The Myths of Lesbians

 

In September, I attended the two-week International Women's Eressos Festival in Sappho's birthplace, Skala Eressos, on the island of Lesbos.

The annual festival started in 2000 and the concept was a simple one and it remains a simple one: To bring women from all over the world together in the birthplace of Sappho – a mecca of ‘lesbian culture’ in Europe – in order to celebrate the rich variety of women’s talents, skills and knowledge.

Sappho lived on Lesbos between 630 – 570 BCE.  

Well actually, I am often told, Sappho didn't really exist; Sappho wasn't a homosexual; Sappho jumped off a cliff in heartbreak, dontcha know, cuz of a man.

So why bother visiting this obscure Greek village? Why bother with Sappho at all? Is she relevant to lesbians? Are lesbians relevant?—Are they real? 

Sappho prepares to throw away her life and career over a faithless boyfriend.
Charles Mengin, Public Domain,

Sappho really did live 2500 years ago, her lifetime overlapping with Buddha, Confucius, Ezekiel, and Zarathustra. While Sappho didn't found a religion, in her day she was as popular as the Beatles are now, as Judy Grahn noted in The Highest Apple, her book about the legacy of lesbian poets.

But only fragments of Sappho's poetry survives, and we know only a little about herself, her social circle, and cultural context. What lives on without controversy is the Sapphic Ode. Stephen Fry, in The Ode Less Travelled, teaches us how to write a Sapphic Ode by example.

Let's hear it for the Sapphic Ode

An oyster bed of gleaming pearls

A finely wrought poetic mode

     Not just for girls. 

Lesbian Sappho made this form

With neat Adonic final line

Her sex life wasn't quite the norm

     And nor is mine

Three opening lines of just four feet

Create a style I rather like:

It's closely cropped and strange yet sweet—

     In fact, pure dyke.

He later quotes Anne Carson's translation of Sappho in Sapphic ode:

Eros the Bittersweet

no: tongue breaks and thin

fire is racing under skin

and in eyes no sight and drumming

fills ears

and cold sweat holds me and shaking

grips me all, greener than grass

I am and dead—or almost

I seem to me. 

Here is another translation of the same fragment, this one by Mary Barnard, composed in triplets.

He is more than a hero

he is a god in my eyes—

the man who is allowed

to sit beside you—he

who listens intimately 

to the sweet murmur of

your voice, the enticing

laughter that makes my own

heart beat fast. If I meet

you suddenly, I can't

speak—my tongue is broken

a thin flame runs under

my skin; seeing nothing,

hearing only my own ears

drumming, I drip with sweat

trembling shakes my body

and I turn paler than

dry grass. At such times

death isn't far from me.

You can listen to a recording of classicist Stephen Daitz reading Sappho's "Ode to Aphrodite." This New Yorker article gives the context for hearing ancient Greek, a language of rising and falling tones that sounds strange to English-speaking ears.

The lost library of Alexandria collected Sappho's work in nine volumes. Scholars believe Sappho wrote about 10,000 lines. If each poem were 50 lines, the ancient world would have known about 200 Sapphic poems. For comparison, the Beatles released 188 original songs. You would recognize any of them, and they will live forever. 

A video documentary on the legacy of the Beatles, 1000 years from now. 

Only 650 lines of Sappho survive. The Mary Barnard collection quoted above contains what is left of 100 poems.

Until the last quarter of the nineteenth century, Sappho's poetry survived only when quoted by others, often in prosody textbooks (like Stephen Fry's). New papyri came to light with the advent of Egyptology.

The first new discovery of a fragment of Sappho was made at Fayum. By the end of the nineteenth century, Grenfell and Hunt had begun to excavate an ancient rubbish dump at Oxyrhynchus, leading to the discoveries of many previously unknown fragments of Sappho. Fragments of Sappho continue to be rediscovered. Most recently, major discoveries in 2004 (the "Tithonus poem" and a new, previously unknown fragment) and 2014 (fragments of nine poems: five already known but with new readings, four, including the "Brothers Poem", not previously known) have been reported in the media around the world. [wikipedia: Sappho]

The discovered fragments of Sappho inspired a fad that produced pornographic frauds like The Songs of Bilitis (1894) by Pierre Louÿs. Louÿs pretended his work was a translation of a Sappho-like poet, but contemporaries like Natalie Barney knew he invented it for his own amusement.

