"Over the past year, a curious trend has been making the rounds on TikTok: Young (and mainly Western) people are proposing marriage to like-minded individuals seeking companionship and stability as well as shared financial burdens and benefits. Love and/or sex? Not necessary. The term "lavender marriage" resurfaced from obscurity, sparking conversations about the origins of such marriages of convenience, and whether this once covert survival tactic could be repurposed for an era seeing shifting relationship norms."
"The phrase "lavender marriage" mainly gained traction in early 20th-century Hollywood, where image was paramount and being openly queer could have ended careers. The unions between a man and a woman with either one or both partners being homosexual provided a heteronormative cover so that stars and other public figures could maintain their reputations while shielding their true sexual orientation."
Young people on TikTok are offering pragmatic lavender marriages to like-minded partners for companionship, stability, and shared financial burdens, often excluding romance or sex. The practice revives a historical form of marriage of convenience used to protect reputations and legal safety. Early 20th-century Hollywood popularized such unions to present a heteronormative image, with studios or agents sometimes arranging partnerships to shield queer individuals. Those arrangements prioritized public perception over romantic partnership. Historical usage of "lavender" links to queer cultural history, with literary references such as Sappho underscoring long-standing associations with same-sex desire.
Read at www.dw.com
Unable to calculate read time
Collection
[
|
...
]