Yes, exactly FairPhyllis.
I think people tend to think about lesbianism as being the female quivalent to male homosexuality (because of course we think in male terms with male being the benchmark for everything else) and therefore people have an idea of lesbianism which is not the actual female experience, particularly the political aspect.
Again Adrienne Rich is good on this and when you read her work, the concept of the spectrum of lesbianism makes perfect sense.
For example women's refuges would be considered an example of political lesbianism in action - women only spaces designed to look after the best interests of women and children and to protect them from male violence. There doesn't have to be an erotic or sexual element. Seen like that, political lesbianism becomes immensely powerful for women (all the more reason for it to painted as deviant bonkers sexual lying....).
From the Rich link I gave above:
Lesbians have historically been deprived of a political existence through "inclusion" as female versions of male homosexuality. To equate lesbian existence with male homosexuality because each is stigmatized is to deny and erase female reality once again To separate those women stigmatized as "homosexual" or "gay" from the complex continuum of female resistance to enslavement, and attach them to a male pattern, is to falsify our history Part of the history of lesbian existence is, obviously, to be found where lesbians, lacking a coherent female community, have shared a kind of social life and common cause with homosexual men But this has to be seen against the differences women's lack of economic and cultural privilege relative to men; qualitative differences in female and male relationships, for example, the prevalence of anonymous sex and the justification of pederasty among male homosexuals, the pronounced ageism in male homosexual standards of sexual attractiveness, and so forth In defining and describing lesbian existence I would hope to move toward a dissociation of lesbian from male homosexual values and allegiances I perceive the lesbian experience as being, like motherhood, a profoundly female experience, with particular oppressions, meanings, and potentialities we cannot comprehend as long as we simply bracket it with other sexually stigmatized existences just as the term parenting serves to conceal the particular and significant reality of being a parent who is actually a mother, the term gay serves the purpose of blurring the very outlines we need to discern, which are of crucial value for feminism and for the freedom of women as a group.