Despite the first-person feminine voice and the lesbian content of these titillating songs, the dedication Louys placed on his Chansons de Bilitis seems highly ironic since its intended audience was probably not women at all, but a select literary circle of men.... Louys wrote to his brother Georges that as much as he would like to have a feminine audience for his work, it seemed unlikely given that "women have only the modesty of words," and are overly concerned with appearing respectable.

Yet women did read this work, including a wealthy young American named Natalie Clifford Barney, who not only identified herself as one of those "girls of the future society" but declared that her own Sapphic writing was inspired by Bilitis.[JSTOR]

Natalie Barney and her friend Renee Vivien are the first modern lesbians we know of who searched for the real Sappho on Lesbos. In 1905 they rented a house in Mytilene, the Lesbos capital. They trekked over the mountains to Eressos, hoping to find some trace of Sappho after centuries of prudish priests and pragmatic fishermen.

They didn't. According to their biographers, the entire project ended in disappointment. They might have found Sapphic inspiration in a sunset over the sea, but unlike Athens, no marble ruins of ancient Greece exist in Eressos. Renee got a letter from her ex-lover, she and Natalie broke up, and they both went home to France. The determined Natalie subsequently created a Sapphicentric scene among the lesbians of Paris. 

Since then, thousands of lesbians traveled over sea and mountain to Skala Eressos, seeking Sappho and finding only each other. When they started to arrive in the 1980s locals found lesbians bizarre and deplorable, but 40 years on they have come to realize that most lesbians make good tourists.  

Did you know Sappho was born on an island with a watery womb in the middle of it? 

 

No one had ever told me Sappho was born in the shadow of this breast-shaped mountain.

Except for the women gathered for the festival, I didn't expect to find signs of Sappho on Lesbos. 

So I was happy to see that the author of A Girls Guide to Lesbos, Tzeli Hadjidimitriou, offered a guided tour of ancient Eressos. (Available as an eBook.) 

Ancient Eressos, like other Greek city-states of the late Bronze Age, traded the produce of its fertile plain through its port, storing treasure and saying prayers in an acropolis.

Led by our "lesbian Lesbian" guide, we made our way around the
base of the ancient Eressos acropolis. 

The ancient city was built on and around the conical hill of Vigla. In antiquity, Eressos was widely reputed for its sweet, aromatic wine, figs, and breads, and it was said that when the gods desired bread, they sent the messenger Hermes to Eressos to buy it. Such was the fame and glory of Eressos's locally produced goods, and the ancient town prospered due to the enormous development in merchant trade and shipping. ...

The modern port is built on the foundations of the ancient one.

The plain of Eressos.

The ancient sources inform us that the town had a market, stadium, theatre, and university, as well as various temples in honour of the ancient gods Poseidon, Dionysus, Apollo, Athena, Hercules, Cybele, and, of course, Aphrodite. ...

Tzeli pointed out this well resting outside an old city wall. Marble-lined, it is the last ancient artifact she knows of not repurposed into other buildings.

Nothing has survived from the splendor of ancient Eressos in Skala Eressos, as though this once rich city had disappeared from the face of the earth. ...

These houses likely contain stone first quarried two thousand years ago.

The new settlement has been built over the old, so all the monuments were destroyed and their building material reused: many of the houses on the plains have pieces of the past built into their walls and courtyards. (A Girls Guide to Lesbos)

Over the centuries of the Greek Late Bronze Age (before 500 BCE) the many islands of the Aegean developed their own political systems, architecture, art, and philosophy. Tzeli told us the people of Lesbos, Lesbians, were known for being open-minded, because of wide trade networks and exposure to a variety of cultures. The Lesbians made their money trading their wine and oil, with partnerships across the Aegean and Mediterranean. 

Sappho was born to this wealth, a talented and educated woman, a flower of this cultural network. Other Greeks city-states, like Athens, ideologically didn't educate women, thus setting a pattern for civilizations like our own that model themselves on Athenian ideals. 

This gate to the upper city dates to Sappho's time.

Tzeli pointed out that native Lesbians developed a tedious building method, forming walls from the individual shapes of each stone, rather than cutting stones into uniform blocks.

Tzeli explains the Lesbian wall building method, which used the natural
shape of each stone to fit in with its neighbors.

She invited us to see and touch the remaining Lesbian artifacts  of Eressos, explaining that as it was well-known in ancient times that as the Lesbians built walls, so did they approach all things, with a philosophy of strength and vitality framed through difference.

A generation after Sappho died, the independent Lesbos became part of the Persian empire. A hundred years after that, Athens arrived; Lesbos revolted and Lesbos lost. The Athenians deposed elite families like Sappho's and parceled out the Eressos plain to Athenian colonialists. Thus democracy arrived on Lesbos.

