The term “lavender menace” was first used by Betty Friedan in 1969 to describe the lesbians demanding to have their issues included in the women’s liberation movement. Friedan believed including lesbians would discredit the movement in the eyes of the public, lead people to believe all feminists are lesbians, and distract feminists from achieving women’s liberation.
Lesbian feminists embraced the title almost immediately and repurposed it, planning a demonstration around the insult. The next year, lesbians attending the 2nd Congress to Unite Women ran onto stage with Lavender Menace tee-shirts and demanded to be included and acknowledged. While two women spoke on stage, lesbians in the audience revealed their own Lavender Menace tee-shirts hidden beneath unassuming blouses and proclaimed they didn’t want to hide anymore.
“When the lights came back on…the audience was completely surrounded by lesbians. They could see we were not this tiny group that they could dismiss”
– Karla Jay
Karla Jay’s description of the event is reminiscent of how Susan Leigh Foster wrote about the way protestors choreograph their demonstrations, only Karla says “staged” rather than “choreographed”. The Lavender Menace forced mainstream feminists to confront homophobia in the movement with not only their voices and their manifesto, but by adorning their bodies with the very words used to demonize them and justify their ostracization. By planting themselves in the audience they used their bodies to show mainstream feminists that lesbians already were deeply involved in and integral to feminism, not some boogeymen sabotaging the movement, that they were literally all around them.
Below is the manifesto they distributed that day, “The Woman Identified Woman”
