The police eventually shut them all down, including a 1939 one in Harlem that ended a 70-year annual tradition (for more, see Gaylaw: Challenging the Apartheid of the Closet by William N. Especially in New York City, drag balls starring “female impersonators” were extravagant and enormous. This was known as the “pansy craze,” a term coined by the historian George Chauncey. “Pansies” were in their heyday in the 1920s and 1930s in New York and many other major cities around the U.S. The Pansy Craze Pansies via Wikimedia CommonsĪs Looby notes in Flowers of Manhood, “daisy,” “buttercup,” and especially “pansy,” as well as the generalized “horticultural lad” were early twentieth century terms for “flamboyant gay men.”
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However, at showings in Paris, some women wore the flower on their lapels as a show of support. The association of violets with lesbianism from this play led to plummeting violet sales at U.S. The New York City district attorney’s office eventually gave in to these calls and shut down the production in 1927. The theme of lesbianism in this play led to an uproar and calls for a boycott and for censorship. Interestingly, as the literary scholar Sherrie Inness observes in the National Women’s Studies Association Journal, in the 1926 play The Captive, one female character sends bunches of violets to another female character, perhaps referencing Sappho. (The racial aspects of these men’s interactions and their writing are explored in “ Race and the Violet Quill” by David Bergman.) Notably, a group of seven gay male writers who met up regularly in New York City in 19 named themselves “The Violet Quill.” Christopher Cox, Robert Ferro, Michael Grumley, Andrew Holleran, Felice Picano, Edmund White, and George Whitmore officially met up eight times over a one-year period, but unofficially before and after those meetings as well, to read and critique each other’s work. And violet was one of the original 1978 rainbow flag’s colors.
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Violet Venable in Suddenly Last Summer or Violet in the lesbian cult classic movie Bound. Violet (in addition to lavender) remains in the pantheon of queer symbols today. She mentions the color purple or violet multiple times, which is perhaps where this color first became associated with the queer community.
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She also references “meadow blooms/spring flowers,” “golden flowers,” “garlands of blooming flowers,” and “purple blooms” generally. In these and other fragments, she references roses, violets, crocuses, honey clover, a lotus, and hyacinth specifically. Since the blessed Graces look more to the flowerful,īut turn away from the ones without garlands. Weaving together slips of anise with gentle hands: Unfortunately, only fragments of her works remain:Īnd you, Dika, put lovely garlands round your hair, Her ancient poetry contains many references to flowers and nature, painting a picture of an idyllic pasture where girls and women frolicked adorned in garlands. In 2008, Lesbian islanders sued for their right over the word and lost. Any person from the island of Lesbos is a Lesbian, but Sappho’s heritage spawned the lowercase-L lesbian we know today. Her presence there was so profound that the word “lesbian” originated with her. 570) was a Greek poet who lived on the island of Lesbos, so close to Turkey’s border you can see it from the shore. The floral fascination of queer people may date back to Sappho herself, fabled as the world’s first known woman-loving woman. Sapphic Violets Bird’s-foot violet via Wikimedia Commons Here’s an exploration of the history of four particular flowering plants that have been decidedly queered. Maybe all the buzzing about the north end of the Ramble in New York City’s Central Park is why that cruising ground was nicknamed the “Fruited Plain.” Or maybe it’s why “evening botanist” is one of the antiquated terms for queer men. What’s the story behind all of this floral symbology? Are queer people perceived as delicate? Colorful? Beautiful? Frivolous? As the literary critic Christopher Looby notes in the journal Criticism, Marcel Proust’s 1921 Sodome et Gomorrhe speculated that male-male courting rituals were similar to the process of flower fertilization.
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A pre-Stonewall gay bar at the corner of Christopher Street and Gay Street was called The Flower Pot. Violets were associated with Sappho herself, and the calamus with Walt Whitman. Oscar Wilde earlier turned the green carnation into a symbol for them across the pond by wearing one on his lapel. The American “Pansy Craze” of almost 100 years ago cemented the use of that flower’s name as a slang term for queer men.