Dressing Dykes: Sappho and the Original Lesbian Look
Make it stand out
Sappho – the original lesbian. At least, this is how we think of her today, with the words sapphic and lesbian originating from her name and home island of Lesbos. Yet, her identity and the desires expressed in her poems have been debated for thousands of years. Sappho has always been an icon for her poetry, her talent garnering her title of the “Tenth Muse” or “The Poetess”. As would be expected, her legacy has prevailed through millennia. The love that she professed for women in her poetry couldn’t be erased, despite the efforts of multiple generations; no matter what, she remains the lesbian icon. This is the story of the creation of the original lesbian look.
A quick note: This column is not about Sappho’s actual sexuality. Instead, this the story of how Sappho has become a figurehead of lesbian iconography. The clothes she wore (or the clothes we think she wore) are lesbian because they’ve has been claimed as lesbian. To quote Laura Darling’s fantastic article about Sappho on the podcast Making Queer History, “she is a symbol. Despite the efforts of biased academics, she will remain that for many years to come.”
Sappho is thought to have been born around 630 BC – that’s 2,650 years ago. Most images of her that exist today are far more recent, mostly from the 18th and 19th centuries. However, her image was already being shaped only a few hundred years after her lifetime. The earliest source acknowledging the rumour of Sappho’s queerness (and then dismissing it as slanderous) is a biography from the Hellenistic period (323-30 BC). It states that “she has been accused by a few of being undisciplined and sexually involved with women.” If sources like these are the start of Sappho’s heterosexualisation, they directly link to her representation in Victorian paintings.
Lawrence Alma-Tadema, ‘Sappho and Alcaeus’, oil on panel, 1881. The Walters Art Museum, Baltimore, USA.
One of these paintings is ‘Sappho and Alcaeus’ by Lawrence Alma-Tadema from 1881. It represents Sappho with Alcaeus, another poet from her time period, in a heterosexual romance that was invented for Sappho after her death. Flora Doble, in her article ‘Sapphic Sexuality: lesbian myth and reality in art and sculpture,’ describes how “in ancient scholarship, Sappho was […] portrayed as a promiscuous heterosexual woman, with her contemporary male poet Alcaeus of Mytilene portrayed as a possible lover.” There’s evidence that the two interacted, but quite literally nothing that suggests a romantic relationship. There are similarities in their writing styles, but all too often this is attributed to a relationship rather than, for example, Sappho leading poetic trends.
___STEADY_PAYWALL___
Other men have been suggested as Sappho’s lovers: her supposed husband was Kerikles from the island of Andros, which translates to “Penis from the island of Men” and was definitely a joke – probably to mock her reputation for loving women. Another “lover” is Phaon, a ferryman blessed with good looks by the goddess Aprodite. Considering that Sappho was real and Phaon the stuff of legends, this is also hard to believe… particularly since the first mentions of this love story occur hundreds of years after Sappho’s lifetime.
Simeon Solomon, ‘Sappho and Erinna in a Garden at Mytilene’, 1864. The Tate, London, UK.
Despite these efforts, Sappho’s lesbian image prevails. The majority of paintings that aim to depict her don’t include men at all. Some of them, like a famous example by Simeon Solomon from 1864, even picture her in a romantic position with other women. This painting has all the benchmarks of Sappho’s look, and Sappho is easily identifiable: embracing another woman, she wears a crown of laurels in her hair, a symbol of triumph. Perhaps this suggests her triumph over poetry and her reputation as “The Poetess.” Perhaps, instead, it represents her triumphs with love – with women, like the one sat next to her. On her other side rests a scroll and a lyre, her writing and her instrument. These are the tools of her trade and again suggest her position as a poet.
This is secondary, though, to the relationship between the two women, sat together in matching tunics with fabric that appears almost liquid. Their kiss is intentional, replicated by the birds painted above them. The painting combines Sappho, the poet, with Sappho, the woman-lover. Simeon Solomon, the painter, was a gay man. He consistently painted images of same-sex desire throughout his career, which was cut short after he was arrested on two occasions for sodomy. He recognised queer love that has been continuously erased.
The words “lesbian,” “sapphic” and “sapphist” took off as descriptions for homosexual and queer women in the 1890s, though women had been compared to Sappho for expressing same-sex desire for centuries. This was, of course, despite the efforts of the men who had tried so hard to erase her love for women. At the turn of the 20th century, her name was spread as a marker of lesbianism. Her image had been captured by lesbians, her story retold and reclaimed.
Sappho’s renaissance was in Paris. The French capital was the go-to destination for modernist lesbians in the first decades of the 20th century, so much so that their community became known as “Paris Lesbos.” Sappho was appreciated, fully and devotedly, as an icon of lesbian love, despite having lived thousands of years in the past. Her representative in the realm of the living was Natalie Barney: writer, poet, heiress and loud, proud lesbian. Barney and her lesbian circle performed Sappho’s image for the lesbian gaze, paying homage to her look and her loves and her poems. The iconography of women in togas, established in so many paintings of Sappho from previous centuries, here existed primarily in relation to lesbian love. The Sapphic look was a visual manifesto of lesbianism. The women of Paris Lesbos refused to allow Sappho to fade into the heterosexual canon, and their efforts weren’t in vain: Sappho is now a a keystone of queer history as we know it.
Sappho, the toga-wearing ancient lesbian with a crown of laurels in her hair, is an image that prevails through the ages. Above is a photograph from the July 1978 Equal Rights Amendment March in Washington, D.C., where one lesbian demonstrator is dressed as Sappho. Like Natalie Barney and her circle of lesbians seventy years prior, she replicates the Sapphic aesthetic in order to claim lesbian history and attempt to forge a better future. The clothing associated with Sappho is shorthand for so much more. Aesthetics are what we see and recognise, and if we know what lesbian history looks like – how it dressed – then we can picture it in our minds. We can even recreate it by wearing it on our own bodies, like the toga-clad lesbian demonstrator in 1978. The history of lesbian fashion allows us to connect to our histories, because no matter the decade, century or millennium, we dress and present ourselves in specific, considered ways. There is a thread that stitches our lesbian lives together, and it can be powerful to gaze back to where it started.
Words: Ellie Medhurst
(This article has been adapted from an earlier version on dressingdykes.com)
