It remains frustrating that essentially all of the surviving source material on female homosexuality in classical Greek and Roman contexts comes not simply through male voices, but through elite male voices who tended to view women as a whole as standing outside the concept of "virtuous, acceptable, praiseworthy behavior." It becomes impossible to filter out the authors' attitudes towards women, and towards relations between the sexes, from any possible evidence about how the women (hypothetically) involved in such relationships might have felt. How did Roman women in general feel about the male-centered rules and structures by which their lives were evaluated? How did any marginalized group in Roman society feel about their own lives? A friend of mine has been summarizing read-throughs of academic texts on the experiences of enslaved people in Roman society and many of the same questions arise, often with fractionally more direct evidence (but only fractionally). Since the end product of the LHMP is to provide information that can help us create fictional scenarios that are compatible with (even if not supported by) the existing data, if seems reasonable to bring in such tangential considerations. Some day I will try to write a "guide to writing f/f fiction in classical contexts" like I've been working on for some other eras. It may be very scanty. But I'm starting to feel a bit more up to the task.
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