Two hundred years after Sappho's time came Alexander and his Successor Kingdoms, then the Romans, Eastern Romans (Byzantines), and Ottomans.  

In the 18th century, the government in Istanbul could not protect distant islands, and pirates raided Greek coastal villages. Lesbians evacuated the convenience of the port and plain and moved inland to the mountains. 

Main street of Eressos village, with the ancient acropolis above the port in the distance.

They did not return to the beach (skala) until around the time of Natalie and Renee's visit. Even today, most local families keep winter and summer houses.

Modern Skala Eressos as seen from the ancient acropolis.

Perhaps because her work was popular, despite the eradication of her Lesbian culture, people continued to remember Sappho's poetry for hundreds of years. She remained "The Lesbian" and "The Tenth Muse" until the codex replaced papyri, and Christianity replaced Paganism. 

Marie-Lan Nguyen - Own work, Public Domain

You might have noticed the world contains few statues of females who are not allegories. The first statue of real women in New York's Central park wasn't installed until 2020. In statuephilic UK, a small fraction of named statues are of women, and nearly all of them of one woman: Queen Victoria. 

 

Among the remaining statues of real women worldwide, Sappho is a popular subject, with five of them in Skala Eressos. Tzeli said they were all designed by men. I photographed four, and didn't bother with the fifth.

 

Sappho in the village square.

This statue reproduces a Roman-era coin which celebrates their most famous Lesbian 600 years after she lived. Considering how rare it is for Romans to feature women on coins, by that time, the image is more of a logo than commemoration.

This one is just a mess. A woman's body,
chopped up and piled like a butcher's off-cut. Yeah, we get it.

 

 

 

The negative image in this one cleverly comes together as you pass by. 

A Sapphic junction box.

The mural behind the Sappho Hotel.

I traveled to Skala Eressos with a friend who introduced me to her social circle. I didn't feel like a stranger and could sit at any table and join a conversation. Very few of the women at this gathering were younger than 40; there's another women's festival in the spring where younger women congregate. I could tell that the sexual drama of the past has been somewhat replaced by medical complaints, but the women's eyes look the same as ever. 

A portion of the “Lesbians of Paris” social network of Natalie Barney and friends. Chart created by Michelle Young. Provided by Alison Child, author of the excellent Tell Me I’m Forgiven: The Story of Forgotten Stars Gwen Farrah and Norah Blaney. 

For two weeks, I spent my days hiking, swimming, and attending lectures about books, lesbians, and lesbians in books. In the evenings I ate plates of local fish and drank lots of local ouzo. Every night offered movies and dances, and I read some poems at an Open Mic. I introduced myself to a table of strangers at the Pub Quiz, claiming to know science, history, and literature, but no sports. The women accepted me and I knew some answers no one else did, but then humiliated myself giving an authoritative but wrong answer to: “Does the Statue of Liberty wear shoes or sandals?”

You knew they were together, didn’t you? 

The festival organized lots of events, but it was easy enough to do nothing at all.  

And then there was the inevitable shitstorm. At the one evening's talent show, two women performed a skit that found its hilarity in a blind Indian wearing leather fringe and feathers throwing tomahawks at an unwilling squaw already wounded and covered in bloody bandages. 

It could not have been more appalling. Obviously, the performers were oblivious.

Controversy roiled through conversations the next day. I spoke with a woman about a decade younger than me, and in despair she complained that lesbians are always finding fault in each other, and constantly arguing. I asked her how long she's been "in this community." She said not long; she didn't come out until she was 40. I tried to reassure her. We always fight amongst ourselves because lesbians are everybody. We come from everywhere. If lesbians can figure out how to get along, everybody can learn from us. 

After this conversation, I remembered what Tzeli said about the reputation of ancient Lesbians. They travelled widely, they traded with everybody, they had open minds, they valued the strength of difference.

A notion that I've mulled for years is known as The Mystery of Lesbians, after an essay by Julia Penelope in Lesbian Ethics (1985). "How, in spite of derision, incarceration, violence, and poverty, do we find the courage to create ourselves?” 

How is it that lesbians exist at all? In Victorian Ireland, when writing laws to criminalize sex between men, politicians didn't include sex between women for fear of making something real by naming it.

