Life Through a Queer Lens
Welcome to the Life Through a Queer Lens Podcast, where anyone with an open mind and heart can learn about the LGBTQIA+ Community from the people within it! We're your hosts, Jenene (she/her, they/them) and Kit (they/them).
Life Through a Queer Lens
EP50: Sapphic Love & History
How can fictional characters queerbait, yet real people cannot? Join me as I unpack this intriguing distinction and share my personal journey of navigating the world of solo podcasting as an autistic individual. I'll open up about transitioning into a performance mindset, the joys of receiving my MatPat U2's figurine, and the difficult decision to step away from Meadowrun's social media accounts due to negativity. Together, we'll also explore impactful social justice initiatives, like supporting Navajo water rights and the Hawaii's People Fund, while celebrating the resilience and beauty of the queer community.
In this heartfelt episode, we shine a spotlight on sapphic identity, tracing its historical roots and embracing the inclusivity it fosters. I'll share my reflections on the importance of respecting individual identities and invite intersex individuals to contribute their experiences. Through empathy and understanding, we navigate the complex terrain of queerbaiting and advocate for kindness and patience in real-life interactions. This episode is a tribute to love, safety, and self-acceptance for everyone within the queer community.
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we love sappho here. We love sappho here. Real people can't queerbait. It's another piece of discourse, real quick, that I've been hearing all the time about celebrities queerbaiting. Real people cannot queerbait you. That's not a thing. Only fictional characters and tv shows and movies and books can do that to you. Real people can't do that. That's not a thing. They're experimenting, they're doing the things that we've all done before we came out of the closet.
Speaker 1:This happens every time. I swear I need five to ten minutes to just get into it and figure out how to talk and get into just being by myself and communicating and I guess quote unquote like the performance, because I don't know. I feel like there's an aspect of this that is performing teaching if you will and it takes a little bit for my brain to be able to like actually get into that mode and I always hit record too early every time. I should wait at least three or four minutes after sitting in this chair and really getting settled in to hit record. But then I'll just get distracted if I'm sitting here without recording and inevitably start doing something that isn't actually going to help me get into the mindset of where recording or I'm recording. This is specifically a solo cast issue. I don't really have this issue when I'm working with someone else, because there's another personality, another energy to bounce off of, but when it's just me talking into the void, there's very much this moment of having to get into the performance headspace and, honestly, I feel like that's something that's a really cool thing to discuss is the idea of everything, to a certain extent, being a performance. Especially when you're autistic, especially like for me personally, there is a lot of just being a person that very much ends up being a performance just because of the fact that masking and learning how to unmask and still struggling to unmask and stuff like that. Yeah, see, I need that little bit of time. I also have had a tension headache for a lot of today, but I did my makeup y'all. I did because we're talking about one of these two things this week and then the next week, but I'm going to be recording both today. So I decided to do both on my eyes and I'll get into what those are in a little bit. But yeah, I did my makeup today and I'm very proud of it.
Speaker 1:Oh, I also just in like some personal fun news. I ended up I'm a nerd I ended up ordering for Game Theory, specifically MatPat's retirement. He did a collaboration with U2's and I ordered a pin and the U2's figurine. I ordered the Glamrock Freddy pin, where you open his hatch and MatPat's in there, and I ordered the figurine and the pin came for my birthday in like June, which was awesome, and I just got the figurine this past Saturday, so he's on my shelf.
Speaker 1:I haven't opened the box yet. I don't know if I'm going to I'm not really a collector, I have no plans of ever doing anything with that, but keeping it on a shelf and stuff like that. So I might end up taking him out of the box. But I'm also not sure, just because I don't want the figurine to start looking tarnished over time. So if anyone has owned a U2's figurine, if you've taken yours out of the box and you're like, oh damn, I wish I didn't do that Because now it looks a lot different than the day I got it, let me know what y'all think if I should just keep him safe in his box or take him and his psychic friend Fredbear out. And, you know, have a time.
Speaker 1:So now that we're past, some personal stuff, some fun stuff, things like that, some little talk of performance and stuff like that. Hey y'all, welcome back. We are here with a solo cast. That is just me, kit, here to talk to y'all today about the identity of sapphic, and I love my sapphic girlies. But before we get into that, I just want to personally do a little bit of house cleaning.
Speaker 1:So, for starters, if you are following us on our Meadowrun social media accounts, like Facebook Instagram Thread, we posted there on September 4th letting everyone know that as of September 5th, which is the day I'm recording, we are going to be deleting all of those accounts. The reason for that is because I posted a clip to our Instagram discussing my father and his journey in self-healing and learning love and acceptance for the queer community prior to passing, when I was 11 years old, and I have never read such heinous things about him or even just like our relationship. You know what I mean. Like it was just. It was the kind of things. That's what y'all get a hobby first off. Secondly, it's not worth it. We have 75 people following us over there. We would love to see you all on our other platforms and coming here and all of that. But we understand if you're a meta only person, we totally get it, but it just very quickly and very suddenly became. It became more harm than it was worth. If that makes sense and I'm sure that does make sense to a lot of you I'm sure a lot of you have left Twitter slash X for that exact reason, because, at the end of the day, the emotional and mental harm that you were experiencing from those spaces is more than the community or exposure that those spaces provide is worth. So, yeah, for those reasons, we are leaving our meta accounts.
