Lambrou the Lesbian vs the lesbians of the world
Aside from politicians, it’s not often that complete lunacy makes it to the main headlines of the mainstream media, but a looming court battle over the claimed appropriation of the word lesbian by, er, lesbians is receiving quite a lot of coverage right now. You might be forgiven for thinking that an inhabitant of the Greek island of Lesbos might rightly be termed a Lesbosian, but no, not according to Dimitris Lambrou, a publisher of a small and presumably very earnest magazine about ancient Greek religious issues. An islander on Lesbos, he’s a Lesbian (note the all-important capital L), or so he claims.
Lambrou the Lesbian objects to the casual appropriation of his island’s name and co-opted two local women, Maria Rodou and Kokkoni Kouvalaki—whether Lesbians or lesbians, or both, we do not know—to file a lawsuit on 10 April. The Greek Gay and Lesbian Union (OLKE) has thus far responded with the argument that the proposed injunction is a groundless violation of freedom of expression.
Many of us would agree with OLKE not only or necessarily from a pro-gay, pro-equality, anti-discrimination perspective but from a sense that money is better spent on other things than this half-baked baloney being thrashed out in a courtroom. But that’s exactly what’s going to happen.
Whatever the outcome, Lambrou has already achieved worldwide notoriety. If the verdict is handed down that lesbians have no right to use the label, the Greek judicial system will look pretty darn bonkers as well.
A decision in Lambrou’s favour would be extremely unlikely to result in women the world over forsaking the designation, and we can only wonder whether he would then go on to take every lesbian on the planet to court to force them to call themselves something else instead. That’s a lot of lesbians; by the time he got to the last one, assuming success in every case, he’d have to start all over again—there’s one, as they say about fools also, born every minute.
Lesbians sometimes choose to designate themselves as gay women, but some don’t like the obvious association it brings with gay men, while others welcome it. They also call themselves dykes, though again some like the term and others loathe it, in part because nobody is quite sure how the term came to be used to describe women who love women. Vulgar rumour has been doing the rounds for decades that there’s a connection with the story of the little boy who put his finger in a dyke and stopped Holland from sinking. It might, for all its obscenity, be true, a dyke being a long wall or embankment built to prevent flooding from the sea. It is, however, unlikely that intimate application of a digit these days could do anything to stop coastal erosion, or that these barriers would ever announce their grief at their name being appropriated for anything else.
Similarly, we shouldn’t expect Sol, our very own sun, to be registering a complaint any time soon over the appropriation of the word ’star’ by celebrities who aren’t powered by a nuclear core, don’t warm the planet, and only cause boredom and earache, not skin cancer. Of course babies the world over may yet rise from their cots and take to task all those lovers who think ‘baby’ is an acceptable word to affectionately whisper to their partners, while cockerels of all bird species could theoretically take offence at the contraction of their label to describe male genitalia, if they weren’t too busy humping hens and waking people up at dawn.
But then, cockerels might also be affronted by Lambrou being described as a complete cock. Nevertheless, he is. All this makes me very pleased to note that the word gay was originally, and remains, an emotional state akin to happy, only with bells on—and a word famously overused in the children’s novels of Enid Blyton, with the passing of time moving from inconsequential to hilarious upon revisiting and noting, again and again, that the character of Noddy often felt rather gay. And his hat had a bell on it as well.
tags: court, dykes, gay, Greece, homosexuality, law, lesbians, Lesbos, nomenclature, prejudice, Sappho
6 comments on “Lambrou the Lesbian vs the lesbians of the world”
May 6th, 2008 at 11:11 pm
I’d only half heard this on the radio before you said about it and wasn’t sure it was for real … hasn’t he anything better to do with his time and money … or like you said does he just want his name known for any reason!
Oh and Noddy and his bell snigger snigger snigger
May 7th, 2008 at 7:37 pm
I was reading about this the other day. Sounds like another frivolous lawsuit.
May 7th, 2008 at 7:37 pm
This is kind of OT but it is about lesbians. I thought you might be interested in a short piece that National Public Radio over here did entitled “English Mill Town Welcomes Lesbian Families”. The audio feed is here. Oh, the “mill town” the piece refers to is Hebden Bridge.
May 8th, 2008 at 7:21 am
@Jami: Oh wow. Yes. Definitely. Thanks! When we lived in Hebden Bridge, and before we moved there, the town long had acquired the reputation of being the unofficial lesbian capital of the UK and it is true that for a very small town it has a large lesbian population. There were more than just us two gay men there as well.
May 8th, 2008 at 7:22 am
@Sue: Well, I think it’s wasteful but the guy is completely serious in pursuing it. He either has a lot of money he’s happy to burn, or his small magazine makes a disproportionately large amount. Either way, it’s something he’s convinced of the rightness of, I guess–but to most everyone else the world over it just seems silly in extremis. x
May 8th, 2008 at 7:23 am
@Beautifu1: I’d say that if you combine prejudice with mobilising money, you can potentially have quite a storm… x
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