There is no doubt that queer representation has been dominating popular culture all summer. The UK aired its first ever sapphic dating show I Kissed A Girl, Billie Eilish and Chappell Roan (both beautiful queer women) are at the top of music charts globally, and hit films such as Bottoms (2023) and Love Lies Bleeding (2024) both follow queer storylines.
But is this anything new? Sure, the media might be giving more attention to queer musicians, actors, and artists than they have in years prior, but let’s get one thing straight: queer people have always existed, whether they have been getting praised for it or not.
One reason why queer joy is being celebrated now more than ever before is because we are finally allowed to have happy endings. That is, in fiction, at least. In the 20th century and earlier, whenever a queer storyline was depicted in literature or film, the one condition was that it must end in tragedy. Publishers refused to accept any storylines where queer people had a happy ending. This usually manifested itself in the death or institutionalization of one of these characters. Queerness had to be cast in a negative light; it could not be represented as something good or safe.
Take Giovanni’s Room by James Baldwin, The Picture of Dorian Gray by Oscar Wilde, or Carmilla by Joseph Sheridan Le Fanu. These varying stories each have one thing in common: they are either heavily queer coded, or explicitly queer, and share endings that perpetuate the stereotype that some tragic event must always get in the way of queer people experiencing lasting happiness. Wilde even had to make several revisions before his novel was published in book format as his allusions to homosexual desire were seen as scandalous and absurd. He was also later convicted and sentenced to two years hard labor and a jail sentence from 1895 to 1897 under Section 11 of the Criminal Law Amendment Act of 1885 for “gross indecency and homosexual acts.”
But this does not change the fact that ever since humans began recording their history, either in words, hieroglyphics, or pictographs, queer stories and people have always existed.
Sappho of Lesbos, one of the earliest examples, was an Archaic female poet who lived from 630-570 BCE. In her “Ode to Aphrodite,” Sappho as the speaker “longs for the attention of an unnamed woman.” The sex of Sappho’s beloved is established from only a single word in line 24: the feminine εθελοισα (etheloisa). Although a queer reading of this poem was proposed in 1835, it was not widely accepted until the 1960s, in the midst of the Civil Rights Movement, Women’s Rights Movement, and Gay Liberation. The English words “sapphic” and “lesbian” respectively derive from her name and the name of her home island.
Fast forward a few thousand years, and the first woman in space turned out to be queer. Sally Ride revealed in her obituary posthumously that she and her partner Tam O’Shaughnessy were together for 27 years. She is the first acknowledged queer astronaut, taking gay representation out of this world!
There are so many other sapphic icons that I could name: Billie Holiday, Judy Garland, and Emily Dickinson, for example. But there is simply not enough space or time to emphasize the importance of queer women and their accomplishments in pop culture history. So perhaps we are not in a “renaissance” of lesbian culture. Perhaps lesbians have always been around and we’re finally starting to give them the happy endings they deserve.
