Is purple a gay color

In fact lavender – a subtle hue that shifts between light pinkish purples, and gray and blueish tones – has had, despite its whimsical nature, its own historical significance in representing. These lighter colours developed a queer hue as they became more fashionable with women and lavender became a slang term for a gay man.

By the late ’s newspapers were casually mentioning the “lavender set” as a dismissive shorthand for groups of queer men. 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 ’s early male friendships as containing a “streak of lavender, and spots soft as May violets.”.

Most people typically associate the term LGBT with the six colour rainbow flag (red, orange, yellow, green, blue and purple).

is lavender the gayest color

It was originally introduced by Gilbert Baker in and has commonly been used as a way of showing identity or support. 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. You may feel like the sky's hue tilted a little purple today.

It's not your eyes, it's the reflection of all of us wearing purple for Spirit Day. Spirit Day encourages the world to "go purple" to show 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 research 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 playwright Oscar Wilde and artist Aubrey Beardsley's fame. Beardlsey's sexually explicit Art Nouveau depicted people of the same gender and, while quite controversial, led to conversations about homosexuality.

These years were also wild with style, giving birth to the fashion magazine, Vogue. It wasn't until that author Thomas Beers titled his book about the s The Mauve Decade, and the more society learned about the prevalence of same-sex desire, the quicker mauve became symbolic of homosexuality. Fast forward to the s, and take the gay nostalgia associated with mauve and the faded purple's likeness to lavender, and get Sen.

Everett Dirksen's term "lavender lads" — used repeatedly as a synonym for homosexuals during this political time of fear and persecution of gay men, later known as the "Lavender Scare. Sign up Log in. A Brief History of the Gayest Color.