Love-of-One’s-Life Department 
Terry Castle
The island of Lesbos: talk about a small world. Pick up any edition of Sappho’s fragments and the same old names keep coming up: Erinna, Gongyla, Attis, Kleis, Anactoria. You would think that after two thousand years these girls would be ready to quit the scene, but no, here they come again – a bit leathery from all the centuries of tennis and golf, but still the only game in town. When, you wonder, will someone new turn up? If it’s true – as a famous gay male writer has suggested – that there are really only 500 people in the world and after a while one has slept with most of them, then the sapphic dating pool has got to be even smaller: eight or ten perhaps, 12 or 15 at most. It’s pathetic, really. Trundle through the Gobi Desert, lift a random tent flap: the bearded Mongolian gal inside was once involved with your college girlfriend.
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From the LRB letters page: [ 18 November 2004 ] Sheridan Nye.
Terry Castle lives in San Francisco and teaches at Stanford. She is the editor of The Literature of Lesbianism, and the author of Boss Ladies, Watch Out!, a book of essays, many from the LRB. She has a blog at terry-castle-blog.blogspot.com
Other articles by this contributor:
Always the Bridesmaid · Sappho
If everybody had a wadley · The Queen of Whale Cay: The Eccentric Story of ‘Joe’ Carstairs, Fastest Woman on Water by Kate Summerscale
Husbands and Wives · Claude & Marcel, Gertrude & Alice
Yes you, sweetheart · A Garland for Colette
Pipe down back there! · The Willa Cather Wars
Terror on the Vineyard · Boss Ladies, Watch Out!
Travels with My Mom · Terry Castle in Santa Fe
Desperately Seeking Susan · Terry Castle remembers Susan Sontag
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