Lesbian is not a dirty word. Sapphic is not a dirty word. But somehow, it is still much more acceptable to be a gay man than it is to be a queer* woman, and this is represented in literature; it is much easier to find well-written books about gay men than it is to find their sapphic counterparts. In recent years, though, sapphic literature has become more popular and been better received, and hopefully one day soon this will no longer be true. I think a lot of the issue goes back to one that stands at the core of gender studies, queer studies, and cultural studies, among many other literary disciplines. For much of literary history, female characters have simply not been as fleshed out as male characters. Virginia Woolf wrote about this phenomenon in A Room Of One's Own, back in 1929, and Alison Bechdel drew our collective attention to it again in the creation of the Bechdel test in 1985. Both authors, interestingly, can be considered sapphic writers. Virgi...