Because it was treated as a reading of historical texts. I haven't personally looked up if those historical texts are legit but it's funny to think that historians would disregard lesbian relations by saying they were just friends/roommates
It wasn't just lesbian relationships. Pretty much any gay/lesbian relationship when written about by historians calls them roommates or very close friends or some bullshit like that
That's it. That's really all there is. And yet whenever you see posts about women in love there's always a reference to this one 5 second video. It's also never in the stories about people's uncles having a "friend" who lives with them in a one bed flat in the Castro, it's only ever a wlw thing.