I'm sure the title got your attention
But, sorry to disappoint, I meant Lesbian in the strict sense of pertaining to Lesbos. In the "gay nation" AH challenge thread, I suggested making Lesbos the "promised land" of homosexuals, leading to the island becoming an independent city-state and the world's only gay-majority country. This led me to look up certain elements of that island's ancient history in general, and the life of its most famous citizen in particular, the poet Sappho. Her biography and her works are regrettably sketchy, owing to determined efforts by Christians to erase all trace of her life in the 4th and the 11th centuries CE; of her nine books of poetry, only isolated fragments made it past the Church's autodafes. But historians agree on the fact that she was born in an aristocratic family and founded a self-styled female priesthood dedicated to the worship of Aphrodite (and that, true to reputation, she did celebrate love between women in deeds as well as words).
So, to the POD: in OTL Euphronia of Eresos, a Lesbian noblewoman, had a miscarriage in 632 BCE. In this TL her child was born, a little girl named Chloe. She grew up to become a lively young woman who, at 17, became fascinated by Sappho, then at the height of her fame. She joined the poet's retinue and before long was part of her priesthood of Aphrodite. When Sappho was exiled to Sicily in 600 BCE, she took over as the head of the coterie, while still acknowledging Sappho as its highest earthly authority. A practical as well as mystically-inclined woman, she turned the priesthood from a loose sisterhood of poets and hedonists into a structured organization with all the trappings of an official clergy. Thanks to her family's influence and money, she managed to give the Lesbian cult of Aphrodite enough respectability to be safe from any crackdown by local authorities. As years went by, she gradually increased the cult's membership, recruiting into both the local nobility and the commoners; prevailing over some of her more "conservative" fellow priestesses, she opened the cult to male members. By the time of her death in 569 BCE, the cult was firmly established as part of Lesbos's religious makeup, to the point where Lesbian citizens, whether worshippers of Aphrodite or not, began to view it as a symbol of their island's cultural idiosyncrasy. Meanwhile, travelling along trading links, the cult had begun to get a toehold in Naucratis, Delos and Phocea.
Where do we go from here?