Zimmerman states that "mythically," Lesbian Nation existed on Sappho's Lesbos, but her description of Lesbian Nation, to some degree, fits in realistically with what we can infer from Sappho's poems. Namely, that there existed within this extremely rigid Greek culture a community of women who, even if just for a little while, loved one another and supported one another.

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This, they would always remember. And they could draw strength from Sappho's assurance that they would live on in memory. For her prediction to her female companions has come true many times over now: "I tell you, someone will remember us, even in another time."

Ancient Greek and Roman art represents a variety of homoerotic experience in several different ways.

The institution of pederasty (paiderastia) was a conspicuous feature of ancient Greek public and private life, but other forms of male-male sexual relations flourished in the Greco-Roman cosmopolis of the second and third centuries C.E.

Ancient Greece holds a unique place in the heritage of homosexual literature as it was a society that openly celebrated same-sex love in its poetry and prose.

Since the 1960s, the general trend in lesbian poetry has been collective and political rather than purely aesthetic.

Despite Sappho's status as most ancient lesbian foremother, her image is almost entirely absent from modern and contemporary lesbian art.

Of mixed Native American, Scottish, and Lebanese heritage, American poet and literary scholar Paula Gunn Allen reinterprets the historic and mythic beliefs of Native Americans from a twentieth-century lesbian-feminist perspective.

In addition to being the muse and inspiration of other writers, American expatriate Natalie Barney, known as the Amazon, was a poet, memoirist, and epigrammatist in her own right.

Baudelaire was among the first French poets to include lesbians as subjects.

Greek-born lesbian poet and translator Olga Broumas writes openly erotic poems that combine ancient Greek echoes and late twentieth-century idiom.

Emily Dickinson's poems and letters to her sister-in-law Susan are both passionate and elusive in their homoeroticism.

The bisexual poet and novelist Hilda Doolittle, who published under the initials H. D., wrote poems and autobiographical prose works that celebrate women's romantic relationships with each other.

Judy Grahn has been an effective leader the gay rights movement, and her identity as a lesbian and a feminist has infused all of her works, in both prose and poetry.

The work of African-American activist and writer Audre Lord was greatly influenced by her lesbianism.

Much of Amy Lowell's poetry is extremely frank, forthrightly sensual, and often overtly lesbian.

No ancient is more instructive about pederasty than the Greek biographer and essayist Plutarch.

Adrienne Rich, who has aestheticized politics and politicized aesthetics, is America's most widely read lesbian poet.

Algernon Charles Swinburne was interested in flagellation, sadomasochism, bisexuality, and lesbianism, not only for their erotics but also as gestures of social and cultural rebellion.

Renée Vivien, who had many affairs with women, openly celebrated lesboerotic love in her poetry and dreamed of women-controlled spaces in an era when most women were still domestically confined.