Well, I think that the thing that's really interesting is that I like the word queer for Sappho, weirdly, more than lesbian. Because calling Sappho a lesbian is sort of like calling Christ a Christian. In some ways, that it's like what they became as a movement is not. Is so. Transcends what. Who they were originally. And so I think that Sappho doesn't have a lot of our baggage, right? We as queer people, are sort of post AIDS crisis, post a lot of trauma, post a lot of Victorian oppression. The cultures were different. So what it meant to be queer was different in the ancient world. What it meant to have desire for women as a woman was different in the ancient world. And in some ways alarmingly similar, as I explore in my work, and in some ways completely different. So one of the ways we know that Sappho addressed her poetry to women is that some of the best pulp preserved poems we have are directed at women.

[Kate Lister]

So she's writing to the girls.

[Katherine Horgan]

Yeah, she's writing to the girls. And we even know their names at a certain point. The first poem of the collection is the Ode to Aphrodite, which is Sappho's prayer to Aphrodite to help her with a girl who is not returning her affections. And I mean, you know, we've all been there. We've all been there. But it's sort of this poem where Sappho. Aphrodite answers Sappho at the end and says, don't worry, Sappho, the one who runs away from you, she will soon run after you. The one you give gifts to, she will soon give them back. So that she is a very important part of the poem that sets the tone for the collection. And then there are many other poems that are addressed to other young women.

[Kate Lister]

And she's writing in the voice of Sappho, the woman, because I suppose somebody could argue, and this has happened throughout history of, like, people are writing poems and directing it somewhere, but maybe the voice of the poet is different. It's definitely her. It's definitely a woman.

[Katherine Horgan]

Well, I mean, Sappho names herself in the poem. Aphrodite says, who wrongs you, Sappho? She says, that's pretty cool. We have a name. We know that Sappho is the person who desires in the poem. And people for a long time did argue that that female pronoun wasn't there, but it is so. And the fragments that were found at Oxyrhynchus only confirmed that that truth. So even more, we have poems, a famous poem to Anactorea, whose lovely ankles, you know, inspire desire, and Sappho. And also we have fragment 31, the famous love triangle poem, where Sappho looks at a man admiring her beloved and has a mental breakdown about the desire of that, the female beloved, who is explicitly female. So Sappho's writing to girls. That's honestly the best evidence we have about Sappho. And the other thing is, in the ancient world, this is a pretty common observation. So Horace and Ovid and all of these old poets, they take it for granted that Sappho is writing for girls and honestly take it as a model for them writing for girls themselves. Right. You know, these male poets are sort of thinking, well, you know, who's really good at getting girls? Sappho? So let's look at those poems and think about them.

[Kate Lister]

I'm wondering how you think that her work and her sexuality might have been understood in the time. It's very difficult to try and tease it out. I've got a theory about it. Obviously I'm not a Sappho scholar like you are, but I've read her work and what we know about her.

[Katherine Horgan]

Yeah.

[Kate Lister]

So it seems like there was a lot of. It's not true that it was great to be queer in ancient Greece. They had their own rules and regulations and things, but they also had an appreciation of same sex love, but also the idea that women were supposed to be the passive recipient and that sort of lesbianism complicated that. And I wonder if this is because she's not talking about sex in her poems, she's talking about love. If that made it a little different for them, that this isn't shagging people, which may have meant they'd have to try and understand this, like how dominant and submissive this could work. But this is in the tradition of men loving other men and women loving other women. It's not about sex.

[Katherine Horgan]

Yeah, I think that. Well, I can tell you actually that by the Renaissance, which is what my work is about, people understand Sappho's loves as explicitly sexual.

[Kate Lister]

She's definitely having sex for sure.

[Katherine Horgan]

And they're very clear about it. I have some new translations that I'm working on of Latin writing about Sappho in the 1400s and 1500s that are very, very explicit about how Sappho had sex with other women, which women she was having sex with and which women she wasn't having sex with, and what the communities of women who have sex with other women look like. So by Shakespeare's moment, there is a strong understanding that this is a sexual relationship. And I sort of think that it's one of these things that I wonder if it was an open secret in some ways. I think in the ancient world, Sappho appears sometimes in these very elite contexts. Like you're sort of mentioning the sort of Socrates, you know, very elevated.

[Kate Lister]

Yeah, that's because there's. I can't remember who. Who writes about it, but they say that, like, oh, Socrates loved his pupils and Sappho loves her pupils as well. And that was this kind of like. So that's what's going on.

