According to the Ali ibn Nasr al-Katib's Encyclopedia of Pleasure, a female poet named Al-Hurqah loved another woman, the legendary Hind bint al-Khuss.

Chūjō becomes angry and jealous when the high priestess abandons her to pursue a relationship with Kozaishō, another lady-in-waiting. Lesbian Sex Wars Archived 2006-03-21 at the Wayback Machine, article by Elise Chenier from GLBTQ encyclopedia. Anne Seymour Damer, an acclaimed English sculptor, may have been a lesbian and was in a relationship with the actress Elizabeth Farren. Some cosmetics-related items, which may have been owned and used by women, feature nude and suggestive depictions of women. However, Sarah White Norman and Mary Vincent Hammon in 1649 in Plymouth Colony were prosecuted for "lewd behavior with each other upon a bed".

Eleno de Céspedes, was a Spanish surgeon who married a man and later a woman, and was tried by the Spanish Inquisition.

It would have read, "Unnatural filthiness, to be punished with death, whether sodomy, which is carnal fellowship of man with man, or woman with woman, or buggery, which is carnal fellowship of man or woman with beasts or fowls".Her friend Leaena comments that "They say there are women like that in Lesbos, with faces like men, and unwilling to consort with men, but only with women, as though they themselves were men". Jonathan Swift, writing for The Tatler in 1711, acknowledges the difficulty inherent in establishing such a narrative framework, where he describes a woman having her virginity tested by a lion. Catharina Margaretha Linck was a Prussian woman who for most of her adult life presented herself as a man. In the medieval Arab world, lesbianism [note 3] was considered to be caused by heat generated in a woman's labia, which could be alleviated by friction against another woman's genitalia. The late nineteenth century and early twentieth century saw the flourishing of " Boston marriages" in New England.