Homosexuality is purged from the pages of history as a matter of course. Gay men’s sexuality is subject to denial, obliteration, silence. Yet their erasure is not as total as that to which the lesbian historical subject has been treated. Not only is same-sex eroticism silenced by the narratives of history, but those narratives (together with religion, science, art and philosophy) have been told by men for men and about men. Gay men’s sexuality may be left out of the account but lesbians are struck off altogether, our very existence denied. Although we are not told that W.H.Auden, Maynard Keynes, Cecil Beaton, Michelangelo, Cecil Rhodes or Tchaikovsky were homosexual, we have been taught to venerate their accomplishments. The scholar of lesbian history is faced with two problematic sets of dispersal: the destruction of evidence of sexual deviance which dogs any attempt to reclaim a homosexual subject and the tendency of historians simply to ignore women.