What was the Lavender Menace? A look back at the lesbians who altered the women’s movement
The Radicalesbians staged a "Lavender Menace" protest at a women's conference more than a half-century ago that forever changed the feminist movement.
“Take a lesbian to lunch!” read one of the signs. “Women’s liberation is a lesbian plot,” said another, and “We are the people you are afraid of.”
It was 1970, and an event in New York City sponsored by the National Organization for Women (NOW) was being interrupted by dozens of lesbian feminists who surrounded the audience with demands to be heard, a direct action against being marginalized by the mainstream women’s movement.
“I was dressed in a nice blouse. I stood up and I said, ‘Sisters, I’m so tired of being in the closet in the women’s movement. This is too much already.’ And I ripped my blouse off, and I had a ‘Lavender Menace’ T-shirt underneath,” said longtime LGBTQ activist Karla Jay, then 23 years old (and now 77).
Karla Jay wears a "Lavender Menace" T-shirt under her blouse at the Second Congress to Unite Women in New York in 1970.Diana Davies / New York Public LibraryCoining Lavender Menace Action for the protest was a reclamation of the inflammatory language used by NOW co-founder Betty Friedan, a complicated but early leader of the women’s liberation movement, whose 1963 book, “The Feminine Mystique,” is credited with sparking second-wave feminism. Friedan referred to lesbians as a “lavender menace” threatening to tarnish the women’s movement as a fringe group of “man-haters.”
The demonstrators, who called themselves the Radicalesbians, held the floor for hours and confronted audience members at NOW’s Second Congress to Unite Women about the group’s exclusionary practices and homophobia. While the protesters were small in number, they had an outsized impact, giving a face and a name to lesbian feminists. The group also passed out copies of its manifesto, “The Woman-Identified Woman,” which described lesbianism not as a side issue but as essential to the success of the women’s liberation movement as a whole.
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