[Katherine Horgan]

Yes. I mean, that's an observation that also this critic, Maximus of Tyre makes in, like, the fourth century. But I think the thing that's funny about it is Sappho also appears in really erotic contexts a lot of the time. So even though she has this sort of elevated, like, 10th muse, sort of really heightened status as a literary person, sort of, as you were kind of indicating, like, someone who's, like, gone above sexuality in some way and, like, pure desire, there's also this really physical comedic tradition of Sappho and sort of Greek comedy and Roman comedy. People think of Sappho as a sexy kind of lady. So I think that there's this sort of relationship between, like, the sublime and the ridiculous that really marks Sappho's sublimity as erotic and her eroticism as sublime. You know, that. That sort of thing that happens all the time. So I think that there is a strong sense of both. And of course, there's just a lot of people with different opinions. It's so hard to reconstruct what people thought. But it seems that all the time there was the potential to think about Sappho both way and often at the same time.

[Kate Lister]

Were they? They weren't. Maybe they were. Have you found stuff from the time that's condemning her of just like, how

[Katherine Horgan]

dare you write this every so often. But the dominant strain is this is the most excellent poetry ever written. So the dominant strain is about the poetry's excellence. Occasionally she's in a little bit of trouble with one author or another, but mostly people are interested in how good she is at it, because they want to be that good at it themselves.

[Kate Lister]

Right.

[Katherine Horgan]

When poets write about other poetry, they're often thinking how they can be Great poets, and Sappho is kind of the greatest poet.

[Kate Lister]

Does she write about sex?

[Katherine Horgan]

Sappho, I mean, one wonders. I don't think so. Not in the way that people who write sex manuals, you know, write about sex, you know, not. Not in the way we do. I think she's always more interested in desire itself and the physical experience of desiring another person. So I think it's sort of. For me, it's. I think that she's more interested in, like, the potential of relationships between women and what kind of eroticism emerges from that. I think we see, as you were saying, the sort of women as passive and men as aggressive in ancient Greek poetry, which is true. And in Sappho, though, we see these women as sort of reciprocal, you know, as kind of changing places, as the desire is sort of really powerful, but also not necessarily possessive or controlling, I think so. Even while Sappho takes on a very masculine role of the desirer, the object of desire is also less of an object. I would say, in some ways there's this sort of the reciprocity of the one who pursues will now be pursued. The sort of. Like that women switch roles kind of easily in these erotic relationships. And the other thing is, one wonders if she didn't talk about sex simply, very much. Simply because she didn't need to. I think that there's something radical about our conversations about sex that means something in our culture. And I wonder if the impetus was different, if the desire was the more interesting conversation rather than the sex being the more interesting conversation, which I think for us, because it was so repressed for so long, that's the more interesting point. But I wonder if in a different sort of society, that's less necessary, less interesting to them. Yeah.

[Kate Lister]

Is it true she lived on Lesbos? We think so.

[Katherine Horgan]

Everybody says so, so nobody says she didn't. Is sort of the. The idea. And women on Lesbos are sort of strongly associated for a very long time with different kinds of sex, from oral sex to women having sex with other women is sort of thought of as a sort of island of Lesbos kind of thing to do throughout the ancient world. So definitely comes from a tradition, like an ancient tradition of sexual features thinking in that way. And she lives in one particular town on Lesbos called Metulene, although there is some debate about exactly where. But people often call her Sappho of Lesbos. That's. No one really fights about that.

[Kate Lister]

In some stories about her, she's married, and in some she has a daughter. What's your thoughts on that?

[Katherine Horgan]

I mean, I think that that's sort of part of the mythos of Sappho. So what I particularly study is what I call Sappho's mythography. So all of the writing you were talking about that surrounds Sappho, the sort of imaginations of Sappho having a husband and a child, and even sometimes a boyfriend named Phaon who comes up. The funny thing about these accounts, though, is that in many ways they make her queerer. Right. Because the thing about Sappho is that all of them are true at the same time. Right. So it's like, if she has a husband in those accounts you're referencing, where she has a husband and a child, she also is the lover of women. The same account says the same thing. So. And in the same poem that sort of imagines Sappho's love for this boy, Faon, she talks about her female lovers as well. So there's sort of this accumulation rather than a. Like one or the other. The question isn't like, what are you, Sappho? Are you a lesbian? Are you bi? It's more, what aren't you? Right. She like. Right. She. She sometimes behaves like a man. She sometimes behaves like a woman. She sometimes, you know, talks like an old woman, sometimes a young woman, sometimes she's married, sometimes she's not. And so there's all of this, like, she's so many things that. That's the queerest part of her.

