cato-the-younger:
pauladeen-vevo:
spacexualkids:
achilles is so often called gay by the community and straight by society even though he fell in love with men and women. freddie mercury is known as the most famous gay man even though he self identified as bisexual. channing tatum is constantly called straight even though he’s dated men and women. evan rachel wood and angelina jolie and drew barrymore–all self identified bi women constantly called straight.
sappho wrote love poems for both men and women and yalls response to the idea that she might have been bi is “there was no concept of bi/gay back then!! let’s focus on the fact that she was sapphic!!” to the point where her name has become synonymous with gay and she’s called a lesbian icon and y’all only seem to have issues with “concepts” and labels when the concept/label is BI. why am i not surprised?
bisexuality is valid pass it on
The first paragraph is great, but you need to check your sources on sapphos love poems for men.
Im more than happy to be proven wrong, but one poem compliments a bridegroom (probably not someone she was marrying as she wrote many similar marriage hymns for brides) and another uses a Greek word that can be translated as ‘man’, ‘slave’, or more commonly ‘youth’. Obviously 19th and 20th century translations give it as ‘man’ bc they couldn’t bear the thought of the so called ‘tenth muse’ being a lesbian.
I don’t know of any others that are about men.
Hi! Classics scholar here.
Sappho’s sexual orientation is a frequent topic of debate, and there is no clear consensus. However, there is a very strong argument that she was bisexual.
Fragment 72 addresses a young man and alludes to other affairs Sappho may have had with men. Fragment 98 talks about “he who is fair,” and Fragment 27 is also addressed to a man that Sappho calls “dear one.” Fragment 115, which is mentioned above, likens a bridegroom to a slender sapling, which is definitely lustful when you understand that she is alluding to a line in the Odyssey.
We know that some of Sappho’s poetry was addressed to men, but that doesn’t always come across in translation, likely because English does not have gendered nouns. But in the Greek, we can tell that the lover she refers to in Fragment 27, for example, is a man, because she uses the masculine form of “dear.” I don’t know about the potential mistranslation of “slave, youth” – it’s not something I’ve ever seen before – but the character to which Sappho refers is definitely male because in Greek the word for male slave would be different from the word for female slave.
What’s more is that the lore surrounding Sappho, even in antiquity, depicts her as loving both men and women. She is often shown with Alcaeus, another lyric poet who was her contemporary and rumoured to be one of her lovers. In some stories, she falls in love with the ferryman Phaon. And these associations appear on 5th and 6th century vases, in Ovidian poetry – well before modern notions of homophobia.
I could go on and on. I could write an essay on Sappho’s sexuality. But I won’t. Here is what I will say:
We know so little about Sappho’s life that she very well could have been bisexual, and there is nothing in her poetry to refute that. In fact, fragments of Sappho’s poetry and representations of her character in ancient works support the theory that Sappho was bisexual.
So claiming her as a bisexual woman who’s sexuality has been obscured is not inaccurate. At all. It’s spot on.
Stop Bi-erasure, already.
clintbbarton 