From Chappell Roan to queer footballers, sapphic cinema to packed lesbian nights, gay women are suddenly everywhere. But is this really a renaissance — or are we simply finally being allowed to see what was always there?
There is a particular kind of cultural whiplash that comes with being a lesbian right now.
One minute, you're explaining to someone that, no, The L Word wasn't a documentary. The next, you're watching a stadium full of women scream along to a song about kissing girls.
Suddenly, sapphic love stories are on our screens, queer women are topping festival bills, lesbian characters get to be funny and complicated and horny and occasionally terrible, and women’s sport is becoming one of the most exciting places to witness openly queer culture in public.
The word sapphic has escaped the group chat.
Call it what you like: a lesbian renaissance, a queer-girl summer, the great sapphic awakening. Whatever the terminology, something has shifted.
And it isn't happening in one corner of culture. It's everywhere.
In music, artists such as Chappell Roan, Reneé Rapp and Billie Eilish have helped push queer desire into the centre of mainstream pop. On screen, films such as Love Lies Bleeding and Bottoms have offered lesbian stories that aren't obliged to make themselves palatable to straight audiences. BBC dating show I Kissed a Girl put queer women — rather than the occasional queer contestant — at the heart of prime-time reality television.
Meanwhile, women's sport has become a cultural phenomenon in its own right, bringing with it an increasingly visible generation of queer athletes.
The result is almost surreal.
For generations, lesbian culture existed in the margins: in bars with discreet entrances, underground clubs, coded literature, whispered crushes and friendships that everyone understood but nobody named. Now the cultural machine has discovered that gay women have money, taste, opinions, sex lives and, apparently, excellent playlists.
Who knew?
We've always been here
Of course, the idea of a lesbian renaissance contains a slightly annoying implication: that lesbians weren't culturally significant before now.
They were.
They always have been.
From Sappho onwards, queer women have made art, written love letters, built communities, and found ways to recognise one another in societies that often preferred not to recognise them at all. Lesbian history is full of women whose relationships were euphemised as friendships, whose sexuality was treated as an open secret, or whose lives were written about without the language that might have allowed them to claim themselves.
The history of lesbianism is, in many ways, a history of visibility being controlled by somebody else.
That is what makes the current moment feel different.
It's not that queer women have suddenly become interesting. It's that we have more opportunities to be visible on our own terms.
And visibility matters.
According to the UK's Office for National Statistics, 2.1% of adults identified as gay or lesbian in 2024, up from 1.6% in 2019. Overall, 3.7% identified as LGB, compared with 2.7% five years earlier. Among 16-to-24-year-olds, 8% identified as LGB.
Those numbers don't tell us everything — identity is complicated, surveys have limitations, and a statistic can never capture the delicious chaos of actually being gay — but they do reveal something significant.
More people are finding the words.
More people are using them.
More people are seeing themselves reflected back.
The fantasy of being seen
Perhaps the most exciting part isn't simply that lesbians are appearing in mainstream culture.
It's how we're appearing.
For a long time, queer women in popular culture existed under fairly strict conditions. We could be tragic. We could be inspirational. We could be tortured. We could be the edgy best friend.
What we were less frequently allowed to be was ordinary.
Or, better yet, ridiculous.
The new wave of sapphic culture is much less interested in proving that lesbians are respectable. It is interested in letting them be messy.
They can fall in love with the wrong person. They can have terrible sex. They can wear too much eyeliner. They can be butches, femmes, studs, weirdos, jocks, academics, pop stars, commitment-phobes and hopeless romantics.
They can simply exist.
That sounds like a low bar.
Historically, it wasn't.
And then there is the internet
If previous generations had lesbian bars, zines and coded classifieds, our generation has TikTok, Instagram, dating apps, podcasts, fan accounts and group chats with approximately 47 women in them.
The internet has done something extraordinary for queer culture: it has made discovery possible.
A teenager in a small town doesn't necessarily have to wait until university, move to London or accidentally find the one lesbian bar in the county.
She can type three words into a search bar and discover thousands of people who feel exactly as confused as she does.
There is comfort in that.
There is also power.
Queer culture has become participatory rather than simply consumable. We don't just watch the film; we make the memes. We don't just listen to the song; we dissect the lyrics, identify the references, construct elaborate theories about the singer's sexuality and send the evidence to our friends at 2am.
The audience is part of the culture.
Sometimes the audience is the culture.
The lesbian economy is alive and well
There is another reason this moment feels different: capitalism has finally noticed us.
And, yes, there is something inherently funny about watching corporations discover the existence of lesbians during Pride Month.
But commercially, the shift is real.
Queer women are no longer being treated exclusively as a niche audience. They are a demographic. A market. A festival crowd. A streaming audience. A publishing category.
That can be cynical.
It can also be liberating.
Because once an industry realises that people are watching, buying, reading and turning up, suddenly there is money available to make more things.
More films.
More books.
More music.
More events.
More stories.
Culture doesn't become revolutionary simply because a corporation puts a rainbow on something. But representation becoming commercially viable can create the space for genuinely interesting work to exist.
The trick is knowing the difference.
So... has there ever been a better time to be gay?
Here's where things get complicated.
Yes.
And no.
It is almost certainly easier to be openly gay in many parts of the UK and other liberal democracies than it was for previous generations. More people identify as LGB, more queer relationships are visible, and lesbian and gay people have legal protections that earlier generations fought enormously hard to secure.
And anti-LGBTQ hostility hasn't disappeared simply because a queer woman can headline a festival.
The contradiction is important.
We can be more visible and more vulnerable at the same time.
We can have more representation while still having arguments about who gets represented.
We can celebrate queer culture while worrying about whether the culture is being commodified, diluted or stripped of its political history.
The renaissance, in other words, isn't a victory lap.
It's a moment.
And moments can disappear.
Maybe the real renaissance is community
The most exciting thing about this era might not actually be the celebrities.
It might be the women sitting next to each other in bars.
The teenagers finding their people.
The football fans travelling across the country to watch their favourite team.
The friends making queer films with tiny budgets.
The authors writing lesbian romances in which nobody dies at the end.
The DJs putting on nights where nobody has to explain why they're there.
The older lesbians watching younger women live lives that would have seemed impossible when they were twenty.
That's the part that doesn't show up particularly well on Instagram.
A renaissance isn't just having more famous lesbians.
It's having more places to belong.
And perhaps that is what has changed most.
For decades, queer women were often forced to search for each other.
Now, increasingly, we are finding each other in plain sight.
Long may the gay era continue
So, has there ever been a more exciting time to be gay?
Maybe.
But perhaps the better question is: have we ever had this many ways to be gay?
You can be visibly queer or quietly queer. You can be femme or butch or neither. You can call yourself lesbian, gay, bi, queer, sapphic — or reject labels altogether.
You can fall in love with a woman and make it the centre of your life.
Or you can kiss a girl, buy yourself a ridiculous pair of sunglasses and remain gloriously unattached.
You can go to Pride.
You can stay home.
You can read Sappho.
You can listen to Chappell Roan.
You can do both, preferably loudly.
The point is not that everything is suddenly perfect.
It isn't.
The point is that queer women have more cultural vocabulary, more visibility and more possibilities than many generations before us could have imagined.
That is worth celebrating.
Because the lesbian renaissance isn't really about discovering lesbians.
We've been here the whole time.
It's about finally giving us the volume.
Written by VavaViolet Magazine's Founder and Editor-in-Chief, Sophie Blackman
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