In Western culture it started life as a color of desire, thanks to the lyric genius of 7th century BC poet Sappho, whose papyrus fragments told of her erotic predilections for younger women with “violet tiaras.” Fast forward a few centuries, and in the 1920s, violets were still drawing together members of the lesbian community, who gifted the delicate flowers as an expression of sapphic interest. President of the National Organization for Women, Betty Friedan, denounced the lesbian membership she believed would threaten the feminist movement as a “Lavender Menace.” At the 1970 Second Congress to Unite Women, a group of radical activists wearing hand-dyed purple T-shirts printed with the words “Lavender Menace” stormed the stage and kickstarted a conversation on the very topic Friedan had struggled to suppress: lesbianism.
Towards the end of the 19th century, however, the public began linking lavender with homosexuality. Aestheticism, a European arts movement was founded, eschewing Victorian wholesomeness and the perceived ugliness of the industrial age, in favor of beauty, passion and “art for art’s sake.” Newspapers denounced Aesthetes as effeminate, not least one of the prominent leaders of the movement, Oscar Wilde, who frequently reminisced about his “purple hours” spent with rent boys, and provoked a moral scandal with the homoerotic themes in “The Picture of Dorian Gray.”
The 1930s marked the start of a dark period when lavender was cruelly lexicalized. Gay men in America were taunted for possessing a “dash” or “streak” of lavender, thanks in large part to Abraham Lincoln’s biographer Carl Sandburg, who described one of the president’s early male friendships as containing a “streak of lavender, and spots soft as May violets.” In 1969, the color came to symbolize empowerment. Lavender sashes and armbands were distributed to a crowd of hundreds in a “gay power” march from Washington Square Park to Stonewall Inn in New York, to commemorate the Stonewall riots that had just taken place a month before.