Speaker 1:In the description down below, we will have our link tree, which has all of our accounts that we still are using in it and stuff like that in our social section, and we also have a petition for an arms embargo on Israel. We have information about the Navajo water rights, information about the Hawaii's People Fund, information about Focus Congo and information about All Eyes on Sudan. We also have Kimberly Crenshaw's paper about intersectionality her original coinage of intersectionality in our link tree, and coming soon, we will have a action link where you can share your story in order to help the Equality Act pass. So, yeah, we've got some fun things coming that way. So check us out down below and follow us on the other socials that we still have. We'll still have YouTube, tiktok, tumblr, because she lives girl. So, yeah, that's one little piece of housekeeping that I wanted to get out of the way.
Speaker 1:And secondly, I wanted to discuss I don't know if I want to call it faux pas, because I feel like that minimizes the harm that could have been done with the words that were spoken on this podcast. On this podcast, but in a previous episode we we being Janine and I, my co-host and I were discussing I believe we were discussing Imani Khalif. I believe we were discussing the controversy around the Olympics, with Imani Khalif as a cis woman being challenged by in her position in boxing. I'm sure that that makes sense. You all remember that. Right, she's suing now, queen. I hope she gets her bag. I hope she wins hard. Jk Rowling might go to jail. It's very exciting.
Speaker 1:But in that episode, while discussing that, we incorrectly and harmfully used the term DSD. This term is used by the medical community. However, the intersex community does not accept this term. When this term was developed by the medical community, it was done without a single intersex person's point of view inputted into the discussion. It was done only with doctors and perisex people, without any input from the intersex community and many people in the intersex community consider it a slur, along with words like the H slur, which I'm not going to say here. I'm sure you can assume what it is. I'm not going to say it here, but that is a slur against intersex people and I want to apologize deeply and sincerely for our improper usage of that word. We even stated in that episode that we may do an entire episode about the difference between DSD and intersex. However, we now understand that is not.
Speaker 1:I would love, if you all are interested, to do an episode about how DSD became a thing, how the medical community fucked that up, a episode about the history of the medical community's lack of care, understanding or empathy toward the intersex community, if that makes sense. I would love to do an episode like that about how DSD as a term is so deeply harmful and how the intersex community has rejected it, basically entirely. But when it comes to actually connecting the two absolutely not to the point where we will no longer be using that term, that acronym, anything like that we will only be referring to intersex people as intersex people and using intersex approved terminology that I will personally start doing research into. Again, I want to deeply apologize to anyone who was harmed by our words in that episode. Information around that situation was coming out very quickly and very inaccurately and I should have recognized in that moment that we just shouldn't have spoken about it without having all of our ducks in a row and plain and simply they were not. So, yeah, those are the little bits of housekeeping I wanted to do Again, deeply apologize.
Speaker 1:If you yourself are intersex, if you would like to come on the show and discuss with us your personal experiences, your life, your struggles, your point of view. This is a topic that I completely understand, that I do not know more about. As a peri-sex person, I need to learn more and understand more and I recognize that in the past in episodes, I fucked up when it came to discussing intersex people and intersex traits. That's the word I was looking for traits, holy shit. Yeah, I hope that we can come to a common understanding and move past this. If y'all have any books that we can come to a common understanding and move past this, if y'all have any books anything like that that you want to suggest to us also, please let us know.
Speaker 1:Again in our link tree I believe it is either the second or third link down, we have a episode suggestions tab. You can send also suggestions for. Hey, I found this article that you might. I found this book. That taught me a lot that you could probably anything like that. Please send that stuff away as long as it is not hateful, as long as it is not defamatory, as long as you are not sending us trash, as long as you are not sending us terrible things to the identity of sapphic, which is my left eye, I couldn't think of it. Listen, I'm really bad with my rights and my lefts. It's one of the reasons why I keep bracelets specifically. Yeah, because it helps.
Speaker 1:So I want to start out this episode about start out this topic. Obviously, this isn't the beginning of the episode. Y'all have been listening for at least 10 minutes at this point, I'm sure, because I don't shut up. But to start out this topic, firstly, while sapphic and lesbian are related terms, they are distinctly different in history and entomology, along with contextual meaning. Yeah, just keep that in mind. They are often frequently overlapping. Obviously, people can identify as both. You can identify however you want. That's the basis of queer theory. But at the end of the day, they are distinctly different when it comes to the actual history of the word I don't know how to say that word E-T-Y-M-O-L-O-G-Y, the history of a word, the building of a word.
