OVERVIEW
For this project I wanted to research a certain movement in the 1960s called the Lavender Menace. I started my research right away and I soon realized that there was not much information on the event. After doing some more research on the group that planned the event, The Radicalesbians, I was drawn to one of the members of the group who attended the protest. Karla Jay is a professor at Pace University and she was a member of the group. She was also involved in the Gay Liberation Front, and had the honor of being a Grand Marshal at the 50th Anniversary of the Stonewall Riots. I got in contact with her and I had the honor of interviewing her for this project. For the history side of my project I decided to take a look at the other protests going on during that time. Below are my projects that I made for Apollo.
ART
I created a mixed media piece with a photograph from a protest during the 1960s. I got some of my inspiration from an artist named Jordan Andrew Carter. I wanted to use modern colors, patterns and styles to re-contextualize this artwork. The purple line in the art represents the term, "lavender streak", used to describe someone who was gay. While creating this piece I used several different materials including acrylic paint, ink, watercolor, and paint markers. To me, this piece re-contextualizes what the movement could've looked like if they were able to express themselves freely.
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English
After interviewing Karla Jay and researching how they dealt with being lesbian in the 1960s, I decided on writing a play in one act. The setting of this play is at the local lesbian bar in Greenwich Village, NY. At first, I wanted to have the characters portray how the planning went for the protests but then I realized that being able to stay safe during a bar raid was more important to them during that time. While writing this play, I contextualized the language during the time period, the setting of the bar and the "invisible hoops" that they had to jump through in order to not get arrested.
HISTORY
When creating my history project, I decided to make a timeline including all of the movements that were actively protesting through 1965-1975. Below is the connections I made from the timeline while contextualizing the movements that were created.
When I first started researching the Lavender Menace movement, I only looked at the events they planned and how they executed their protests. I started to research a woman named Karla Jay and when I started reading her book, “Tales of the Lavender Menace: A Memior of Liberation”, I soon realized that their movement branched out from the Gay Liberation front. The GLF was established in 1969 after another group called the Mattachine Society started their work. I then understood that after one group found the courage to stand up for their rights, another followed, but with their own ambitions and visions. The Civil Rights Movement started in the 1950s, but when women realized that their rights were not being taken seriously, the National Organization of Women was brought to life. They were a feminist group led by Betty Freidan. Once the lesbian comminity saw that they were not accepted in the NOW, they joined a group called the Radicalesbians, and started the Lavender Menace movement. These protests and groups all connect to each other, and although they aren’t fighting for the same rights, they still worked together. As you can see on the timeline, the events are spread out from 1965-1975. This was the time frame that had the most activism and liberation movements. It was interesting to research and understand how these events connected eachother. For instance, the NOW refused to list a sponsor for their organization because the said sponsor was a lesbian group. When hurtful words and actions started to occur, they planned a protest at the Second Congress to Unite Women. In another situation, while the civil rights movement was planning and executing protests, black women were still getting treated with disrespect and not given the rights that they deserved, therefore, they joined the NOW, demanding for their voices to be heard. Although these movements went on for years, people did not give up. Although they had to fight for what they wanted their rights to be, they changed the lives of those in the future.