At that time, those same lawmakers were asserting that Irishness didn't exist either. Ireland had been a kingdom of the English for 800 years; the British had deposed its native elites, distributed farm land to colonizers, and overthrown native political systems, art, philosophy, and language. Thus an evolved constitutional monarchy came to Ireland. They only allowed a few circumscribed icons of Irishness, like the Guinness harp—much like Sappho's harp on a Roman coin.  

How is it that the Irish exist at all? Through myth. 

Besides illustrious contemporaries of Sappho who founded religions, the time of Sappho was also the era of the oldest Irish myths: the Tuatha Dé Danann, the Book of Invasions, the Dream of Aengus, the Wooing of Étain, and the Children of Lir (the story at the heart of Swan Lake). 

"Spirit of the Sea," by AE (George Russell)

These myths formed the deep background of a cultural movement that revived a consciousness of Ireland as Irish. The Irish people eventually declared independence, fought a war, forced a truce, signed a treaty, and built a nation. The vision of themselves as Irish lived first in their minds, and was expressed as art. Later came the political reality. 

"Deirdre at the door of her Dun" by AE (George Russell)

Whether or not we know anything accurate about the historical Sappho, she is a myth. I recently came across a link between myths and—my other obsession—mushrooms. Sophie Strand gives us the metaphor that myths are the fruiting bodies of conciousness.

Gathering at anodyne festivals in Skala Eressos, or in our own living rooms, lesbians create ourselves. We grow in networks of women who love women, generation after generation. Modern Sapphics have no ancient foundational texts, distinctive temple rituals, or even decent statues. Our name for ourselves recollects a myth, the fruiting body of our lesbian minds. 

Let us not mourn the Sapphic Odes

Lost and burned by neglect and time

As ever we love in networked nodes

Each dyke, a rhyme.

Some say the profile of Sappho is visible in that headland. 

 

Mushroom Interlude

 

A friend and I went on our first mushroom walk last week. The week before the woods were dry and fungiless . 

If I can see one amanita muscaria in a season, I am satisfied. 

These little ones grow in spirals around stumps. 

Three in one day. I love this place. 

Another kind of amanita. 

These are a kind of Chanterelle. I ate them, but have come to accept that I would rather talk to mushrooms than taste them. 

These are the same type of chanterelle gris (gray), growing in a little colony inside a stump. 

The bolete is in the middle distance, shouting at us to admire it. 

Do you believe in fairies? 

As we walked out of the forest we saw three or four huge trees lining the road. I could tell they weren’t natives, but planted by the Stewarts 100 years ago to line their horse riding path. Later I identified them as Monterey Cypress. No wonder they looked familiar. 

Clown Cars Parked All Over The Front Lawn

 

I heard comments from American friends and in American media that the Irish were pretty happy about Queen Elizabeth’s death.

They are not.

This, despite articles like “Royalists Very Angry at Reaction to Queen’s Death” which say that people are angry about other people's reactions, but reports no actual reactions that would anger anybody.

That’s because the reports were fake, like the video of Irish men dancing to “Another One Bites the Dust” in front of Buckingham Palace. They released the video months ago.

Most Irish people don’t care about the British monarchy. This essay in the Times, on the occasion of the Harry and Meghan interview with Oprah, expresses a common perspective. 

Having a monarchy next door is a little like having a neighbour who’s really into clowns and has daubed their house with clown murals, displays clown dolls in each window and has an insatiable desire to hear about and discuss clown-related news stories. More specifically, for the Irish, it’s like having a neighbour who’s really into clowns and, also, your grandfather was murdered by a clown.

The essay concludes:

Over the course of the interview Harry and Meghan, who are charming, clever and good at being celebrities, make the monarchy look like an archaic and endemically racist institution that has no place in the modern world. Well duh. And despite all the outrage you might read in the UK tabloids right now, they also did something else that renders everything else irrelevant: they officially launched themselves in the United States.

The best authentically angry outrage I heard was: “They replaced the Queen with a MAN.”

The Queen visited Ireland once. She spoke a few words of Irish, which was a big deal, but really shouldn't have been since Irish is spoken by many thousands of people in Northern Ireland, a country for which she is the Queen.

There's another famous essay, a speech delivered by Olivia O'Leary on the occasion of the Queen's visit to Ireland, where she discussed the curtsy and other Hiberno-Anglo unspeakable anxieties.

It's about ten minutes long, and she addresses all the unsayables.

Now that this Great Misinformation War has waged since 2014, I hope we can defend ourselves against any news story that attempts to rile people up.

Is it true that the Irish rejoice at the Queen's death? If true, how would it make you feel? Tribal solidarity and moral outrage? If so, then those are the emotions that keep your eyeballs on the adverts, not your evolved enthusiasm for truth.

