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What Does Lavanda Mean?
Lavanda means Lavender in Spanish. And to us it means so much more. Founder, Emma Whitney, felt that Lavanda perfectly symbolizes her identity as a Cuban-American Lesbian and signals Lavanda’s mission to create a diverse and inclusive queer space.
“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.”
-Christobel Hastings, CNN
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.”
Christobel Hastings, CNN
During the McCarthy era, there was state-sanctioned discrimination when president Eisenhower signed Executive Order 10450, which became part of a national witch-hunt to purge homosexual men and women from the federal government. Dubbed “The Lavender Scare” by historian David K. Johnson, the suffocating climate of fear and suspicion subsequently led to around 5,000 federal agency employees losing their jobs on the basis of their sexuality.
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Christobel Hastings, CNN
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.
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Christobel Hastings, CNN
It was also the year president of the National Organization for Women, Betty Friedan, denounced the lesbian membership she believed would threaten the feminist movement as a “Lavender Menace.” This time, there was backlash. 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.
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Christobel Hastings, CNN
A lavender marriage is a male–female mixed-orientation marriage, undertaken as a marriage of convenience to conceal the socially stigmatised sexual orientation of one or both partners. The term dates from the early 20th century and is used almost exclusively to characterize certain marriages of public celebrities in the first half of the 20th century, primarily before World War II, when public attitudes made it impossible for a person acknowledging homosexuality to pursue a public career, notably in the Hollywood film industry. One of the earliest uses of the phrase appeared in the British press in 1895, at a time when the colour of lavender was associated with homosexuality.
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Wikipedia