[Kate Lister]

Yeah. I mean, certainly. I mean, even at the time, it's very malleable, her sexuality. And it's very fluid, isn't it? And it still amazed me that it doesn't seem to have offended her or anybody. And it doesn't seem to have stopped her rise to become the most famous. Maybe. Maybe it helped it. Maybe that was how they could try and square it of, like. But she's a more masculine woman, so of course she's really famous.

[Katherine Horgan]

Yeah. And it certainly did. That helped a lot. But it's sort of one of these things where. One of my favorite things about queerness is when it sort of forces people to accept itself because it plays into dominant tropes. So it's sort of like, you know, people are forced to accept this masculine woman because she is masculine and great and we want to put her into our traditions, but also she's a woman. And so we have to expand our concepts for her because the queerness, actually, it's her queerness that forces us to accept her in some ways, because she plays into the normative masculine tropes, even though she's not a man. And so we have this really intense queerness that forces people to talk about her and include her even when they're trying to exclude her, which is a kind of inclusion, you know.

[Kate Lister]

I'll be back with Catherine and Sappho after this short break.

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[Kate Lister]

Was she all. I mean, she was clearly a very big deal in her own day. Like, you've got loads of writers writing about her, saying how great she is. Did her fame dissipate? Did it have a resurgence later on? Has everyone always been pro Sappho or was there any points? I mean, the Victorians or the Renaissance where people went, hang on a minute here, she's talking about girls. We can't have this.

[Katherine Horgan]

Yes, well, yeah, I mean, I think that there's like, you know, fashions of sort of making Sappho a little bit straighter and making Sappho a little bit gayer. Right. It goes in and out. When you've been around for 2,000 years, you go in and out of fashion like Everyone else. So it seems like the idea of Sappho is a pretty steady trickle of people sort of knowing that she's famous and that she matters about her sexuality. There are people who sort of go through phases of kind of expanding on it. For example, John Donne loves, in some of his poems to talk about women who have sex with other women, as in his poem Sappho to Felinus. So the sort of Renaissance liking of a queerer Sappho. And then there's like a slightly later 18th century version of a straighter Sappho. Sort of a Sappho who's more of a school mistress, who's an educated lady, you know, who has female students. Right, yeah, there's sort of that vision. And then the Victorians really love Sappho.

[Kate Lister]

Oh, did they now? What did they have to say about Sappho?

[Katherine Horgan]

Well, they kind of love this sort of elegant, you know, dark gothic Sappho. You know, we've sort of. We haven't touched on this yet, but there is the myth of Sappho's suicide.

[Kate Lister]

Oh, they would love that. The Victorians would love that. Yeah, they'll be all over that one. Right.

[Katherine Horgan]

They love a lovesick lady. They love that. And so there is this story throughout that Sappho ultimately committed suicide because of the abandonment of her boyfriend, Phaon. This is one of many stories about Sappho. However, the Victorians really love that elegant, mysterious, missing Sappho, the Sappho of the fragments. They're sort of fascinated by this idea of fragmentation, of loss, of that kind of pining and logging, like in the desire of the poetry. And by the sort of 1860s and 70s, there are some pretty famous translations. The 1880s, really, there is a famous translation that really strongly asserts that Sappho's poetry is queer. It's sort of been a matter of debate in the early 1800s, the mid early 1800s. But then there's sort of an English translation that comes down hard on the issue. And this really paves the way for the safism of the 20th century, where we sort of get the idea of Saffist, lesbian, all of those modern terms that really underpin our ideas of what it means to be queer, a queer woman today.

[Kate Lister]

When did they start using the word lesbian? Because I love the history of words that they use to describe particularly lesbians, because it gives you a really strong understanding of how culturally same sex attraction was understood. And it's usually very badly.

[Katherine Horgan]

Yeah, it's a pretty old word. I mean, I can tell you sort of. The unpublished version, which is. I am working on a paper that records an instance of the word lesbian to describe queer women as early as 1475.

[Kate Lister]

No, I thought that the OED put it at like 19th century. That's amazing, Catherine.

