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The Green Carnation Book Prize

February 20, 1892, was the premiere for Oscar Wilde’s comedic play Lady Windermere’s Fan. It’s a glorious, smart, subversive play that deals with gender assumption, class issues, love, trust, loyalty, and you should read it.  Or see it.  Or hear a recording of it (I really love this play, if you can’t tell…).

The play was an enormous success, but Oscar’s speech at the end (he was brought out on stage to be applauded, as well) may have actually been the most memorable part of the evening.  You can see a reproduction of it here, with Stephen Fry playing Oscar:

Anyways, for the premiere, Oscar arranged for one of the actors to wear a green carnation in his buttonhole.  He also gave carnations to his friends who would be attending, so that it would appear that a select number of audience members were in cahoots with the actors over the style.   Artist Graham Robertson was one of the people Wilde asked to wear the flower.  As the story goes, Robertson asked Wilde what the green carnation was supposed to mean.

“Nothing whatever,” Wilde replied, “but that is just what nobody will guess.”

The story is a good one, and definitely fits with Oscar’s love of gently mocking society at large for being ridiculous, but the truth was that there was a lot of meaning behind the green carnation.  Green was the symbol of Irish nationalism, and Oscar, an Irishman himself and a firm believer in the cause of Irish nationalism.  It was also the color of absinthe, a hallucinogenic drink that of which Oscar was particularly fond (you can still get it now, but it’s not a hallucinogen anymore…).  Finally, to Oscar, green was the color of artists–a green carnation is not natural.  You can’t grow them naturally.  They have to be created, with intention, and purpose.

Oscar Wilde was also a homosexual, and today, there are a lot of assumptions that the green carnation was a covert symbol of homosexuality.  It wasn’t–or, at least, it never seems to have been used as a symbol by Oscar himself to denote homosexuality (it was never referenced at his trials, and he himself never wrote a word about it, though he wrote about his carnations and the color green fairly often).  However, there were a number of people who mocked him (covertly and not-so-covertly), and stated that the green carnation was some kind of symbol of depravity.

Since that time, however, the green carnation has been adopted as a highly literary and rather esoteric reference to homosexuality, in deference to Wilde who, in many ways, defined what a homosexual man should look, act, and sound like.

Fast-forward to 2010, when author Paul Magrs, who also writes funny, charming, and very clever books, tweeted about the “scandalous lack of prizes for gay men” in the UK (<– Quoting the tweet there), and he and journalist Simon Savidge decided to set up just such a prize, they decided to name it The Green Carnation Prize. The Prize was originally awarded to the best fiction and memoirs by gay men.  In 2012 the prize opened its submission criteria to include all LGBT writers, in 2015 it widened its submission criteria even further including all ‘works of translation’.

Why is this important?  You might ask.
It’s important because human beings are herd animals.  We accept things are “right” when other people do them/think them/say them/wear them/eat them/sing them/dance with them/etc. first.  It’s why it’s so easy to do what everyone else is doing.  It’s why humans who do things alone, who are the first to say something or do something is such a momentous event.  Affirmation and validation and self-confidence are all wrapped up together in our cave-people brains.  And it’s really hard when you are a reader, to never read a book about people like you.  Whether the “people like you” have a certain skin color, speak a particularly language, practice a certain set of beliefs, looks a certain way, or loves a certain way, it’s enormously important to our self-understanding to know that there are other people “like us” somewhere in the world.

And, as tribal animals, who understand that taking care of our human tribe is as important as taking care of ourselves, we need to make sure that everyone can find a book in which they can find themselves, and feel like they belong.  It might not be a book that you yourself enjoy, or with which you identify–and that’s ok. We’ll find some.  Or we’ll write some.  Or maybe you’ll write them.  But the point is, the more we celebrate diversity in all its forms, the more diversity there will be.

So today, we bring you the Green Carnation Short List.  Where the books haven’t yet been released in the US, the WorldCat links are provided.  We can get these books for you, if you come in and ask!

The winner will be announced at Foyle’s Book Shop in London on May 22nd!

Courtesy of http://greencarnationprize.com/