In a bonus episode of my favorite podcast, The Irish Passport,  "The Irish Reactions to Queen Elizabeth’s death" ($1 to subscribe) they discuss the harm Americans inflict when amplifying fake news about Irish people. Even if Irish people were sharing anti-monarchy memes, they would be very few Irish people, compared to the millions and millions of Irish Americans. When those Irish Americans act from tribal solidarity and outrage, it is their voices which are heard in the North, not Irish journalists joking about clowns. People in the North then see this American reaction and fear their neighbors.  It's not helpful.

An Irish Passport episode you can listen to for free is their coverage of King Charles's meeting with Northern Ireland politicians. Authentically awkward!

Creeslough

We live midway between two villages, Dunfanaghy and Creeslough. Dunfanaghy is the more well-known of the two, until a week ago. I don’t have any photographs of Creeslough. It’s too deep into our lives. We were only go there three or four times a week. 

Creeslough is now forever associated with a catastrophic explosion that destroyed a small grocery store and the apartments above it.

We didn’t know how many had been killed, or who, for a few days. We still don't know the cause. "A tragic accident." That first weekend we waited. We sent money to a young couple we know who lost their home. We watched the news. When we talk to neighbors, we all say the same thing: "There are no words."

I listened to Soul Brew, a podcast by two local men. They mention the song, “Homes of Donegal,” and the lyric “I’d like to know how you’re gettin’ on,” the question we keep asking, and struggle to answer. 

Today The Irish Times published a wonderful story by Keith Duggan which says anything anybody could say, about Creeslough.

In the aftermath of Friday’s explosion at Lafferty’s fuel station, a big delegation of Ireland’s political leaders hurried to Creeslough to pay respects. The most obvious truth about Donegal may have occurred to them on the long journey to the northwest. If you want to see the place, then you must make the conscious effort to go there. For many, Donegal remains an abstract concept because you are never simply passing through.

…

“I have staged the play among the mountains of my native Donegal, relating my characters to the rock and bog in that grim, beautiful land,” Peadar O’Donnell wrote after completing Adrigoole (1929), one of six novels he would write. The word “grim” may seem a harsh judgment but O’Donnell’s Donegal was before the advent of everyday motorcar use and centrally heated homes and telecommunications, when day-to-day existence, particularly through the depths of winter, must have been physically demanding. The migratory work experience became part of that — having to leave for work and coming home again has always been part of the Donegal reality.

The landscape and seascape become burnt on to the retinas of those who live there. While it’s true that the shop and accompanying businesses destroyed in the blast was very much a hive of activity in Creeslough, the village itself has plenty of stories of business and creativity born of people’s wish to make a life in the locality and to make things happen. A few weeks ago, the journalist Ciaran O’Donnell sat down with Lorcan Roarty to record an episode of his podcast, Business Matters. Roarty is the owner of the Wild Atlantic Camp, located just a short walk from the ruined fuel station. He was one of the first on the scene and helped some of those injured to safety.

The Coffee Pod, which was quickly transformed into a dispensary of free food and hot drinks in the wake of the disaster, is part of the complex. The glamping site was set up in 2013, in the middle of the recession. Roarty is a quantity surveyor by profession and after he qualified, he moved to the east coast of the United States for work. But his ambition was “to set up roots in Creeslough”. He bought Roses bar, in the centre of the village, in 2004.

Irish pub culture was thriving during the Boom, but it never fully recovered afterwards. The creation of the glamping site came about through a chance conversation. Roarty had been gifted the land by his parents and wanted to build something sustainable. Now, the facility has pods and cabins and is a convenient walk from the centre of the village. It opens all year round: that way, the company can give full-time employment to its permanent staff.

Roarty spoke of other advantages; daily buses to Galway, to Belfast, to Glasgow; the pending Michelin star for the Olde Glen bar and restaurant; the tourist attractions of Glenveigh National Park, of Doe Castle, Ards Forest Park, Muckish and Errigal mountains and the gorgeous beaches.

But it was when reflecting on the evolution of Creeslough over the past decade that Roarty became truly animated.

“Since we opened in 2013, Creeslough has come out of the Celtic Tiger recession quite well. It was no different from any rural village throughout Ireland in that it took a fair hit during the recession. But I do believe that its rebound has been remarkable from its lowest point to where we are today. There is a great spread of new businesses that we have opened here. If we start at the bottom of the village, we have a great new pharmacy that opened since the recession. There’s a fabulous cafe, the Huckleberry, coming up through the village. And Roses bar, we now serve food and that has filled a great gap for gastro-dining in the village.