[Katherine Horgan]

Well, this is in Latin. So this is a writer. Yeah, this is some writing in Latin. It counts. But it completely shocked me. I was sort of going through some, you know, due diligence things, and I found a commentator who says, you know, lesbian women were famous for this sort of thing for having sex with other women. That this is. So. So women of lesbos are having sex like this. So. And the adjective is lesbian. Right. From lesbos. And it kind of collapses. Right. It means women who have sex and relationships like this, this. And also women from lesbos do this thing. So it's kind of an oldish idea of women on lesbos having different kinds of non normative sex, but it becomes sort of formal to mean specifically queer women or women having sex with other women in the 19th century sort of way.

[Kate Lister]

Some of my favorite slang. I'm deviating slightly from Sapphire now.

[Katherine Horgan]

Do it, do it.

[Kate Lister]

I think it dates to the 17th century and it's playing at flats.

[Katherine Horgan]

There's a lot of those. There's so many of those. Yes. I just worked on this extremely wonderful edition called all the World in Thee, which is coming out, I think, this spring with Columbia University Press. It's an edition of queer poetry throughout history in English. And some of the 18th century poems about women having sex with women have some of the truly great euphemisms or dirty sluts.

[Kate Lister]

Is it all grinding? That's the one that seems to crop up the most, is grinding. And anything that's like that, I think it's this misconception. We probably call it scissoring today. But this idea that women cause there isn't a penis there, that they must be imitating heterosexual intercourse and kind of rubbing on each other.

[Katherine Horgan]

Yeah. So that's actually the ancient word for women who have sex with other women is tribad, which comes from the Greek word tribose, to rub. And in some of the Latin I've been working on, Renaissance writers are very clear about what this kind of sex is. But I actually think that it's a lot of the time people think that there is some kind of dildo involved. You know, just to get right into it.

[Advertisement Voice - Jack Welch Management Institute / Rakuten]

Right.

[Katherine Horgan]

There's a lot of like Roman. Just let's get into it. The Roman writing has a lot of dildos involved, but with Sappho that's actually not true a lot of the time. It is sort of true in some sort of. Of comedic, later interpretations. But the idea of Sappho as, like. I think that the idea of, like, women who have sex with other women by scissoring is a particularly important way that we get out of this masculine, feminine, who's the man dynamic. I think that with Sappho, that's so unclear, that often she's not really a penetrative partner in the way people talk about her. I have an article that I'm going to publish on this, but it's sort of this very interesting. The idea of oral sex, sex, right? And also. Which they also talk about and sex, like by scissoring or grinding, is that it doesn't mean that someone is dominant and someone is submissive.

[Kate Lister]

Very true.

[Katherine Horgan]

It's this sort of really the thing that characterizes Sappho's relationships, which is this reciprocity, right. This sort of fluidity of roles of genders, which I think makes her really appealing today in our own conversations about gender fluidity and sexual fluidity.

[Kate Lister]

So, see, that's a much more generous reading than I've done for historical slang. And the way that they talk about lesbians, the way I saw it was these kind of male writers looking, well, there's no penis, so what on earth are they doing? They're just clearly rubbing themselves on one another. And that seems to be what's happening. There was an Islamic scholar, I think it was like 15th century, he described it as they're clashing shields, but never with a sword, which I always really liked.

[Katherine Horgan]

I mean, the thing is. I mean, that metaphor, for me, first of all, the way I always think of these male accounts is these women are having great sex and you're just jealous is number one. Right. And number two is sort of. I don't. Who wants to be stabbed with a sword? That means you die.

[Kate Lister]

Very few people. Yeah.

[Katherine Horgan]

That means you die. Right. You know, if you clash shields together, that means you live. And I personally want to live. So I think. I think that that's. I think that there is sort of a. Like, there is, of course, like, this whole dismissiveness of lesbian sex, which actually allows it to proliferate in some ways. Right. Which is. Is this sort of. It's almost like, you know, the dismissiveness is a problem. I'm not sort of thinking that that's okay, but my point is, I don't think it really successfully stops anyone, right, from having sex in this way.

[Kate Lister]

But do you Think that. That. That might be why, like, now, I'm not saying lesbians haven't been persecuted throughout history. They have been, and violently so, and continue to be. But they haven't, in certain places, exerted the same level of censor and horror and legal persecution as gay men. Do you think that's this. This idea of penetration coming down to it and equals?

[Katherine Horgan]

It certainly was. I think that there's something about the way gay men can have sex with each other in that particular way that seems, because of the way people define sexual intercourse and have defined it, I. That allows people to criminalize it. Whereas the very question of whether or not lesbian sex is sex really protects the pleasures of lesbian sexual communions in. In a way, it makes it very hard to criminalize, quite frankly, because if you don't think it's possible for a crime to take place, then no one can get in trouble. And so a lot of books on, I'm sure, as you've seen, on lesbian sexual history, talk about, like, the idea of nothingness and nothing, which, as dismissive and harmful and sort of abusive as that is as a way to talk about other people, is also really protective of women's relationships because they're sort of allowed to proliferate under the radar, which causes a problem if you want to, for example, get legally married, but is less of a problem if you don't want to be imprisoned like Oscar Wilde.

