Jammie Wearing Fool took note of a lawsuit in Greece.
RESIDENTS of the Greek island synonymous with the love verses of an ancient woman poet have launched a legal case against a gay group insisting that they are the real Lesbians.
From the website:
Three Lesbians, two of whom are women, have appealed to Greek justice, asking for the prohibition and withdrawal of the word “Lesbian” from the registered name “Greek Homosexual and Lesbian Community” (OLKE), their argument being that their historical and regional identity and personality are illegally offended by such a usage. One of the prosecutors, publisher of the magazine “Davlos” (www.davlos.gr) Dimitris Lambrou, stated that the use of the word “Lesbian” , in Greek both a noun and an adjective, by individuals having absolutely no relation to his place of birth, is arbitrary and inadmissible, as it distorts a true historical meaning and causes daily problems to the social life of the inhabitants of the island.
The word acquired the meaning of homosexual woman and has been used as such in all languages for the last decades. The alteration of its meaning stems from the fact that the great Lesbian poetess Sappho of the 7th cen. BC, several centuries after her death, was thought to have had homosexual relations with her female students. Newer research has disproven this, as Sappho had a family and committed suicide for the love of another man.
I guess they don’t have Human Rights Commissions in Greece yet. If this were Canada, Lambrou would be hauled before a tribunal posthaste for saying that residents of Lesbos are harmed by being associated with homosexuality. He may stop this particular organization from registering that name, but it’s decades or maybe centuries too late to try to disassociate the word “Lesbian” from female homosexuality. This is a publicity stunt. It’ll be interesting to see how it plays out in court and the reaction of the Greek public, though. And the phrase “Three Lesbians, two of whom are women,” is just funny.
