Are You a Lesbian?
Lesbos islanders dispute gay name
Campaigners on the Greek island of Lesbos are to go to court in an attempt to stop a gay rights organisation from using the term “lesbian”.
The islanders say that if they are successful they may then start to fight the word lesbian internationally.
The issue boils down to who has the right to call themselves Lesbians.
Is it gay women, or the 100,000 people living on Greece’s third biggest island – plus another 250,000 expatriates who originate from Lesbos?
The man spearheading the case, publisher Dimitris Lambrou, claims that international dominance of the word in its sexual context violates the human rights of the islanders, and disgraces them around the world.
He says it causes daily problems to the social life of Lesbos’s inhabitants.
AMY KING View All →
Amy King is the recipient of the 2015 Winner of the Women’s National Book Association (WNBA) Award. Her latest collection, The Missing Museum, is a winner of the 2015 Tarpaulin Sky Book Prize. She co-edited with Heidi Lynn Staples the anthology Big Energy Poets of the Anthropocene: When Ecopoets Think Climate Change. She also co-edits the anthology series, Bettering American Poetry, and is a professor of creative writing at SUNY Nassau Community College.
AMY KING 
People are upset at what other people
call them. But what you call yourself?
Is there a toll?
Poetic sitcom…Hello Sapphian?
People get so pointlessly allergic.
I have a solution: We lesbians get an uninhabited island of our own, and we can vote on a name for the place. I cast my ballot for “Heaven,” and then we can all be called Angels. (How’s that for pride?)
Sisters, how long
have you been among us?
For millions of years,
even before the human face.
Persisting with ease in
the face of the obvious,
the selections.
But are we here
to live the obvious? No.
What is there to matter
anyway, except that you
are home already.
You belong to the
Way of Things.