[Kate Lister]

And what I love about that is the idea that all throughout history, there's just been a bunch of men writing laws going, well, they can't be having sex. And just a whole load of lesbians going, yep, yep, that's right. We don't know what we're doing. That's right.

[Katherine Horgan]

Yeah, that's right. Nothing to see here. Right?

[Kate Lister]

Like, nothing to see here. That's exactly what it is.

[Katherine Horgan]

Yeah. No, just two women friends.

[Kate Lister]

Just two women just grinding on each other and wondering where the penis is. That's what's happening here. As friends.

[Katherine Horgan]

Yeah, as friends. As you do.

[Kate Lister]

Oh, dear. So as a sort of a final question, then, to round this off, it's difficult to say what is Suffolk? But I guess that kind of gets to the heart of what you're doing, because so much about her is unknowable. How do we even pin down what her legacy is?

[Katherine Horgan]

I think that, for me, it's a legacy of imagination. Right. So much about being a queer person is sort of being in one context and trying to imagine yourself differently. And that's a really hard thing to do. And it can be a very lonely thing to do. And throughout history, because we know so little about Sappho other than that she was amazing, that she was queer and that she was great at writing poetry, that that blank almost offers people a structure to imagine in. And they have, over time, really used Sappho to imagine new things, like, what does a feminine man look like? Or what does a masculine woman look like? What is a different kind of sex? Right? What does desire without power feel like? What does desire without control feel like? What could I look like? What could I be like? What could I seem like? And oftentimes that imagination is not a sad one, but a positive one, because Sappho is so successful. So there's like this idea of queer victory that I think is really inherent in Sappho, right. Rather than like, sort of queer suppression and queer loss, which certainly is a part of Sappho's poetry. But when we look at not just the ways the fragments are lost, but the ways that people imagined Sappho, we see so many contradictions that free us as queer people and that have inspired us as queer people, to reimagine ourselves and to reimagine society in many ways, the society in which we live, where women do get married, and there are Instagram accounts like, you know, devoted to, like, queer women. And, you know, there's. This is an open thing that we can do here. And so I think that there's this narrative of queer survival and victory and joy in Sappho that you can be queer and the most famous poet ever to live. So I think that that's really what her legacy is for me is that the fact that we can use her to imagine, always will forever. Let us imagine and reimagine ourselves, which is the invitation of Sappho.

[Kate Lister]

Catherine, you have been wonderful to talk to. Thank you so much. If people want to know more about you and your work, where can they find you?

[Katherine Horgan]

Well, currently they can find me at my website, which is. And I'm currently at Harvard finishing up my dissertation, and I will begin as a professor at Sarah Lawrence College in the fall.

[Kate Lister]

Congratulations. That's amazing.

[Katherine Horgan]

So you can take one of my classes. You can shoot me an email on my website. And I love to hear from people about Sappho and I love, love to answer questions. So. Yeah.

[Kate Lister]

Well, thank you so much for coming by. You've been a treat.

[Katherine Horgan]

Thank you so much for having me. I love talking about Sappho and you've given me a lovely morning.

[Kate Lister]

Thank you for listening and thank you so much to Catherine for joining us. And if you like what you heard, don't forget to like, review and follow along wherever it is you get your podcasts Coming up we are going to go inside the brothels of colonial India and attend a masquerade parade in Georgian Britain. And if you would like us to explore a subject or maybe just wanted to say hello, then you can email [e-mail] this podcast was edited by Hannah Theodorov and produced by Sophie G. The senior producer was Freddie Chick. Join me again Betwixt the Sheets the History of Sex, Scandal and Society A podcast by History Hit. This podcast contains music from Epidemic Sound.

[Katherine Horgan]

Liberty Mutual customizes your car and home insurance and now we're customizing this rush hour ad to keep you calm, which could help your driving. And science says therapy is great for a healthy mindset. So enjoy this 14 second session on us. I think you've done everything right and absolutely nothing wrong. In fact, anything that hasn't gone your way could probably be blamed on your father not being emotionally available because his father wasn't emotionally available and so on. And now that you're calm and healing, you're probably driving better too.

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