shag carpet bomb wrote:
>
> from reading around, I suspect that the use of flowers to symbolize an
> effeminate man may have simply been a way of associating something
> considered feminine (flowers in general) with an effeminate man,
I do not know nearly as much about the relevant cultural history here as I should, but query: Is there any necessary link (and was there in the past) between effeminacy and homosexuality? When someone in (say) 1650 called a man a pansy, i.e. effeminate, was there any suggestion of his also being a sodomite? Someplace in his criticism Coleridge identifies some kind of writing as effeminate? Would his readers have thought, "sodomite"? Remember there was no word for homosexuality as a social category in the early 19th ce.
Carrol