Women uniting to oppose a faithless male lover is the theme of Behn's entertainment, "SELINDA and CLORIS," in which the title characters befriend each other in order to deal with betrayal. First Selinda is warned by Cloris about Alexis, who was untrue to her. Selinda's response is to ally herself with the other woman and vow that Alexis will not conquer her as he did Cloris. The women praise each other's generosity and intelligence, agreeing to be good friends.

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The reciprocal relationship between the women includes both physical and intellectual attraction, friendship, and sexuality. Cloris "will sing, in every Grove, / The Greatness of your Mind," to which Selinda responds, "And I your Love." They trade verses and sing together just as traditional pastoral speakers do. In this case, however, in addition to being poets, lovers, singers, and shepherds, the speakers are also, untraditionally, female. The celebration of their mutual joy is a variant on the conventional wedding masque of Hymen, and presents in song and dance a formal poetic drama that emphasizes the eroticism of the women's relationship.

The bonding of women in female friendship is most clearly stated by Behn in her explicitly lesbian love poem, "To the fair Clarinda, who made Love to me, imagin'd more than Woman." This is the last of the poems appended to Lycidus (1697), and in it Behn shows how important to her were those androgynous qualities for which she herself was praised. Just as she was commended in the dedicatory verses of her Poems for having "A Female Sweetness and a Manly Grace," Behn asserts the unity of "masculine" and "feminine" characteristics in her "beloved youth."

She cleverly argues that she "loves" only the "masculine" part of Clarinda and to the "feminine" gives merely friendship. Since Clarinda's perfection manifests the idealized Platonic form, loving her cannot and should not be resisted. Further, since that by which society defines sex is not found in the female form, that is, women do not have the necessary physical equipment to consummate what is, in a culture, considered "the sex act," love between women is, by definition, "innocent," and therefore not subject to censure.

Clarinda is a hermaphrodite, a "beauteous Wonder of a different kind, / Soft Cloris with the dear Alexis join'd." Clarinda is not a passive fair maiden, but one who, the title states, "made Love" to the speaker and, therefore, may also be seen as the initiator of their sexual activity. The reciprocity of their eroticism suggests the mutuality of some lesbian relationships that reject the domination and subordination patterns of traditional heterosexual roles. As the poem ends, Behn, in a witty pun, asserts the multigendered sexuality of both Clarinda and the speaker: "we the noblest Passions do extend / The Love to Hermes, Aphrodite the Friend."

Through the centuries, there has been interest in at least some of Behn's works. Her later reputation has been enhanced by her prominence as a model for women writers, as noted in Sackville-West's early biography (1927) and Woolf's memorializing of Behn in A Room Of One's Own (1929). Contemporary readers may recognize even more of the multilayered messages in Aphra Behn's homoerotic works that place her foremost in gay and lesbian literary history.

Throughout the Restoration and eighteenth century, sodomitical characters were both presented and pilloried in literature.

The United Kingdom has a rich and vibrant legacy of queer cultural expression despite a long history of severe legal sanctions against male-male sexual acts and other manifestations of sexual and gender deviance.

Two-thirds of the poems of Katherine Philips, "The Matchless Orinda," concern erotic relationships among women.

Best known for her relationship with Virginia Woolf and for her scandalous love affairs, Vita Sackville-West was a prolific author of poetry, fiction, and nonfiction.

Admired through the ages as one of the greatest lyric poets, the ancient Greek writer Sappho is today esteemed by lesbians around the world as the archetypal lesbian and their symbolic mother.

Passionate friendships with women were essential to the life and work of novelist Virginia Woolf.