Lesbian Historic Motif Podcast Episode 326 – Speculative Fiction and Sapphic Plots

Saturday, October 18, 2025 - 07:00

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Lesbian Historic Motif Podcast - Episode 326 - Speculative Fiction and Sapphic Plots - transcript

(Originally aired 2025/10/18 - listen here)

When I get ideas for podcast episodes, I set up an empty folder to remind myself of the topic. Last month I was doing some file housekeeping to remove place-holder folders for topics I’d covered in some fashion and found this script—nearly complete and never used. I’d even assigned it an episode number, back three years ago. I have no idea at this point why I left it sitting. It does overlap with material from some other episodes. I worry about repetition sometimes, but then I remember that you, my audience, don’t live with all this information packed into your brains like I do. And there’s no point in letting the script go to waste, so I thought I’d finish polishing it up and offer it to you.

Introduction

For contemporary writers of lesbian and sapphic characters, the field of fantasy and science fiction offers wide open spaces to envision identities, lives, and societies that differ from the ordinary. Speculative literature embraces stories that are limited only by imagination, whether they choose alternate worlds as a setting, explore what science and technology might offer, or incorporate forces or beings that are not a part of our everyday lives.

For the most part, we don’t need speculative fiction as a medium for telling engaging, sympathetic, positive stories of women who love women. We write speculative fiction because we enjoy it for its own sake, and we write queer characters because they’re part of the world we live in, expressing a whole range of stories and personalities.

In past centuries, it wasn’t quite as simple to create stories in which women who loved women could be presented as ordinary, as sympathetic, and as positive role models. Oh, you could do it if that love were depicted as sisterly, or platonic. You got a lot more push-back if their love was clearly romantic or sexual.

But there was one big escape clause. People did enjoy stories about women who loved women; they just got a bit uncomfortable if you implied those stories took place in the here and now. If you set the story in the mythic past? If you told wonder tales about other worlds? If you took your readers or listeners through a doorway into an imagined adventure of heroes, gods, fairies, and magic? Then you could have your heroines kiss each other. Maybe.

There’s a regular theme running through lesbian history that societies try to deny the existence of love between women in the here and now. It’s something that people did a long time ago. It something the people in foreign lands do. Women in the here and now who didn’t keep the sexual aspects of their love invisible or disguised could face condemnation and punishment. But at the very same time, people were relatively accepting of fictions of female same-sex love, and were willing to find such characters honorable and even admirable. As long as they remained fictions.

The more removed the stories were from everyday life—the more they belonged to the fantastic and imaginary—the more free the characters were to have openly sapphic relationships. This means that early versions of fantasy and science fiction can offer some of the more positive and affirming stories about women loving women, or at least ones in which lesbian representation is present and not outright condemned.

The genre labels of “fantasy” and “science fiction” are modern inventions of course, but we can define some general definitions of what type of literature we’re talking about. We’re talking about stories that are explicitly not realistic. They aren’t depicting the everyday world and the sort of events and people in it. They may be set in an alternate geography—a place that is entirely invented, or that is a fictional adaptation of a real-world place, such as King Arthur’s Britain, or the China envisioned in tales from the 1001 Nights. The story may use a setting peopled with magical or supernatural beings, such as classical gods, or the inhabitants of Faerie. It may involve unexplainable events, such as transformations, visions, or magical journeys. The distinction between what we would define as fantasy versus science fiction isn’t always clear, and there’s more material that leans toward the former than that latter. But stories that take the form of a traveler’s tale, exploring a previously unknown land and society, often feel rather science-fictional.

In this brief survey, we’ll be looking at some characters and stories from historic literature that fall in the intersection of speculative fiction and sapphic plots.

