that [Algernon Charles] Swinburne was not merely the prophet of the twentieth-century sexual revolution but the person who first gave open voice in the English language to the joys of lesbianism. The Oxford English Dictionary's earliest usage of the word is from A. J. Munby's diary in 1870, where the reference is clearly to such explicitly lesbian poems as "Anactoria": "Swinburne . . . expressed a horror of sodomy . . . and an actual admiration of Lesbianism, being unable to see that that is equally loathsome".from The Times Literary Supplement: A century after Swinburne
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