Sapphic Violets Bird’s-foot violet via Wikimedia Commons Here’s an exploration of the history of four particular flowering plants that have been decidedly queered. Maybe all the buzzing about the north end of the Ramble in New York City’s Central Park is why that cruising ground was nicknamed the “Fruited Plain.” Or maybe it’s why “evening botanist” is one of the antiquated terms for queer men. What’s the story behind all of this floral symbology? Are queer people perceived as delicate? Colorful? Beautiful? Frivolous? As the literary critic Christopher Looby notes in the journal Criticism, Marcel Proust’s 1921 Sodome et Gomorrhe speculated that male-male courting rituals were similar to the process of flower fertilization. A pre-Stonewall gay bar at the corner of Christopher Street and Gay Street was called The Flower Pot. Violets were associated with Sappho herself, and the calamus with Walt Whitman.
Oscar Wilde earlier turned the green carnation into a symbol for them across the pond by wearing one on his lapel. The American “Pansy Craze” of almost 100 years ago cemented the use of that flower’s name as a slang term for queer men.
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