All-Female Societies

One of the most obvious opportunities for sapphic stories would be woman-only societies, though the romantic possibilities aren’t always acknowledged. In the earliest classical stories of the all-female Amazons, the possibility of same-sex desire tends to be ignored. For the ancient Greeks and Romans, the sex lives of Amazons were most relevant in their occasional encounters with men. But in medieval and Renaissance stories involving Amazons, they were often shown engaging in homoerotic encounters, or at least open to the possibility. In Shakespeare’s Two Noble Kinsmen, the Amazon Emilia is mourning her dead girlfriend and rejects the idea of marriage out of loyalty to her. While there is no explicit indication that it was a sexual relationship—as opposed to a very intensely romantic one—a sexual reference would be at odds with the tone of the work.

In a less familiar 17th century play The Female Rebellion, we are shown both platonic and sexual bonds within the mythological Amazonian setting. The Amazon Queen Orithya is being plotted against by her generals, but supported by the loyal Nicostrate who infiltrates the rebels. The rebels believe (and are allowed to believe) that the bond between Nicostrate and Orithya is sexual, so a lovers’ spat is invented to motivate Nicostrate’s supposed betrayal. The villainous Amazon generals are portrayed as openly erotic with each other, so perhaps this isn’t the best example of fiction excusing lesbianism.

In several chivalric romances, an Amazonian warrior character becomes the object of female desire due to gender confusion, but I’ll cover that motif separately in a little bit. In Philip Sidney’s mythic adventure Arcadia, a character pretending to be an Amazon uses the sapphic reputation of Amazons as a ploy when courting a woman, though in this case the fake Amazon is a man. But the episode establishes the literary motif of lesbian relationships being normalized among Amazons.

Another fantasy setting involving an all-female society comes from the classical myths of Artemis or Diana, goddess of the hunt, who required that her female followers reject relations with men. While not all literature depicting Diana’s band depicted sexual relations among the women, many works do—or at least involve erotic play, including an entire genre of mildly erotic artwork with this motif. Ovid’s story of Callisto’s seduction by Jupiter in disguise as Diana necessarily relies on the idea that Callisto would be open to a sexual relationship with the goddess. This motif appears in a number of Renaissance works that feature Diana and her followers in Arcadian fantasies, such as William Warner’s play Albion’s England and Thomas Heywood’s The Golden Age in which Diana’s followers are paired up in monogamous same-sex couples.

Aside from works playing with classical mythology, fiction about all-woman societies really begins to appear in the late 19th century. Most female-authored utopian novels of the 19th and early 20th century that depict all-woman societies reflect the gender stereotype prevalent at that time of women as being elevated, cultured, but non-erotic beings. In works such as Charlotte Perkins Gilman’s Herland, published in 1915, or the much more obscure 1890 work Mizora by Mary E. Bradley, an event in the past has eliminated all the men in an isolated region and the women became able to reproduce via parthenogenesis. Sexual desire, however, is assumed to be absent from these societies and the authors may not even feel the need to explain this point. Mizora is a rather fascinating science-fictional “hollow earth” story, and the female explorer who narrates the story both has a past romantic friendship with a woman and develops an intensely romantic friendship with one of the women she meets there, though this isn’t depicted as a natural consequence of the single-sex nature of the society.

Stories of Long Ago and Far Away

Popular ways to create a fantasy setting for a story include setting it in the mythic past (as we saw in Amazon stories) or in a distant land. Setting aside genuine travelers’ tales, such as the flood of descriptions of the Ottoman Empire that became popular in the 17th and 18th centuries, describing lesbianism as prevalent in a land far away—whether real or fictional—not only removed the ability for the audience to fact-check it, but made the idea less threatening.

The 2nd century author Iamblichos wrote a soap-opera-like tale, the Babyloniaka, set in a mythic earlier Mesopotamia. Perhaps not so far away as some fantasy settings, but definitely not intended as a contemporary story. Among many other characters and events, it includes a romance between Bernice, the Queen of Egypt, and a woman named Mesopotamia. Depending on how one translates certain key vocabulary, the two women either got married or simply had sex. The situation is presented in a positive light, though the 10th century summary which is our only source for the text may have been a bit more disapproving.