Speaker 1:Sapphic is seen as much more of an umbrella term. That includes lesbians, bisexuals or pansexual, trans femmes, trans masks, non-binary folks and cis women. So, whereas again, you can identify however you want to identify, but sapphic is seen as a much more umbrella term for any femme-aligned attraction. If you will, I even have a little side note for everyone. Even with sapphic being a more broad term, trans and trans non-binary folks, anyone who wants to identify as a lesbian rather than or in addition to being sapphic, are entirely valid and fine Queer theory. In one sentence or less, let people identify how they want to respect them and fight for their rights as they are yours, because we are all in this together. Your own community is not the enemy. Let people identify how they want to identify. It's not that hard guys. Yeah, at the end of the day, a transmasc person may choose to identify as sapphic, or they may choose to identify as lesbian. Either or is valid, or they may choose to identify as both. They are valid no matter which of those three ways or a plethora of others they choose to identify. All right, full stop. That's okay, as long as we're all on the same page there.
Speaker 1:This is a direct quote from a themus article about sapphicism. Yeah, sapphicism, I believe, is the term which is actually a real word. I didn't even realize that, but I found it on the etymologycom, which I thought was interesting, like the etymology dictionary website. I thought that was really fascinating. So this is the direct quote. Yet, unlike these sexualities, sapphic strives to conjure an experience more akin to an intention toward attraction, one oriented less in any specific gender identity and more in the fullness of a potential lover's humanity. So it's more about the, the feeling. I've heard it described in a lot of ways as an aesthetic, but deeper, it's an aesthetic way of looking at passion, if you will. But yeah, it's interesting, it's fascinating. So this is another quote from Richmond Public Library's article the Meaning of Sapphic Unraveling the Power of Identity.
Speaker 1:The term acknowledges and affirms the unique experiences and relationships of female identifying genders who love femmes and navigate their romantic and platonic love within the context of their personal lives and society. But yeah, it, just like those, those quotes say sapphic is, is very much about that, like when people talk about, like girlhood and like that, like very specific type of love that femme aligned people feel. And, mind you, this is coming from someone who doesn't use she, her pronouns, but also understands that femme like attraction, and it doesn't matter how you identify, how you were born, anything along those lines, if you get it, you get it. I have met people of every gender under the sun who get it and if you get it, there's that certain spark with quote-unquote sandbox love, as they say in Jennifer's body. Don't make me cry, but sandbox love feels very sapphic and it does not matter the genders of anyone involved. I hope that makes sense to people. I hope that makes sense to people. I hope that resonates with people because there's something in there that I am not smart enough to pick apart and if you are, hit me up because I want to have that discussion of the identity and the word itself.
Speaker 1:The term is derived, like much with femme love, from the ancient Greek poet, sappho of the island Lesbos and her poetry exploring love and desire for all genders, but specifically through and for the female gaze. We love Sappho here. We love Sappho here. She lived during the 600s BCE and was considered the female counterpart to homer with her poetic wisdom and lyrical beauty. Sappho was also considered the 10th muse and was called the poetess. Her identity is still questioned and debated over to this day, which is not something that we're really going to do here. I'm not really here to humor those types of discussions.
Speaker 1:I am of the firm belief that, for one, real people can't queerbait. First off, it's another piece of discourse, real quick, that I've been hearing all the time about celebrities queerbaiting. Real people cannot queerbait you. That's not a thing. Only fictional characters and TV shows and movies and books can do that to you. Real people can't do that. That's not a thing. They're experimenting. They're doing the things that we've all done before we came out of the closet, bro, come on.
Speaker 1:Or doing normal human things of figuring out who you are and then realizing, oh, this is who I am, and then either sticking to being straight or that's just part of the human experience is exploring yourself. Isn't that what we want? Isn't that what we as queer people want is for things like self-exploration to become the norm. Does that not make it easier on us? Or am I the dumb one? I'm so serious. Guys Explain it to me like I'm five. Okay, so yeah, just we're not, we don't. I don't really want to humor that here.
Speaker 1:She was clear enough in her poetry. We don't need to say it for her. You know she expressed love for all genders, but specifically for and through the female gaze, which is something that is evident in her poetry. We don't need to know. She told us. She just didn't use the modern language we now have because she didn't have the modern language we now have.
Speaker 1:Sapphic first came into use as an adjective in the 16th century as a reference to sappho herself and specifically the characteristic meter of her poetry. It took until the 1890s for the term to gain meaning of pertaining to sexual relations between women, which, again, all this comes from the entomology, origin and meaning of sapphic. Sapphic as an identity term resurfaced in the public consciousness during the LGBTQIA plus and feminist movements, specifically of the mid-20th century. The noun sapphicism also originated during this time and meant homosexual relations between women. Lesbian was also derived from the island of Lesbos that Safik hailed from, she lived on and wrote her poetry from.
