Happy Pride month! Though many of us are lamenting that we can't celebrate Pride how we usually would (for the second year in a row!), there has been so much online activism, art, community, and crowdfunding that it really makes me reflect on the beliefs that are at the very heart of Pride.
Before I jump into the blog post properly, let me clarify my stance on a couple of things. Pride is NOT a corporate holiday where companies can slap a rainbow flag on their products and then profit off their coy, colourful marketing strategies, all the while assuming a feigned deafness when their anti-LGBTQ+ policies are criticised. Seriously, if you want cute Pride merch (and, honestly, who doesn't?) please support independent, LGBTQ+ artists. Pride is also NOT a piss-up. It is a protest: Stonewall was a rallying cry for the emerging gay rights movement, and there is a line that can – and should – be traced from the Stonewall riots to Pride. It is a protest, moreover, that we owe to black trans women like Marsha P. Johnson: never forget that the majority of people at Stonewall were either drag queens or gay men of colour (recalls Titus Montalvo). Trans rights are human rights; there are no gay rights without trans rights; and BLM and Pride should be inextricably linked in your social justice. These are not just soundbites, they are the foundations of the LGBTQ+ community.
It is with BIPOC and trans rights in mind that the new Pride flag was envisioned, and it became particularly popular after the BLM protests and once the rainbow flag was co-opted to show support for the NHS during the COVID-19 pandemic.
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| The new Pride flag was designed by Daniel Quasar in 2018. |
Flags bring me to the main topic of this blog post. The flag in the cover picture for this post is the Sapphic Pride flag, an alternative flag for WLW (women-loving women) who do not support the original Lesbian Pride flag for reasons,* and/or for WLW who specifically identify as Sapphic.
*(the main reason being that the designer of the flag was reportedly racist, butch-phobic, transphobic, and biphobic... the secondary reason being that it's kinda ugly)
So, I thought for Pride Month 2021 I would continue my Queering Myths series with... Queering Myth iv: Sappho Special!
(Find the previous instalments here: i: Iphis and Ianthe; ii: Ancient Greek Society; iii: Gay Heroes)
Like the other posts in the series, I am sharing a part of my research for the 'Queering Myth' chapter in my thesis, that attempts to sketch out the longstanding relationship between queerness and Greek myth, and then focuses on two contemporary queer mythical retellings, namely Ali Smith's Girl Meets Boy and Madeline Miller's The Song of Achilles.
In my opinion, you can't talk about queer myths without talking about Sappho.
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| Sappho fresco, Pompeii |
Who Was Sappho?
Sappho is the earliest surviving woman writer of the west; she was considered to be the
female counterpart to Homer - he was called ‘The Poet’ and she was ‘The Poetess’; and Aristotle reported that she was highly honoured ‘although she was a woman’ (Rhetoric, 1389b12 in Greene 1996: 1). Most of Sappho's poems are now lost, and those that have survived have mostly done so in fragmentary form – that is, on little scraps of papyrus.
female counterpart to Homer - he was called ‘The Poet’ and she was ‘The Poetess’; and Aristotle reported that she was highly honoured ‘although she was a woman’ (Rhetoric, 1389b12 in Greene 1996: 1). Most of Sappho's poems are now lost, and those that have survived have mostly done so in fragmentary form – that is, on little scraps of papyrus.
Sappho is a central figure in Queer Classics, as she is the ancient lyricist from Lesbos from whom the identifiers sapphic and lesbian are derived. Though the term lesbian was prescribed by doctors seeking to pathologise female same-sex desire, it became the chosen identity marker of WLW. As sapphist classicist Ella Haselswerdt writes in the self-reflexive piece ‘Re-Queering Sappho’:
women found in the imposed name of their supposed sexual disease a tradition worth embracing — a set of beautiful fragmented poems about the love of one woman for another, full of detailed imagery of flowers, women, and fruit, with an attention to private, embodied experiences of lust, loss, and longing. (Haselswerdt 2016: np.)
Lesbian Desire in the Sapphic Fragments.
Much of Sappho’s surviving poetry fragments are centred around the themes of female desire and yearning. Fragment 38 is a good example of desire in Sappho’s poetry, which is translated as either ‘you burn me’ (trans. Carson 2002) or ‘you scorch me’ (trans. Raynor 2014). Mendelsohn calls this ‘the sexy little Fragment’ (2015, np.) and, indeed, though only this line of the poem is preserved, the lust still remains.
Atthis was one of Sappho’s most significant lovers and, according to the Suda (the Tenth Century Byzantine encyclopaedia), it was ‘Through her relations with them [Atthis, Telesippa, Megara] she got a reputation for shameful love’ (Suda s.v. Sappho, in Carson 2002: 361). Sappho dedicated a number of her poems to Atthis, such as the following:
]
] Atthis for you
]
]
(fr. 8)
I loved you Atthis, once long ago
a little child you seemed to me and graceless
(fr. 49)
For centuries, Sappho’s relationship with Atthis, preserved in the fragments of her poetry, has been a point of interest for lesbians, Classicists, and even composers. Georg Friedrich Haas’ 2009 opera Atthis ‘sews Sapphic fragments together in an account of a relationship between the poet and the younger woman’ (Hall 2015: np.).
Sappho compares Atthis to a child: this is what Mendelsohn calls ‘her susceptibility to the graces of younger women’ (2015, np.), and Sappho’s relationships with younger women can be understood as a feminised version of the pederastic tradition. For more information on pederasty, see Queering Myth II: Ancient Greek Society.
