The Lesbian Idea in the Modern West

The lesbian idea has never been the exclusive intellectual property of the female sex. The collective mental discovery that women might love and desire one another as men loved and desired them is first visibly registered in the writings of men those humanist poets and scholars of 16th and 17th century Europe. This pattern of symbolic ownership would only be disrupted around the beginning of the 20th century with the fervently Sapphophilic writing of René Vivienne Natalie Barney Gertrude Stein HD Radcliffe Hall Amy Lowell Virginia Woolf and many othersYes, I'm less interested in what lesbianism is in other words than in what people have said about it its role as rhetorical and cultural topos and top