By Syaa Liesch (they/them)

Content warning: discussions of homophobia and transphobia

Flowers have been used throughout history to signify meanings like love, passion and beauty (roses), purity, virtue and devotion (lilies), rebirth and new beginnings (daffodils), and joy (marigolds). However, flowers have also been used as a coded language to signify queerness during times of persecution or to represent love and joy within the queer community.

Violets

Violets have been linked with the poet Sappho (6 BCE) for over two and half thousand years. Thought to be one of the greatest lyric poets of her time, Sappho lived on the Greek island of Lesbos. The name for the residents of Lesbos – Lesbians – also became associated with women who are romantically and sexually attracted to women in the late 19th century. Similarly, the term sapphic, referring to women who are romantically and sexually attracted to women regardless of their specific sexuality label, is derived from Sappho’s name. While very little of her work has survived through to the modern day, the fragments that remain (many expressing her affection, desire, rapture, and love for women) follow the floral and natural imagery of Archaic Greek poetry. Images of garlands and scents convey female sensuality, and Sappho’s sense of beauty – that which a person loves – is found here:

14.

Many crowns of violets,

roses and crocuses

…together you set before more

and many scented wreaths

made from blossoms

around your soft throat…

…with pure, sweet oil

…you anointed me,

and on a soft, gentle bed…

you quenched your desire…

…no holy site…

we left uncovered,

no grove…

While her remaining poetry has many references to flowers such as roses, crocuses, honey clover, lotus, and hyacinth, her many references to ‘purple blooms’, like violets, worn in her lover’s hair or around her neck, has maintained the link between purple flowers and female desire throughout the centuries. Violets, a representation of female desire, were worn by lesbians in early 20th century Paris. One poet, Renée Vivien, inspired by Sappho and by her first love – a woman named Violet - maintained this motif through both her poetry and her dress:

in its velvet keep
Earth holds you; on your forehead violets weep.

Green carnations

Green carnations were popularised by writer and wit Oscar Wilde (1854-1900) as a symbol for gay men in 1892. At a London theatre for his latest play Lady Windermere’s Fan, life allegedly resembled art as Wilde’s character Cecil Graham – an elegant and witty figure resembling Wilde himself – wore a green carnation onstage. While recounts of the night remain unclear, the green carnation was seen at the premiere of another play soon after. Wilde was seen in the audience with a ‘suite of young gentlemen all wearing the vivid dyed carnation which has superseded the lily and the sunflower’. These flowers were associated both with Wilde and the flamboyant, sexually ambiguous youth within the Victorian Aestheticism movement. The carnation was mentioned again in a London periodical, where a young ‘dandy’ – an extravagantly dressed, often effeminate man – showed off his gage d’amour (love token) given by an older man. The dialogue stated nonchalantly: ‘oh, haven’t you seen them?…. Newest thing out. They water them with arsenic, you know, and it turns them green.’ Green carnations were exciting and dangerous. They were not understood by society women but by dandies. In both senses of the word, they were a little bit queer. It was later the title of the fictional novel, The Green Carnation, which appeared to be loosely based on the real-life relationship between Oscar Wilde and Alfred Douglas, and which was used as evidence of Wilde’s ‘sexual and moral degradation’ in the trial that would lead to his imprisonment, exile, and death. At the time of his trial, Wilde’s propensity for ‘artificially coloured green’ carnations was seen as another admission of guilt, as they were allegedly worn by gay men in Paris.

Roses

Roses, originally a symbol of love, are also associated with the queer community. In Japan, roses became a symbol for gay men during the 1960s. Originally a derogatory word, the rose was reclaimed with the 1963 publication of 薔薇刑 – Bara-kei (Killed by Roses, later amended to Ordeal by Roses), a collaboration between controversial author Mishima Yukio and photographer Hosoe Eikō. Hosoe created a series of dark, erotic images focused around Mishima’s masculine body and surreal poses, with allusions to Mishima’s themes of homosexuality in his own writings. This collection of photographs inspired the creation of ‘Barazoku’ (Rose Tribe), Asia’s first commercially produced gay magazine, and helped to popularise the term 薔薇 (bara) for gay men. While the term bara is not as popular today in Japan, the rose remains to be an important symbol for gay men.

The rose is used today as a symbol for the trans community, inspired by the phrase ‘give us our roses while we’re still here.’ It is particularly used on Trans Day of Visibility as a reminder of those who have been lost to internalised transphobia and transphobic violence.

Lavender

Lavender was another flower popularised by Sappho as a symbol of female desire and attraction. Purple flowers, such as lavender or violets, were a common gift between women who wanted to covertly express interest in one another. However, the colour was only associated with homosexuality in the zeitgeist near the end of the 19th century. Purple synthetic dye, created in 1856, was an expensive, fashionable dye which became linked with the flamboyant Victorian Aesthetes. This pale lavender, often compared to the more decadent purple associated with royalty, emphasised the assumed ‘unmanly’ interests of the Aesthetes. This, along with Oscar Wilde and the Aesthetes’ already present association with homosexuality, led lavender to be associated with ‘effeminate’ and ‘sexually degraded’ men. These associations continued in the 1940s and 50s, following the communist Red Scare, where queer people in the United States of America were subject to the ‘Lavender Scare’. Governmental employees thought to be gay were systematically investigated, interrogated, and removed from positions of power. The policy was based on the fear that gay men and lesbians would be a threat to national security, being vulnerable to blackmail due to their ‘weak moral characters’.

However, this negative association with lavender was soon transformed into a symbol of empowerment for the queer community. During commemorative marches after the Stonewall Riots, protestors wore lavender sashes and armbands to symbolise their joy and resistance. The same year, lavender became associated with lesbians trying to join the National Organisation for Women. After the president of the organisation stated that lesbians would ‘tarnish the feminist movement’, a group of activists stormed the 1970 Congress to Unite Women, wearing purple shirts with the slogan ‘lavender menace’. Their activism, reshaping the relationship of lesbians to feminism for years to come, has been remembered as a turning point in the second-wave feminist movement and a founding moment of lesbian feminism.

References

http://suzannefagencecooper.blogspot.com/2017/01/the-flowering-of-aestheticism-lily.html

https://www.geriwalton.com/the-term-dandy/

https://lithub.com/how-oscar-wilde-created-a-queer-mysterious-symbol-in-green-carnations/

https://theconversation.com/guide-to-the-classics-sappho-a-poet-in-fragments-90823

https://greekreporter.com/2024/07/12/greek-island-lesbos-word-lesbian/

https://www.kew.org/read-and-watch/plants-LGBTQ-symbols

https://daily.jstor.org/four-flowering-plants-decidedly-queered/

https://dressingdykes.com/2021/08/20/from-lavender-to-violet/

https://time.com/5922679/lavender-scare-history/

https://www.degruyter.com/document/doi/10.18574/nyu/9781479805419.003.0050/html

https://www.nippon.com/en/japan-topics/b07414/