Blooming Queer: an LGBTQ+ Botany
- midlandsrainbow
- 2 days ago
- 6 min read
Spring has arrived, and (hopefully) it brings with it warmer weather, new plant growth, and blooming flowers. Despite queerness and transness so often being vilified as ‘unnatural’, flowers and plants have long been used as symbols by the community. So, in the words of Lady Gaga, let me take you to the Garden of Eden, where a rainbow of plants is blooming.
Green Carnations –
Thanks to the playwright Oscar Wilde, these flowers are intrinsically linked to homosexuality. In 1892, the writer reportedly asked a group of his friends to wear green carnations in their lapels to the opening night of his play, ‘Lady Windermere’s Fan’; thus popularising the wearing of these flowers as a secret symbol to others that you were gay.
According to the painter, Cecil Robertson, who recounts the events in his memoirs, Wilde had told him that a character in the play, Cecil Graham who was reminiscent of the writer himself would wear a carnation on stage as part of his costume, and as such he wanted his art to imitate life.
“I want a good many men to wear them tomorrow,” Wilde allegedly told Robertson. “People will stare…and wonder. Then they will look round the house [theatre] and see every here and there more and more little specks of mystic green.”
It is unclear how much of Robertson’s story is true but even so, the green carnation became synonymous with Oscar Wilde, and with homosexuality.
A novel, The Green Carnation by Robert Hichens, published two years later in 1894 even featured leading characters who were based on Oscar Wilde and Lord Alfred 'Bosie' Douglas.
Lavender –
Lavender scare, lavender menace, lavender weddings, LGBTQ+ history is well woven with this strongly-scented purple plant.
During the 1930s and 40s, lavender became a symbol increasingly linked to the community.
After the communist ‘Red Scare’ in America during the 1940s and 50s, came the lesser-known Lavender Scare, during which LGBTQ+ people were ousted from government jobs due to their perceived communist sympathies.
Then, in 1969, the president of the National Organization for Women claimed lesbian membership of the group would threaten the progress of the feminist movement, calling lesbians a ‘Lavender Menace‘.
In retaliation to the comment, a group of activists stormed the 1970 Congress to Unite Women, wearing purple shirts with the slogan ‘lavender menace’.
During a time when homosexuality was still illegal in places like the UK and U.S., lavender weddings were also common place. These were unions between a man and woman, where at least one or even both partners were from the LGBTQ+ community. Lavender marriages, which concealed someone’s sexuality, were entered into due to societal pressure and lack of acceptance.
While lavender marriages were more common in history when LGBTQ+ acceptance was lower, they do still exist for various personal and societal reasons.
Violets –
‘You culled violets and roses, bloom and stem,
Often in Spring and I looked on as you
Wove a bouquet into a diadem.
And may the maidens all night long
Celebrate your shared love in song
And the bride’s bosom,
A violet-blossom.
many the crowns of violets and roses ... you have put on yourself, and many the garlands woven from flowers you have cast round your delicate neck, and with quantities of ... flowery perfume ... fit for a queen even, you anointed yourself all over, and on soft beds ... delicate ... you have satisfied desire ...
The symbol of violets, specifically used by lesbian, bisexual and queer women can be traced back to the poet Sappho for whom we also have to thank for terms including ‘Sapphic’ and ‘Lesbian’, the latter of which is derived from her homeland, Lesbos.
Sappho is thought to be one of the greatest lyric poets of her time, and though little of her work has survived, many of the fragments that remain express affection, desire and love for women, often using floral and natural imagery. She writes of roses, crocuses, clover, lotus, and hyacinths, alongside many references to purple blooms such as violets, worn by lovers in their hair or around their necks, linking the flowers to female desire over the centuries that followed Sappho’s lifetime.
Pansies –
The garden pansy, which began its life as a violet and became what it is today after cultivation of several different violet species, is another linked with LGBTQ+ history.
During the 1920s and 30s, the flower lent its name to the Pansy Craze, a brief golden age for drag clubs and LGBTQ+ nightlife, predominantly in the USA, which thrived in New York’s underground club scene during prohibition.
