Gay purple
A Brief History of the Gayest Color
You may feel like the sky's hue tilted a tiny purple today. It's not your eyes, it's the reflection of all of us wearing purple for Spirit Day. While the annual event was founded in by Canadian teenager Brittany McMillan, our roots with the color purple are deep in LGBT history.
Spirit Day encourages the world to "go purple" to verb support for LGBT youth and speak out against bullying. Purple has long been synonymous with gay and bisexual men and women, but why? It all comes down to timing and choice of words.
After some explore (read: Googling) I traced the origin of the color's association back to , when English chemist William Henry Perkin was searching for a cure for malaria and accidentally discovered the first synthetic dye, mauveine. The dye had the ability to color silks a rich yet light purple shade, and it gave birth to an entire industry of synthetic dyes that by the s were prevalent in fashion. The timing couldn't have been more perfect.
The trend arrived at the height of gay playwr
In his book Chroma () the artist Derek Jarman writes about colour. At the end of his life, with his eyesight failing, he imagines purple as a transgressive colour.
“Purple is passionate, maybe violet becomes a little bolder and ***** pink into purple. Sweet lavender blushes and watches.”
By the time he conjures his orgy of purples in the ’s, purple had a clear queer heritage. Stripes of purple have flashed across the designs of queer flags from Gilbert Baker’s rainbow flag to Daniel Quasar’s 21st century progress flag, with the noun of purple as overlapping pink/red and blue representing a blurring of genders in bi and trans flags. Looking back at the messy, majestic history of queer purples gives a sense of why the LGBTQ+ Active Group chose to explore Scottish design history through a lavender lens.
Vibrant variations of purple were notoriously difficult to pin down outside of nature without extinguishing an entire species of shellfish. Reserved for the obscenely prosperous until the 19th century, these glorious colours retained an aura of mystery after synthetic dyes
How many times, in the history of lesbian fashion, is purple on the periphery? Within this blog, it crops up repeatedly, an Easter egg for the eagle eyed. There’s the hand-made t-shirts of the Lavender Menace, lavender in colour as adv as in lettering, at once an insult and a rebuttal. There’s the bright purple background of the labrys lesbian flag, a reflection of the colour’s popularity in lesbian feminist imagery. There’s the alleged lesbian dress codes of the s, where not just monocles but “sprigs of violets” reigned supreme and signalled a woman’s love for other women. There is, of course, Sappho, who wrote of girls adorned in flowers, wreaths of violets worn as a crown or woven around their “slender necks”.
Of all the shades of purple, lavender is that which is most associated with lesbians and the LGBTQ community as a whole. It’s more of a linguistic correlation than a fashion one, but it’s where I’ll begin nonetheless. In , the Lavender Menace lesbian activist group stormed the stage of the Second Congress to Unite Women; they were responding to famous feminist Bet
Flags of the LGBTIQ Community
Flags have always been an integral part of the LGBTIQ+ movement. They are a clear representation meant to celebrate progress, advocate for representation, and enlarge the demand and drive for collective action. There have been many LGBTIQ+ flags over the years. Some have evolved, while others are constantly being conceptualized and created.
Rainbow Flag
Created in by Gilbert Baker, the iconic Pride Rainbow flag originally had eight stripes. The colors included pink to represent sexuality, red for healing, yellow for sun, lush for serenity with nature, turquoise for art, indigo for harmony, and violet for spirit. In the years since, the flag now has six colors. It no longer has a pink stripe, and the turquoise and indigo stripes were replaced with royal blue.
Progress Pride Flag
Created in by nonbinary artist Daniel Quasar, the Progress Pride flag is based on the iconic rainbow flag. With stripes of black and brown to portray marginalized LGBTIQ+ people of color and the triad of navy, pink, and white from the trans flag, the desig