Historical, regional, and genre use of "lavender marriage"

[pauamma]

In Google Ngrams aggregate English use of "lavender marriage(s)", the small bump between 1880 and 1890 in an otherwise all-zero graph until use takes off in 1988, which isn't present in American English but wholly due to British English and is attested in the British press in 1895 (although that year may be a typo for 1995 so what meaning it had in the 1880s is unclear to me).

Note the complete lack of "lavender marriages" as a plural in British English, which hints that it mostly refers to the custom, not to specific marriages. I don't know what the lack of a bump in 1880s English fiction indicates. (There's no region-specific English fiction corpus in Google Ngrams, unfortunately, and I'm not sure whether the lack of the plural form there means it's because of the genre, because of the region, or both.) Then there's that perplexing sharp trough hitting the bottom in 2001 for English fiction. (Is it corpus sampling bias?)

Comments

[lilacsigil]

Well, something specific happened in gay history 1895 that would make the term relevant, which is Oscar Wilde's conviction.

[pauamma]

You have a point about relevance (I wasn't aware he married), but (if it was actually used that year and Google Ngrams missed that - which I can't rule out), that doesn't explain why it was used earlier and had vanished in 1890. Or am I missing something else?

[lilacsigil]

I would think it had been occasionally used earlier and then had sudden relevance in 1895.

[thekumquat]

It's used for specific marriages in the sense of "I think X and Y have a lavender marriage", but otherwise the plural is denoted by the concept as a whole:

X and Y and A and B can't all be queer! They're married!
Lavender marriage.

I imagine that the larger peak represents when mentioning the concept became a bit more acceptable (Wolfenden Report, maybe?) until such time as when the social pressure to be closeted and to have such a marriage had severely reduced and didn't need to be referred to with a euphemism any more.

[pauamma]

*nod* Thanks.