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| Haas 'Atthis' 2009 (source) |
Yearning for lost love is also a key theme in Sappho’s surviving poetry: ‘but a kind of yearning has hold of me—to die / and to look upon the dewy lotus banks / of Acheron’ (Sappho, trans Carson 2002: fr. 95). Sappho yearns for Acheron, the river of woe in Hades, due to losing her eromenos, Gongyla. Sappho’s most famous poem is perhaps Fragment 107:
‘do I still yearn for my virginity?’ (Sappho, trans Carson 2002)
The meaning of Fragment 107 is veiled by time, as there is no consensus on the meaning of virginity to the Ancient Greeks. It is most likely that Ancient Greek virginity did not refer to abstinence from any sex with any gender, though it could refer to penetrative heterosexual intercourse - if this is the case, then Sappho could be yearning to have never had sex with a man. Others argue that Grecian virginity is more aligned with notions of marriageability and fertility, so Sappho could be yearning for her youth and, perhaps tellingly, ‘She was likely past middle age when she died, since […] she complains about her graying hair and cranky knees’ (Mendelsohn 2015: np.).
Whatever Sappho meant by ‘virginity’, the recurrent theme of yearning in her poetry has led to a tradition of female same-sex desire being closely entwined with yearning.
More recently, queer yearning has been harnessed for its activist potential by bell hooks who, in yearning: Race, Gender and Cultural Politics, uses it to refer to ‘common passions, sentiments shared by folks across race, class, gender, and sexual practice’ that can ‘[open] up the possibility of common ground where all these differences might meet and engage with one another’ (hooks 1999: 12, 13).
A Quick Note on Translation.
Sapphic fragments in her collection, if not, winter. Readers who do not care about translation, on the other hand, are warmly encouraged to skip this side note, and move on to the next subheading, where the lesbian lyricism is continued.
I've noticed on #ClassicsTwitter that Carson is mocked a lot for her instapoetry-esque translations and use of brackets to allude to the fragmentary nature of Sappho's extant work.
For my research, though, Carson's translation works best because it is at once an outspoken act of creation as well as a marked effort to render the ancient work in plainer, more accessible English. This is, to me, identifiable with Emily Wilson's goal in translating the Odyssey in a more accessible way, and Wilson actually commended Carson's translation 'which should enable even the Greekless reader to understand some of the most important textual problems in Sappho' (Wilson 2014).
I am, admittedly, a Greekless reader.
How Sapphic Was Sappho?
Not all classicists agree with Sappho’s classification as a queer lyricist.
Glenn W. Most has opined that Sappho’s reputation as the founding mother of lesbianism is ‘a onesided [sic] distortion’ (Most 1996: 35), an act of creative reception rather than one of historical accuracy. Most cites the origins of the terms sapphic and lesbian as labels of sexual dysfunction and the Attic comedies that portrayed Sappho as the polar opposite of a woman-loving woman (Ibid., 27, 35). The comedies referenced by Most are those which portrayed Sappho ‘primarily as an oversexed predator — of men’; though lesbian now means female same-sex desire, in ‘classical Greek, the verb lesbiazein—“to act like someone from Lesbos”—meant performing fellatio, an activity for which inhabitants of the island were thought to have a particular penchant’ (Mendelsohn 2015: np.).
Put simply, can a Lesbian be a lesbian if Lesbians were famous for giving men blowjobs but lesbians famously don't do that?
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| 'Sappho and Erinna', Simeon Solomon (1864) This Victorian painting has a very interesting history |
Mendelsohn wryly labels these debates ‘the Sappho wars’ (Ibid., np.), though the issue of Sappho’s sexuality perhaps transcends spirited academic debates and satirical commentary.
Haselswerdt recalls a conversation in which a colleague proposed that Sappho was a man, and it upset her greatly, leading her to question ‘But why did I care so deeply? Why do I so badly want a female Sappho? And why do I so badly want a queer Sappho?’ (2016: np.). Haselswerdt argues that her eponymous call to re-queer Sappho is a part of the ‘fight for the legitimacy of lesbianism’ and that ‘in re-queering Sappho, we might simultaneously make some headway into rehabilitating lesbianism as a radical and queer contemporary identity’ (Ibid., np.).
Maybe Sappho is kind of like Willow in Buffy the Vampire Slayer where, on the one hand, it's very iconic that she's a lesbian, but a lot of people feel that this was, in fact, bisexual erasure, given how meaningful Willow's relationship with Oz was. Maybe Sappho was a lesbian (as well as a Lesbian), maybe she was bisexual, maybe we should conclude - as we always do - that it is inaccurate and anachronistic to attempt to apply modern-day labels to ancient figures. Nevertheless, what we're seeing here is that Sappho’s sexuality in the 6th Century BCE has implications for current Queer Classics and identity politics.
I'll leave you with some (notably comparable) comments on Sappho's sexuality from modern women:
Gertrude Stein:
She ought to be a very happy woman (1903-1932; 1999; 461)
Anne Carson:
Controversies about her personal ethics and way of life have taken up a lot of people’s time throughout the history of Sapphic scholarship. It seems that she knew and loved women as deeply as she did music. Can we leave the matter there? (Carson 2003: x)
Jeanette Winterson:
So little of her remains. Her remains are scandalous. The teasing bones that shock and delight. Yet, it is certain, that were every line of hers still extant, biographers would not be concerned with her metre or her rhyme. There would be one burning question […]
What do Lesbians do in bed? (Winterson 1994: 289 [ePub edition])
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| 'Sappho of Eresos' by Neo-Classicist Available as a print HERE Available as a sticker HERE |
Cover art: Sapphic pride flag, originally created by Tumblr user lesbeux-moved in 2015 (Source)
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