L'Amour des Femmes

Question: Pretty sure that you're not going to be able to find much, but I wanted to know if there any major examples of lesbianism in mythology. Artemis, for whatever reason, gets accused of it, but I know that's nonsense. So are there actually any real examples?

There certainly aren't very many examples, but that doesn't mean lesbianism isn't present in mythology. It means that it's invisible, and it's invisible as a result of the attitudes of the ancient cultures that those mythologies grew out of.

The problem with representations of lesbianism in ancient myth is that, for many ancient cultures, it was actually considered not to exist - or rather, not to actually be a real thing in the sense that relationships that involved men were real, solid bonds. Because many ancient cultures thought of sex as requiring penetration, they literally did not believe women could have sex with other women - nobody had a penis, so how could it possibly be sex? That doesn't mean women weren't having sex, of course, because they almost certainly were, but it does mean that their culture treated it like any other thing girls might do together on their days off - meaningless, pointless, and unvalidated unless a dude decided to get involved. In most of these societies, it was literally not possible to have a sexual or romantic relationship between two women; they would just have said those girls were good friends, and the idea that they wouldn't get married and have children like all women were supposed to do would be laughable.

It's a combination of the erasure of homosexuality in history, where cultures that didn't approve of it simply didn't talk about it so it's hard to find evidence of it, and the erasure of women and their wants and actions over the history of sexism, creating a double-whammy of billions of dudes denying that anyone could want anything that didn't involve their all-important penises for literally thousands of years. That's quite a stumbling block for a modern researcher to get around.

The best example I can think of for a lesbian goddess is Hi'iaka, the Hawaiian goddess of flowers and putting up with her sister Pele, and who I've been doing a lot of reading on lately thanks to working on her pantheon. Hi'iaka has several female lovers mentioned over the course of her myths (although she also has male lovers, so really she's bisexual), including the dance-goddess Hopoe whom Pele murdered with lava in order to get back at her sister when she suspected her of luring her own lover away. It's generally assumed that various other minor Polynesian goddesses probably have encounters with other women, based on implication in fragmentary recorded tales and songs. This is a result of the pretty impressive level of sexual freedom in ancient Polynesian societies, which didn't put a ban on pretty much any behavior except for bestiality and incest; they were cool with homosexuality, fine with extra-marital affairs as long as both parties were okay with it, and shocked the daylights out of the first Europeans who discovered them by offering their wives and daughters as casual sex in a spirit of welcoming without finding that in the slightest weird or inappropriate. Not that they didn't have some rules - daughters of particularly important chiefs might be expected to remain virginal until married, for example, and some stories make it clear that marital infidelity could be a major problem if one party was opposed to it - but overall, there's a lot less worrying about what everyone is doing with their private bits, which in turn makes it a much more welcoming environment for preserved tales about same-sex relationships.

You brought up Artemis, and she does always come up in this discussion; she's very often read as a lesbian thanks to her cult being made up of females and dedicated to feminine companionship, and her own sacred vow (backed up by Zeus' ruling) that she never be forced to marry a man. Because of all the fuckery surrounding lesbianism in Greek mythology, it's very difficult to tell if that means she's attached to the idea of virginity and untouched childhood (she is always shown wearing the short skirt of a young girl, for example, suggesting that she never grows up to the point of womanhood where she would normally be married) or if she's attached to the idea of female-female relationship. The waters are further muddied by the fact that the penis-centric ancient Greek mindset of course required a phallus for sex to actually be considered to have happened, so she could have been having fifty-nymph orgies daily and they would still have considered her a virgin if she'd never been touched by a man.

The idea of Artemis as a lesbian is usually mostly supported by the tale of Callisto, which isn't really about Artemis at all; in it, Zeus decides he wants to bang Callisto, one of Artemis' nymphs and her current favorite, but since he knows she's sworn off men he impersonates Artemis in order to get close enough to seduce her. A lot of later historians and mythographers have therefore concluded that Artemis and Callisto must have been in a lesbian relationship, since Zeus' gambit seems to suggest he thought he could get into her pants by being Artemis. However, as with all things going on with Artemis, it's hard to tell if that's actually what's happening, or if Zeus just impersonated her boss and friend to get close enough to her and then went in for the kill. Certainly he turned back into himself for the actual act of rape, and Callisto is definitely pretty weirded out by "Artemis'" forceful come-on, so it's difficult to tell if this is a relationship she was expecting or would have welcomed, and therefore difficult to try to extrapolate it onward to Artemis being in a relationship with her. And since we don't really have any other stories in which Artemis has much of a relationship with anyone except for her twin Apollo, there's no good evidence one way or the other.

There is, however, one really solid example of a romantic relationship between two women in classical mythology, and that's the tale of Iphys and Ianthe. To cut a long and torturously complicated story short, Iphys was brought up as a boy despite being a woman in order to avoid being killed by her father, who had declared he would murder any non-male child his wife bore, and was engaged to another woman, Ianthe, when she came of age. Ianthe fell in love with Iphys, believing her to be a man, while Iphys fell in love with Ianthe and was stuck in a conundrum of what to do, since there was no such thing as marriage between women and she could neither reveal herself nor properly consummate the marriage. In about what you would expect from a Roman myth, this problem is solved by the introduction of a penis, when the combined efforts of Juno and Isis (in one of her Roman cult appearances!) transform Iphys into an actual male so the two can get married and live happily ever after.

Obviously, this is not a great example of a lesbian myth; Ianthe actually thinks she's in love with a man so she's hardly displaying lesbian tendencies, and Iphys has actually been brought up as a man her entire life and is transformed into one at the end of the story, making it more of a tale of transgenderism than anything else (and possibly involuntary transgenderism, at that - it's really hard to tell if Iphys actually wanted to be male, but then the Romans would assume that everybody secretly wants to be male). But it is at least an acknowledgement of the idea that women could be in love with other women, even if it only acknowledges it within the framework of insane genderbending shenanigans on pain of death.

If you're looking to explore homosexual themes in your games - or just have a character or NPC that swings that way and are wondering how to fit them into the framework - you have sort of a black void of unsupportive mythology hanging underneath you, but that doesn't mean you can't do anything with it. If anything, ancient gods in a modern setting is a perfect time to have those kinds of characters pursue same-sex relationships; we do recognize those as validly existing now and you have all the freedom in the world to decide what examples of female friendships, relationships and partnerships in myth might actually include a sexual element that has simply been silenced all these centuries by the combined forces of the straight male historian armies. If you want to decide that Xochiquetzal and Tlazolteotl have always been more than friends, or that Artemis and her nymphs are not just hunting deer out in the woods, or that Amaterasu came out of that cave to see Uzume for more reasons than just to admire her technique, you have all the space you need to go for it, regardless of the fact that there's little mythic evidence to support it. Since we know that this is an area in which evidence of those kinds of things would have been specifically omitted or ignored, how creative you want to get is entirely up to you.

You might be right, you might be wrong, but since nobody knows either way, you should tell the most compelling story you can. Ladies who love ladies traditionally get almost no press in mythology; with a new crop of modern Scions coming in, now's a good time to change that, right?