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Archaeological research has found the oldest representations of humans in art and objects were mostly of women. In the absence of written records, they are a symbolic system of 'silent witnesses' in which women were the sex made visible.

Many figures of female couples also have been found (male-female couples are very rare), but their meanings are not clear. They could represent 'mother and daughter, sisters, priestesses who together oversaw the cult of the twin goddesses, double queens, handed down from the Amazon myths, or simply lovers.'

Marija Gimbutas, an archaeologist born in Lithuania, who migrated to the US as the result of World War II, used her knowledge of folk culture to interpret all the ancient objects as goddess figures, producing a controversial theory of Old Europe as a peaceful goddess-worshipping culture.

Fragments of love poems written to women by Sappho and Alcman still survive. Greek men largely didn't write about lesbianism, perhaps not even allowing for love between women to be identified as sexual. Occasional depictions of lesbian love have been found in ancient Greek art.

Masawaiyh (c  777–857) reported in a medical text that lesbianism was caused by the mother's diet: Lesbianism results when a nursing woman eats celery, rocket,  melilot leaves and the flowers of a bitters of a bitter orange tree. When she eats these plants and suckles her child, they will affect the labia of her suckling and generate an itch which the suckling will carry through her future life.

Al-Kindi (c. 801–873 AD) wrote: Lesbianism is due to a vapor which, condensed, generates in the labia heat and an itch which only dissolve and become cold through friction and orgasm. When friction and orgasm take place, the heat turns into coldness because the liquid that a woman ejaculates in lesbian intercourse is cold whereas the same liquid that results from sexual union with men is hot. Heat, however, cannot be extinguished by heat; rather, it will increase since it needs to be treated by its opposite. As coldness is repelled by heat, so heat is also repelled by coldness.

The Encyclopedia of Pleasure or Jawāmiʿ al-Ladhdhah (جوامع اللّذّة) is the earliest existent Arabic erotic work. It documents the first lesbian love story in Arab culture, about a female poet named Hind Bint al-Nu’man (known as Al-Hurqah (هند بنت النعمان), and Hind Bint al-Khuss al-Iyadiyyah (known as al-Zarqa’) from Yamama in Arabia.

Male homosexual relationships first criminalised in England  when the act of anal intercourse (buggery) was criminalised. The law applied to both men and women, but when applied to men it acted as a homosexist warning to the male brotherhood to use their penis 'morally.' The focus on the act of penile penetration meant that lesbian sexuality was not criminalised.

Eleanor Butler (1739-1829) met Sarah Ponsonby (1755-1831). Both were members of wealthy families from the Irish aristocracy and determined not to be married off. They fought parental efforts to stop them leaving Ireland but they eventually were allowed to go to Wales, where they finally settled down in 1780 and lived as a couple for nearly fifty years with a servant, Mary Carryl, and a series of dogs all named Sappho.

The emerging suffragist and women's movement encouraged greater independence for middle & upper-class women through gaining educational and employment opportunities. Passionate friendships became evident in novels and real life.

Jennings, Rebecca 2007.  Lesbian History of Britain. Love and Sex between Women Since 1500, Greenwood, Oxford.

Any male homosexual act made illegal in the UK, even committed in private. The law was used to prosecute Oscar Wilde in 1895.

Source: Dryden A short history of LGBT rights in the UK

Raclyffe Hall's novel The Well of Loneliness published, tried and banned for obscenity in 1928. Lesbian communities, bars and clubs formed in the 1920s (eg in Paris, Berlin, San Francisco). Legislation to criminalise lesbianism in UK introduced, debated and defeated

Formation of CAMP in Balmain NSW announced by Christabel Poll and John Ware in the first edition of the newsletter CAMP INK, soon after 2 articles in The Australian by Janet Hawley 'Homosexuals form group aimed at ending an aura of mistique, secrecy' and 'Couples'. Within a year, a national network of CAMP and Society Five groups were established in Queensland, Victoria, ACT, Tasmania and most universities, where it was known as Campus CAMP.

South Australia decriminalised homosexuality.

On 24 June,after a march in the morning to celebrate International Gay Solidarity Day, a street party was held in the evening for the first Sydney Gay and Lesbian Mardi Gras. Fifty-three people were arrrested. More demonstrations later against police violence and for the right to protest peacefully led to a total of 178 arrests. All charges were dropped the following year. (Source: Robyn Kennedy  & Robyn Plaister CAMP. Australia's pioneer homosexual rights activists, Pride Publishing 2022)