Later, throughout the 20th century (and often still to this day), Pansy was used as a derogatory term for homosexual men, suggesting they were delicate and feminine. Ironically, however, pansies are actually hardy flowers, known for being resilient and self-seeding; even sometimes growing in cracks in paving.
Some have now reclaimed the term and use it endearingly. Artist Paul Harfleet has gone even further, using the flower to inspire an act of queer resistance; planting pansies at sites of homophobic and transphobic violence as part of the Pansy Project. He also wrote a children’s book, Pansy Boy, inspired by his childhood as a young gay man.
Red Roses –
Roses are known as a symbol of romance across sexualities, spanning back to the Greco-Roman god of passion and erotic love, Eros, for whom the rose was a symbol.
In Japanese history, however, the red rose in particular has been associated with gay men since the 1960s. The use of the rose as a prominent symbol for love between men is supposedly derived from the Greek myth of King Laius’ relations under rose trees. Originally a derogatory word, the term bara (薔薇), meaning ‘rose’ has been likened to the use of ‘pansy’ in English.
The term, however, has been reclaimed by the gay community notably with the 1961 publication of the anthology Ba-ra-kei: Ordeal by Roses; a collection of semi-nude photographs of homosexual writer Yukio Mishima by photographer Eikoh Hosoe. Then later, in 1971, the first commercially produced gay magazine in Asia, Barazoku (薔薇族), literally translating as ‘rose tribe’, began publishing.
Roses are also used today as a symbol for the trans community, particularly on Trans Day of Visibility, inspired by B. Parker, a Black transgender artist, who wrote “give us our roses while we're still here.”
Sappho also writes of roses:
Here under boughs with a bracing spring
Percolates, roses without number
Umber the earth and rustling,
The leaves drip slumber.
Clover –
While not a staple queer symbol, clover is another plant that features in Sappho’s writing:
Dew is poured out in handsome fashion; lissom
Chervil unfurls; Rose
And Sweet Clover with heady flowers blossom.
Oranges –
Jeanette Winterson’s coming-of-age story about a lesbian growing up in an English Pentecostal community, ‘Oranges Are Not the Only Fruit’ (1985) signifies life's many pathways, and Winterson's own realisation that there were worlds outside her religious upbringing, particularly regarding sexuality. In the book, oranges represent the dominant, heteronormative ideology, and it wasn’t for the first time that oranges would represent homophobia. In the 1970s, gay bars in America stopped serving Screwdriver cocktails, instead replacing the orange juice with apple in a concoction named ‘Anita Bryant’. Bryant was a spokesperson for the Florida Citrus Commission and a notorious anti-gay activist who fought to repeal LGBTQ+ rights. Queer people responded by boycotting orange juice.
Almost fifty years later, however, oranges have come to be a symbol of queer love in literature in titles such as The Priory of the Orange Tree by Samantha Shannon (2019), and Insatiable by Daisy Buchanan (2023) the cover of which shows a woman’s hands tearing into an orange, representative of a vulva.
Peaches –
The peach – which particularly in its emoji form is often seen as a euphemism for vulva or buttocks – is not necessarily a direct LGBTQ+ symbol its association with sexuality has led to wide use in the LGBTQ+ community.
In particular, this connection can be linked to the iconic queer film, Call Me By Your Name, adapted from the novel of this same name by André Aciman.
Narcissus –
Dan Jones’ Queer Heroes of Myth and Legend features the Greek mythology story of Narcissus who was punished by the goddess Nemesis for his rejection of the nymph, Echo, and thus fell in love with his own reflection before being transformed into a small white and gold flower. His story can be viewed either as a rejection of heteronormative relationships or as a reflection of asexuality/ aromanticism.
“On seeing his reflection, perhaps for the first time in his life, Narcissus fell deeply and passionately in love… The Narcissus of myth reject marriage and the family pressures to take a wife and then meets a tragic end.” - Dan Jones
Trillium –
The Trillium (also known as Wake Robin) has become a symbol representative of bisexuality within the LGBTQ+ community. Primarily this link is due to the fact that the flower has both male and female reproductive parts, and while this could also be representative of intersex characteristics, early scientists described the plant, in a botanical context as ‘bisexual’ thus cementing the plant as a symbol of the bisexual and pansexual communities.
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