“Moving up through the village, Scrumptious Ice Cream has opened and is a massive hit during the summertime. Gusto’s takeaway in Creeslough is famous, now, for its fast food and quality. We’ve a new 24-hour launderette opened. The Coffee Pod, serving gourmet sandwiches, has opened up. The Happy Camper, the post office in Creeslough which has been retained, Huckaboard, a really cool idea set up by Cathal Sheridan has taken off massively. We have great fitness facilities in the village now as well which Anton McFadden set up a couple of years ago. And that’s just what I’m naming out to you now, there are others as well. But for a small village like Creeslough, it is unbelievable success in the last 10 or 12 years.”

It’s a wonderful synopsis of people investing their faith in their place. And it is desperately sad to listen to now. This was the promise and vibrancy which the nightmarish explosion instantly stilled. An accident of such sudden, shocking violence and the ending of 10 lives would be relatively rare and unsettling event in a major city. But in a village the size of Creeslough, where everyone knows everyone, it inevitably leaves a daunting psychological and emotional burden. Everyone used the Applegreen; to get petrol, groceries, to call into the post office or the beauty salon. To use the cash machine; to have a sandwich at the deli.

…

The sound of the blast was still reverberating when the people in the village began to respond. They haven’t stopped since.

Ireland Is Completely Fine with Homosexuality

The most-read story in the Irish Times the other day is, as is often the case, an installment of the relationship advice column, “Ask Roe.” The headline is, “I’ve been with my partner exclusively for 18 years, but he’s been in an open relationship.”

The photo above the story shows two men in bed, one on his phone, the other pretending to sleep.

I’m old enough to remember when a photo like this would have been catagorized just south of pornography. What a wonderful world of stock photography we live in now. 

Reading this column left me conflicted. Male homosexuality was criminalized in Ireland until 1993, or thirty years ago. (Homosexuality was decriminalized in California fifty years ago.) Female homosexuality was never criminalized, for fear of giving young women impure thoughts. The marriage equality referendum changed the constitution of Ireland in 2015, and my marriage in California was accepted without question by Immigration Department bureaucrats.

Ireland remains the only country to confer marriage equality by popular vote, not legislation. 

As a married lesbian couple, we’ve experienced absolute indifference to our legal and private life. We don’t even hear of distant gay relatives as one used to.

As Roe McDermott’s columns usually are, her answer is even-handed:

I’m intrigued by the dynamics described in your letter, and I’m curious about what discussions or acknowledgments – if any – have happened around you partner sleeping with other people. 

…

It’s also interesting to me that you don’t explicitly describe this as cheating, nor do you refer to you both as having an open relationship, just him. This feels accurate to the dynamic that you have both created, where you have tacitly accepted this as part of your relationship for this long without and addressing or setting boundaries around his behaviour – but also don’t feel that the relationship is a fully and consciously open relationship because you have never talked about it.

…

You have silently accepted your partner’s behaviour for 18 years and it’s important to explore this part of yourself.

…

You have, through your silence, contributed and created this dynamic. I don’t say this to blame you or to undermine your emotions, but so that you can open up an important exploration of how you and your relationship dynamic led to this point – so that you can start to consciously change it. 

It’s worth reading her entire answer, if only to verify one significant aspect: at no point does she mention that this is a relationship between two gay men. “Gay” or even “man” or “men” does not appear in the column. 

And there’s where I’m conflicted. Popular advice columns convey schadenfreude, and the best ones, like this one, promote empathy. The answer would be helpful to this man, and helpful to anyone in the same situation. That’s the point of advice columns. 

But her answer implies that norms for straight and lesbian relationships could be applied to two men together. The article, for all its expected acceptance of homosexual relationships in modern Ireland, makes this a gay relationship invisible. Two gay men in Ireland are not the same as an Irish man and woman, or even two women. Gay men's lives are enriched, influenced, distorted, determined by other gay men in their daily lives—and by gay men’s culture worldwide and over time.

It must to be just as incorrect to elide gay relationships as it is to slander them.

There have always been two wings to the "gay liberation movement." There are those who believed that there is no difference between straight people and homosexuals, but "One." This is why the first homophile magazine so named itself. The other wing believes that homosexuality changes everything, that a life lived so contrary to the norms and restrictions not only liberates the individual, but can set everyone free. I have to say I'm on the side of freedom.