On the more satirical side, Lucian’s Dialogues of the Courtesans also represents a 2nd century Greek author setting tales in a fictional antiquity. When his courtesan tells of being hired to be part of an all-female threesome, there may be an implied expectation that his contemporary audience will find this shocking, but within the story itself, the women’s relationship and actions are presented as merely odd.

The fully separate secondary world is often a feature of philosophical or satirical writing—a means in general of being able to comment on contemporary society with plausible deniability. This is the case for Delariviere Manley’s late 17th century roman à clef Secret Memoirs and Manners of Several Persons of Quality of Both Sexes from the New Atalantis, an Island in the Mediteranean. I’d tend to classify this as a science fictional work, as it uses the motif of a separate society in the lost land of Atlantis, though mirroring Manley’s contemporary world closely. Her Atlantean society features an all-female secret society, the New Cabal, whose members reject the love of men and enjoy passionate pair-bonds with other women of the club. While Manley’s work strays a little from the theme of positive depictions, the satire is light and fairly gentle—gentler than her treatment of same-sex desire in her more realistic writings.

Secondary Worlds and Crossdressing Romances

Fantastic literature that includes female cross-dressing creates a doubly-distanced context for permitting the neutral depiction of same-sex desire. Cross-dressing alone doesn’t license lesbian relations in the eyes of society—as we can see in the legal history where prosecutions for female same-sex relations almost always are triggered by one member of the couple cross-dressing. But in an imagined secondary world, cross-dressing is often used as a gateway to depicting lesbian desire.

Ovid’s Iphis and Ianthe not only created a neutral depiction of female same-sex desire (conveniently situated in an ancient past) in his original 1st century work, but inspired regular reworkings of the material throughout the medieval and early modern periods. Unlike some cross-dressing romances where a female-presenting character falls in love with a masculine-presenting one, the cross-dressed Iphis falls hopelessly in love with her childhood friend, though the author writes her as considering her love to be in vain. The love itself is not condemned, only the possibility of its fulfillment is denied until divine intervention restores heteronormativity.

Later authors who took up the tale, perhaps having the cushion of even greater conceptual distance from a mythic ancient Greece, were a bit more generous, sometimes allowing the two women a wedding night before the divinely-mediated sex-change. Or, as in the 17th century play Gallathea, concluding with the two women reaffirming their love for each other as women, before the off-stage resolution that allows them to marry, as all good theatrical protagonists must.

In general, the early modern fashion for mythic pastoral settings involving the presence of classical deities was generous to the possibility of female homoeroticism. Several versions of the story L’Astrée or Astræa include erotic scenes between the followers of the goddess Diana, plus the stratagem of a man only being able to win a woman’s romantic attention by cross-dressing. Something of a reversal of the usual cross-dressing romance plot.

Amazon romances are not confined to depictions of all-female Amazon societies, as in Ariosto’s Orlando Furioso and Philip Sidney’s Arcadia, both of which involve positive depictions of female same-sex desire, mediated by mistaken gender or gender disguise. While one could argue that such gender-confusion plots don’t involve actual homoeroticism, the possibility of that desire is depicted in a neutral or positive way, even when the confusion is resolved.

Conclusion

These are only a selection of the historic literary works in which a fantastical or science-fictional setting created a space in which female fictional characters were allowed to experience same-sex desire without condemnation or punishment. The motivations were different from those of modern authors. Today, we may want the freedom to create positive depictions without directly violating what we consider to be the constraints of actual history or current society. (As well as the freedom to tell stories that break free of realistic fiction in other ways.) Authors of the past probably had a variety of motivations, not all of them admirable. Representations of lesbianism may have been done for titillation, in a context where a realistic depiction would have provoked moral outrage. Most of these depictions, however neutral in context, still included heteronormative resolutions in some fashion. But they all speak to the scope of what could be imagined, once the imagination was liberated from the here and now.