For centuries, flowers have been an important symbol for Queer poets, authors, activists, and everyday people. Below are brief descriptions of the literary authors featured in this piece. Some are responsible for popularizing flower symbols;, others simply referenced flowers in their writing. All are Queer, and all represent the power of Queer existence and love.
Poets:
Sappho
Poems: Sappho Fragments
Violets are a Queer symbol because of Sappho, the Greek poet who wrote homoerotic poetry only a century or so after Homer wrote the homoerotic Iliad. Sappho was so good at writing about women that both the words sapphic and lesbian both originate from her. Though violets featured prominently, her sapphic poetry contained a whole garden: she referenced roses, crocuses, clover, lotus, hyacinths, and more. Centuries later, violets are still a symbol of Queerness and sapphic love.
Emily Dickinson
Poems: “Bloom” and “One Sister Have I in Our House”
The 19th century New England poet, famous for her obsession with death, first had an obsession with flowers. In 1865 Dickinson created her own herbarium: a book of carefully collected, pressed, and labeled New England Flowers. Her poem “Bloom” documents the intricate life cycle of a flower. It ends with the line “To be a Flower, is a profound/Responsibility.” Though this poem is not explicitly Queer, a Queer interpretation is powerful: to be Queer, especially in that time period, was a profound responsibility. Existing was its own form of protest. Dickinson had a relationship with her friend and brother’s wife, Sue. She referenced violets in one of her poems about Sue, ending the poem with “Sue – forevermore!”
Oscar Wilde
Writing: Lady Windermere’s Fan and “Phrases and Philosophies for the Use of the Young”
A Queer poet, playwright, and novelist, Oscar Wilde was known for his desire for life to imitate art. Wilde popularized the Green Carnation as a Queer symbol. He instructed his friends to wear the carnation on their lapel to his play Lady Windermere’s Fan so that they would create a sea of flowers and bring art into the real world. There is debate over whether Wilde intended for this to be a symbol for Queerness: some say that he and his friends would wear the carnation to indicate their sexuality, while others say that the carnation was a symbol of art and aestheticism. Regardless of what Wilde intended, the carnation became a fashion symbol for Queer men. Gay men would wear carnations on their lapels in Paris and London; green as a color even became associated with gayness in the 1940s. What Wilde himself intended is not important, what is important is the phenomenon he created.
Alfred Douglas
Poem: “Two Loves”
Alfred Douglas was Oscar Wilde’s lover and author of the poem “Two Loves.” “Two Loves” describes the manifestation of Queer love and an interaction between two boys. It is packed with flower imagery: flowers fill the landscape and adorn the manifestation of Queer love. This poem was published in 1894 in The Chameleon, an undergraduate magazine that only had one issue because it was criticized for containing Queer content. Along with “Two Loves,” the issue contained “Phrases and Philosophies for the Use of the Young” by Wilde and the short story “The Priest and the Acolyte.” Both The Chameleon and “Two Loves” was referenced at Oscar Wilde’s trial: when asked what the “Love that dare not speak its name” in the poem is, Wilde gave a long and passionate speech, saying, “it is the noblest form of affection. There is nothing unnatural about it.”
The Violet Quill
Writing: Dancer from the Dance and Nights in Aruba by Andrew Holleran
A bit of a divergence from the previous writers, the Violet Quill was a group of seven gay authors who met up throughout the 1970s to read and critique each other’s work. As Edmund White explains in The Violet Quill Reader, the writers struggled to get productive writing advice from straight authors who would get hung up on the presence of Queerness. The Violet Quill was part of the post-stonewall gay liberation era; it represented a new type of Queer writing which wrote about the day to day reality of Queer lives. The group is an example of Queer friendship and collaboration, something just as important as Queer romantic love.
Reginal Shepherd
Poem: “You, therefore”
Our most contemporary author, Reginald Shepherd was born in 1963 in the Bronx. As a Black gay poet who grew up in poverty, he broughttried to bring the Bronx into his poetry and used art as a tool of liberation. In his book Orpheus in the Bronx, he described how he worked to disentangle the privileged world of the art scene – he recognized that it was rare for anyone from his background to achieve anything in the literary world – from the liberatory aspects of art. In his life, he was an assistant professor at Northern Illinois University and an adjunct professor at the University of West Florida, and he made his poetry accessible through blogging. After his death in 2008, his partner Robert Philen (to whom “You, Therefore” is dedicated to) maintained both Shepherd’s page and his legacy.
Love is not love: Queer love is a form of resistance. Flowers are more than just symbols of love;, they are also symbols of activism. Throughout history, Queer activists have used flowers to represent themselves and their cause.
Activists:
Marsha P. Johnson
Marsha P. Johnson was on the front lines at Stonewall, the riot that paved the way for a new era of Queer liberation. She was famous on the streets of Greenwich Village as a drag queen, prostitute, and activist. Following Stonewall, she joined the Gay Liberation Front (GLF) and co-founded the Street Transvestite Action Revolutionaries (STAR) with Sylvia Riviera. As a trans drag queen, style was a form of rebellion, and flowers were an essential part of her style. As Michael Kasino’s documentary Pay It No Mind – The Life and Times of Marsha P. Johnson describes, she would use her last ten dollars to make a bouquet for her hair because she knew those flowers would make her a lot of money. She was such a fixture in Greenwich that people in the flower district would give her leftover flowers for her bouquets. Flowers were part of her liberation.
Lavender Menace
STAR was not the only group to come out of the Gay Liberation Front. Radicalesbians was originally founded out of a desire to host a lesbian-centric dance, as all of GLF’s so far had been dominated by men. This shows how Queer joy and Queer protests are closely tied together. From there, the group started planning a demonstration to protest the treatment of lesbians in the National Organization for Women (NOW). NOW had labeled lesbians as a lavender menace, so they became just that: on May 1, 1970, a group of lesbians wearing “lavender menace” t-shirts took over the mics at NOW’s conference to discuss how women’s struggles and lesbian struggles were intertwined. They shared their pamphlet “The Woman Identified Woman” which explains that lesbian as a social category only existed because of the patriarchy and rigid sex roles. Sappho’s purple flower lives on in these demonstrations.
Transgender Day of Remembrance
“Give us our roses while we’re still here” is a rallying cry created for Transgender Day of Remembrance. Trans Day of Remembrance was founded in 1999 to honor trans people who had been killed in acts of anti-trans violence. “Give us our roses while we’re still here” was popularized by artists B. Parker and Micah Bazant to remind people to cherish trans people in life, not just in death. Roses are symbols of both love and mourning: the phrase reminds people to not just mourn, but also love, trans people.
The Pansy Project
The Pansy Project is a world-wide art piece created by Paul Harfleet. The artist plants and photographs pansies at sites of homophobic and transphobic violence to bring attention to the plight of Queer people. He has planted flowers all around the world, from London to Istanbul to New York City. According to the Pansy Project website, these flowers are a symbol of Queer survival: they mark a place of death with a living plant. Despite violence, Queer joy lives on.
cover image by margaret sprigg-dudley
