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Peter, A Young English Girl

Lesbian satirical etching entitled "Amorous Ladys, or Tete-a-Tete Ex-strachnary," made by William Heath, 1820.

Description:

Two ladies embrace, seated on a sofa, not noticing the entry of their husbands. One, Lady Strachan, says: "You know my dear Sarah I love you very well yet I must reserve a few Kisses for the worthy old Ad-l." Lady Warwick: "Oh never mind him, my Sweet Louisa he's undeserving your embrace's and only fit for walking the Quarter Deck." In the doorway is Sir Richard Strachan, in admiral's uniform, followed by Lord Warwick, indicated by a paper or pamphlet: 'Warwick Gude'

In London in 1892, everybody—or, at least, everybody who was anybody—was talking about one thing: green carnations. Nobody was sure, exactly, what wearing a green carnation meant, or why it had suddenly become such a deliciously scandalous, dazzlingly fashionable sartorial statement. All anybody knew was that one day, at a London theater, someone important (stories differed as to who exactly it was) wore a green carnation, or maybe it had been a blue one (stories differed about that too).

Green carnations may have had something to do with sexual deviance. They may also have had something to do with the worship of art. And the whole thing somehow had to do with Oscar Wilde, the flamboyant playwright, novelist, and fame-courting dandy who—as he never tired of telling the press—put his talent into his work but put his genius into his life. Wilde lived his life as a work of art (or let people think he did). The affair of the green carnation gives us a little glimpse into how.

One story about what exactly happened comes from the painter Cecil Robertson, who recounts his version in his memoirs. According to Robertson, Wilde was keen to drum up publicity for his latest play, Lady Windermere’s Fan. A character in the play, Cecil Graham—an elegant and witty dandy figure who rather resembled Wilde himself—was ostensibly going to wear a carnation onstage as part of his costume. And Wilde wanted life to resemble art.

“I want a good many men to wear them tomorrow,” Wilde allegedly told Robertson. “People will stare…and wonder. Then they will look round the house [theater] and see every here and there more and more little specks of mystic green”—a new and inexplicable fashion statement. And then, Wilde gleefully insisted, they would start to ask themselves that most vital of questions: “What on earth can it mean?”

Robertson evidently ventured to ask Wilde what, exactly, the green carnation did mean.

Wilde’s response? “Nothing whatsoever. But that is just what nobody will guess.”

Within days, carnations were everywhere. Just two weeks later, a newspaper covering the premiere of another play, this one by Théodore de Banville, reported a bizarre phenomenon: Wilde in the audience, surrounded by a “suite of young gentlemen all wearing the vivid dyed carnation which has superseded the lily and the sunflower,” two flowers that had previously been associated with Wilde and with fashionable, flamboyant, and sexually ambiguous young men more generally.

A little over a week after that, a London periodical published another piece on this mysterious carnation. It is a dialogue between Isabel, a young woman, and Billy, an even younger dandy—heavily implied to be gay—about the flower, which Billy has received as a gage d’amour (the French is tactfully untranslated) from a much older man. Billy shows off his flower to the curious Isabel with the attitude of studied nonchalance: “Oh, haven’t you seen them?…. Newest thing out. They water them with arsenic, you know, and it turns them green.”

The green carnation is something desperately exciting, understood not by ordinary society women but by Brummell-style dandies, shimmering with hauteur. It’s deliciously dangerous, perhaps even a tad wicked; the carnations are colored with poison, after all. It’s also, in every sense of the word, a little bit queer.

The green carnation’s appeal as a symbol of something esoteric persisted. Two years after the premiere of Lady Windermere’s Fan, an anonymous author—later revealed to be the London music critic Robert Hichens—published The Green Carnation, a novel that appears to be very obviously based on Oscar Wilde’s real-life homosexual relationship with the much younger Lord Alfred “Bosie” Douglas.

The Green Carnation, though it is certainly a satirical exaggeration, can tell us much about this strange, new class of young men cropping up not only in London but also in Paris, Copenhagen, and so many other European capitals during the nineteenth century: the dandy. Inheritors of the mantle of Beau Brummell but far more flamboyant in their affect—John Bull would certainly have turned around to look at them in the street—these modern dandies didn’t just live their lives artistically.

These dandies believed—or at least made out that they believed—that the highest calling a person could have was a careful cultivation of the self: of clothing, sure, and of hairstyle, but also of gesture, of personality. And behind that belief lay a kind of bitter nihilism, as poisonous as arsenic itself. Nothing meant anything, unless you decided it did. A green carnation could signify homosexual desire, or aesthetic dandyism, or “nothing whatsoever,” depending on your mood and what you felt like conveying to the world that morning.

In the morning we were kissing,

And our night was full of love.

We were drinking, like two brothers,

And did not take our masks off.

And these masks were sweetly smiling,

While our eyes were not aligning,

And our lips were mute for once.

Playing Faust in the lamplight,

As though never knowing of night,

Those are night men, they're not us.

– by Mikhail Kuzmin

Kuzmin was a poet and an openly gay man who also wrote diaries that offer a glimpse into the life of a writer and homosexual of the early 20th century. His poetry and prose was often based on his own life. See, for example, an entry for July 25th, 1906:

We were waking up, washing up, I laid the table thoroughly [...] When we greeted each other with a kiss and sat for tea, as if with some relative, nephew, guest, sweet, obliging, modest, to feed, to entertain [him] after the night of love – it was delightful. I have a passion for the man I love to exist and be [with me] not just for the moments of love. Then I played Faust and Schubert

Natalie Clifford Barney, c. 1898, ph. Emery, Bar Harbor (Maine)

Smithsonian Institution Archives, Accession 96-153, Alice Pike Barney Papers

Konstantin Somov, A Reclining Man, 1936. Somov was gay, and quite openly. Here he painted his lover and muse Boris Snezhkovsky

Paul Cadmus, Jerry, 1931. Cadmus painted Jared French, another artist, while they, as a couple, were travelling around Europe

Alice Austen, Gertrude Dancing, 1899. Alice Austen, a pioneering female photographer, met Gertrude Tate in 1897. They lived together, travelling, throwing tea parties, and riding automobile, until Alice's death in 1952

Wilhelm von Gloeden, Two Men Talking, c. 1895. Von Gloeden was famous for his homoerotic photography and made Italy popular among gay men and lesbians. Although this photo is likely just that, a photo, its meaning is clear

Louise Catherine Breslau, The Toilette, 1898. Breslau lived with Madeleine Zillhardt, fellow artist, for over forty years. She drew her often, like in this tender painting. There's now a street in Paris called Place Louise Catherine Breslau & Madeleine Zillhardt