City of Hamburg takes Hamburgers to Court

I'm kidding, of course, but a similarly crazy notion has been before the court in Athens. What I'm referring to is the case of a male Lesbian in search of international exposure. His name is Dimitris Lambrou and he publishes a small, neo-pagan magazine about pre-historic Greek customs - and he has suddenly seen the light.

When he first saw, read or heard that Greek lesbians call themselves lesbians, he decided that this was one bridge too far. One wonders why he had not known this fact earlier, but perhaps he lived in a cave somewhere on his beloved island, without magazines and internet and no way of knowing what was happening in the real world.

Anyway, he decided to sue the gay rights organization of Greece (known as OLKE) but he realized that a single male Lesbian as plaintiff wouldn't look that good. So he found himself two women, Lesbians like himself but not lesbians, really, and the three took OLKE to court, demanding that OLKE (and later all of the world) stop abusing the name Lesbian because it "shames" and psychologically "rapes" the poor islanders.

Mr. Lambrou claims he has no beef with lesbian women, just with them using the name of his island. He also claims that the term lesbian (for the sexual orientation) has crept into our languages only in the past few decades ... but even the purest and most righteous zeal doesn't make a mere opinion right.

The first use of lesbian in English, for example, for talking about sexuality between women, must be credited to the 1870 edition of the Oxford Dictionary. But the word was probably derived from the French, where lesbienne in the sexual sense already appeared 350 years ago in the 17th century. Other European languages also use related words to indicate gay women; and have done so for long: Lesbierin, lesbisch, lesbienne, lesbiana, lesbica, lesbico - to cite just a few contemporary languages (German, Dutch, Italian, Spanish, Portuguese).

I wish Mr. Lambrou all the luck in the world in trying to change all these languages ... and should his court case succeed, the island would surely soon be without tourists - most of whom are lesbian women visiting the birthplace of their heroine/poet Sappho (7th century BCE) - and I wonder if his fellow Lesbians would thank him for that.

Now if you think this is a hoax or joke, just type Dimitris Lambrou into your favorite search engine and you'll see ...