Early in the 1980s, Nikos Stangos said to Robert K. Martin, author of The Homosexual Tradition in American Poetry (1979), ‘Literature is literature… There is no such thing as gay literature’. Stangos, a poet who was gay, was the commissioning editor with responsibility for the Penguin Modern Poetry (Ashbery, Ginsberg, Harwood...) and Penguin Modern European Poetry (Cavafy, Pessoa, Ritsos, Tsvetaeva...) series. Gay/lesbian poets are only great if you don’t categorise them as such. Djuna Barnes said, ‘I am not a lesbian, I just loved Thelma’, either meaning that she only ever loved one woman in that way, or that she declined to be treated as a case study in a category of supposed deviancy. In 1987, Yves Navarre responded to an invitation to a conference of lesbian/gay writers: ‘I am gay, I am a writer, I am not a gay writer.’ Indeed, one can hardly blame those who reject the category ‘lesbian/gay writer’ when they are working within a homophobic value system.

So who is what? Adrienne Rich famously developed the idea of the ‘lesbian continuum’, involving ‘a range – through each woman’s life and throughout history – of woman-identified experience, not simply the fact that a woman has had or consciously desired genital sexual experience with another woman’ (‘Compulsory Heterosexuality and Lesbian Existence’, 1980). As Olga Broumas pointed out, referring to Rich’s ‘Twenty-One Love Poems’, ‘It is not the physical which defines this love as lesbian, but the absolute and primary attention directed at the other’ – and the other is a woman. We are reminded of Audre Lorde’s espousal of the old Carriacou name for women ...