New York Times: "Lesbian vice," July 8, 1852

“that Lesbian vice, of which SAPPHO was suspected”

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An electronic search by OutHistory.org of the New York Times from its start in 1851, for the first time provides that newspaper's earliest use of the word "Lesbian." The context indicates that the term is being used in a sexual sense, but whether the reference is to sex between women, illicit sex between women and men, or illicit sex of some other kind, remains open to research and analysis. Perhaps future research will clarify the exact meaning of this New York Times reference to "the Lesbian vice" suspected of Sappho

In 1981, art historian Judith Ellen Stein warned that:

Although Sappho of Lesbos may be today synonymous with female homosexuality, this was not true until the 1890's. Her poems were translated with male rather than the original female love objects until the twentieth century. Yet the abiding fiction of a "second Sappho," who was a courtesan, explains the presence of her name in frankly pornographic contexts during the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries. When the fascination with Sappho as a woman of legendary passion and unbridled sexuality finally obscured her literary reputation in the nineteenth century, we find images of her in such roles as a solitary voluptuary, an heterosexual lover, and, in two rare instances, as an homosexual amorist.

New York Times, July 8, 1852

A satirical letter to the editor of the New York Times, published on July 8, 1852, in that paper, purports to be from a married but “solitary man,” who watches for fires and works in a tower overlooking New York City. It’s signed “The City Hall Bell Ringer” and is a critical comment on crime in New York City’s streets, and the failure of the authorities to do anything about it.

In the eighth paragraph of the story, the writer says:

My wife – good creature that she is, -- brings me books. But what books? Translations of French Romances. Would you have me wallow in such a slough of iniquity? I have dipped somewhat into them, and my verdict may not be unworthy. They display much ingenuity, but no genius, except perhaps GEORGE SAND’s later novels, which are otherwise deformed by her Fourierism. As for her earlier works, they are true Devil’s Literature, worthy [of] the age of that Lesbian vice, of which SAPPHO was suspected.

The writer then adds:

The outrageous exaggerations of [Eugene] SUE, the stilted extravagances of [Alexandre] DUMAS, and the obscenities of PAUL DE KOCK, are but indications of the present abnormal state of French taste and morality. They are the fruit, -- the tree strikes its roots deep into the rottenness of the Parisian social system. Woe to that nation whose literature is the harvest of such seed-sowing, in such a soil! What can be expected of its contributions towards the liberation of mankind?

The writer answers his own question:

Even what we behold; spasmodic eruptions, as of a volcano, belching out fire from the central deeps, soon to be extinguished and die away in a column of dingy, funebral smoke….

The paragraph ends: “Poor France! poor Frenchmen!"

References

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