Speaker 1:We will also be doing an entire episode about the etymology of lesbian as a word, as an identity. It is equally as deep and fascinating and goes beyond, just like the island of Lesbos. There is obviously more to it, which again, is something that we will 100% go into at a later date because it is fascinating. But I wanted to touch on these guys first because I don't know. Everyone knows, at the very least, what lesbian is. Everyone knows at least what it means to identify as a lesbian to a certain extent, but not nearly as many people know what it means to identify as sapphic, especially outside of the internet spheres. We have to remember, everyone on the internet is a real person, but the internet is not real life. Not everyone knows about this. Sharing the information, even though it is through the internet, it just broadens it out, gives people something to. Hey, if you don't know what this means, here's this to teach you. You get the drift.
Speaker 1:So now let's go into the flag. Technically, flags actually. The first sapphic flag was posted on August 14, 2015 by Tumblr user LesboMoved. It's spelled L-E-S-B on top and one on bottom, with a white stripe in between and two ornate violets at the center of the white, symbolizing the love between two women. The second version of the flag was posted on September 10, 2016, by DeviantArt user PrideFlags. The second flag has the same colorings and placement, with a simplified violet at the center. So yeah, they're both really cute, really pretty. I love them. I based my eye makeup off of them. I love it. A quote from the Richmond Public Library page, again from that same article.
Speaker 1:As before, in addition to its use as a sexual orientation, sapphic has also become an aesthetic term referring to art, literature or cultural experiences that evoke the spirit of Sappho's poetry. The sapphic aesthetic celebrates the lens through which we view women, the beauty and strength of women, femmes and non-binary people, the bonds they form with one another and the resilience of their love. And that's what I mean when I say there's a certain aestheticism to the identity of sapphic. There's this, again, like it's based entirely I'm going to cry it's based entirely around this immortalized poet, the poetess, the female equivalent of Homer, and there's so much absolute awe to be drawn from that. There's so much beauty and wonder and excitement and strength and just absolute awe to be drawn from that. I love women, it's so cool. So yeah, and this is actually a shockingly short one, y'all, because we are already at our interesting fact that pretty much wraps up the history of the identity of sapphic. Again, the basis of queer theory anyone can identify as whatever they would like. Just let people be, Just let people live, just let people experiment.
Speaker 1:What the fuck does it harm you? Really Ask yourself that. What does it harm you? What does it harm you if someone wants to go by neo pronouns? What does it harm you if someone? What does it harm you? Why doesn't it fill you with joy to fill other people with joy? Do you know how happy it makes me to find out someone else's pronouns and preferred name and be able to use them and just like share in that joy that I also understand and experience when someone uses my proper name and pronouns, there is a communal joy and bliss that comes from mutual respect.
Speaker 1:Why wouldn't you want that? What, what? Why? Why wouldn't you want that especially? Why wouldn't you want that, especially with people that you claim to love or claim to care about? What? For the sake of being closer to God or being the bigger? What is the point? What is the point? What are you trying to prove? Who are you trying to prove it? To Just be a good person. Respect someone else's identity. Don't be a dick. It's not that hard. So yeah, on that note, we're going to jump into our interesting fact, and this one's a doozy, guys, I'm not going to lie. Reading about this one made me cry, like when I was compiling the information for this. This one hurt, this one got me a little bit For reasons that go beyond one single human lifetime, and you'll get what I mean.
Speaker 1:What survived of Sappho's work after the destruction of the Library of Alexandria was collected and published into nine books. This edition did not make it past the fourth century when the church ultimately destroyed her work after years of criticizing her use of erotic and lesbian imagery. Efforts to revive her poetry have been ongoing since the Renaissance, but are often clouded by compulsory heterosexuality. As of now, there is only one complete surviving poem of Sappho's. It is a, I believe, 28 line. It's either 28 lines or 28 stanzas, but it's a poem called Ode to Aphrodite. It is her only complete and full surviving work after the burning of the library of alexandria and the the church doing what it do, what it's been doing since its inception, what it continues to do to this very day by banning books, what it do.
Speaker 1:So, yeah, thank you all so much for joining us. I had a lovely time talking to you all today about sapphic everything and just fun things. And just remember y'all, no one in real life is going to queerbait you or can queerbait you Real people. No, that's just, that's the pretend stuff. Let's remember that. Okay, just let real people figure themselves out. Life is hard and confusing. I don't know if we've just forgotten that, but this shit ain't easy for anyone doing it. So just let people figure themselves out. Stay safe, stay queer. I love you all. Have a good one, thank you.