Dimitris Lambrou is tired of being called a lesbian.

As a magazine publisher on the Greek island of Lesvos — Lesbos according to the classical spelling — he is suing Greece’s biggest gay and lesbian association to get the term (with a small l) expunged from public usage.

He claims it is insulting to what he calls the proper Lesbians — the people of Lesvos. “We are suffering psychological and moral rape,” said Mr Lambrou.

Mr Lambrou’s magazine, called Davlos (Torch), has been campaigning against the lesbian identification with the island for years, even since gay women around the world made it a place of pilgrimage. The town of Eressos has become known as a world lesbian conference centre.

He and two local women, Maria Rodou and Kokkoni Kouvalaki, are the plaintiffs in the case scheduled to be heard in an Athens court on June 10.

“This is ludicrous,” countered Evangelia Vlami, a member of the Greek Gay and Lesbian Union, which is being sued. “The term has been in use for thousands of years to denote gay women.” The Union is now fighting for the right to same-sex marriage in this otherwise devout Orthodox country.

Lesvos was the birthplace of Sappho, a poet who ran a finishing school for well-bred girls in the early 6th century BC. She is reputed to have fallen in love with several of them, especially Atthis, whose concerned parents removed her from the school. Sappho’s love poetry, some of the best from antiquity, has since been quoted to prove her homosexual proclivities.

In 19th century Britain lesbianism was delicately termed the “Sapphic vice”. But only around the mid-20th century did the Oxford English Dictionary include lesbian as a sexual orientation term as well as purely geographical one.

Ordinary Lesbians are having to cope with a growing problem, Mr Lambrou claims. The gay women’s gatherings at Eressos have in the past attracted opposition from church groups and concerned parents.

“They’re welcome to come here,” he said on Greek television today, “but we don’t want to be tarred with the name they’ve unfairly given themselves.” He also claimed that Sappho is wrongly believed to have been gay, as before opening her school she married and had a daughter, and was reputed to have killed herself after being spurned by a man.

“That doesn’t mean anything,” Ms Vlami responded. “Thousands of lesbians are in married situations with children, and the story of her suicide is not founded in fact.”

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