By ISABELLA BURCIAGA
Staff Writer
Lavender marriages are defined as ¨male- female mixed-orientation marriages, undertaken as a marriage of convenience to conceal socially stigmatized sexual orientation of one or both partners¨. They were suspected in Hollywood from the 1920s to the 1960s, they were culturally decided to be less and less speculated around the 1970s in Hollywood after the Stonewall Riots of 1969. During the Golden Age of Hollywood, iconic actors and actresses like Rock Hudson and Janet Gaynor who were rumored to have LGBT+ affairs would typically be set up by their agency to have an arranged marriage to save their careers and quell homosexual rumors that were fluttering about. As an LGBT person myself, I can see both sides of agreeing to a lavender marriage during the 1920s. While it would pain me to close myself to the rest of the world, these arranged marriages were often just an economic decision: be true to everyone else or have a career in Hollywood. Robert Taylor´s marriage to Barbra Stanwyck, a fellow rumored LGBT actress, is an example of an obvious lavender marriage as after they were announced man and wife, Taylor refused to kiss his bride and spent his honeymoon night at his mother’s house. In today’s Hollywood, many celebrities are able to have successful careers and represent the LGBT community proudly for all, and Lavender marriages have appeared to ´die out´ in modern Hollywood. Gay is okay in Hollywood, and while very few in Hollywood during that era were openly out, we should also not forget what it was like to be Rock Hudson and Barbra Stanwyck, who although were in marriages against the LGBT revolution, were dealt tricky cards for life that they believed they had to instate. If today’s world should learn anything from Lavender Marriages of the 1920s, it should be that the future has finally arrived and LGBT people of today should still recognize these men and women as individuals who were forced to make decisions and have struggled themselves and to never forget that.