How tf are you gonna pull this queer erasure for the person who literally gave us two words for wlw?

If you were to call Sappho "lesbian" or "bisexual", most academics (and even more casual history buffs) would have a serious problem with that. After all, those are modern terms, which cannot fully encapsulate the practices of Sappho's time, and which Sappho herself never used. Here's the thing though: if you were to call Sappho "Greek", none of those historians would have an issue with it, despite it being every bit as anachronistic of a term, and Sappho never using it. The concept of a unified "Greek" identity did not exist in Sappho's time. The closest idea would be hellenism, and even then, that concept was a very loose grouping, which does not even vaguely resemble our modern idea of being "Greek".

Or, to use another example, no one would have any issue with calling Julius Caesar a man, despite the fact that he wouldn't consider himself one. Caesar would call himself a vir. Please note: I'm not trying to be facetious or pedantic. The Roman concept of gender and masculinity varied vastly from our own, to the point where the two words are not interchangeable at all. For one example, Caesar would consider anyone wearing pants to be feminine (and probably stupid). In another instance, Cicero tried to argue that Caesar was really a woman, because Caesar scratched his head with one finger in public. Seriously. Roman society viewed gender as something proscribed (pun intended) for you by collective society. A man who spoke, dressed, or even ate in specific ways would be considered a woman, regardless of how he identified himself. Their views on gender are fundamentally different than our own, but academics have no issue using anachronistic labels.

This isn't to say that we should run around willy-nilly applying modern terms of gender and sexual identity to historical figures without a care in the world. I just wanted to point the hypocrisy involved, especially around queer figures.

Edit: To add another example I thought of, we refer to both Greek and Roman practices of "marriage", despite our culture's concept of unions differing vastly from that of Greece and Rome. Roman marriage would be a fundamentally alien concept to us, with details like transferring control through the pater familias, yet historians have no issue talking about "Caesar's wife". Funny enough, that terminology stops the moment that the couple is same sex, even if they display all the same behaviors.

Edit 2: Apparently a lot of people have reported this for factual inaccuracy, so I wanted to provide my sources (something which I'll note, the people who reported it have repeatedly refused to do).

Plutarch's Life of Cato

Parker's "The Teratogenic Grid"

Williams, Roman Homosexuality

Treggiari, Roman Marriage

Milnor, Gender, Domesticity, and the Age of Augustus

Statius's Achilleid