When in 1978 Gilbert Baker made the First Pride flag for the San Francisco Gay Freedom Day celebration, it was a grassroots action to symbolize hope and liberation with the colors of the rainbow displayed as horizontal stripes. Red stood for life, orange for healing, yellow for the sun, green for nature, turquoise for art, pink for sexuality, indigo for harmony, and violet for spirit
These were attributes of ALL the people the flag represents regardless of race, color, creed, sexual orientation or gender identity. Just as the Stonewall Rebellion began as a spontaneous community outburst, one inside the bar and subsequently coalescing into one on the street, and not, while the current generation fights over which single person started it needing an individual to identify with because, apparently the concept of community is too difficult to comprehend, an individual. Like those who morph the Bible, that fictitious person’s orientation and gender identity came into play changing periodically so that over the fifty years since the Rebellion roles have been changed, some invented, and, after a period of time, someone announces that someone else threw either the fictitious shot glass or the fictitious brick and got it all going.
The obsession to claim a link to the person who started it all became divisive and each hero was rolled over the last to become the new.
We ALL did something then as ONE. It is being divided now.
Just as the meaning of Stonewall would be more complete with the proper understanding when it came to DIVERSITY AND INCLUSION, so too the stripes would be seen as inclusive as they represent the diversity of the Community if there was not this fight to be King of the Hill on flat land.
As a grassroots movement of volunteers with little money, mass producing the flags became a financial burden not only because the flags were hand sown, the commercially printed ones coming much later, and as the pink and turquoise were so expensive, costly. Thus they were subsequently dropped and we have the six stripes of the Pride flag that symbolizes all of us and our community.
No color was removed to white wash the flag as there was nothing about the flag that placed any one race, color, creed, orientation or gender identity over another.
It became the flag that Gay activists fought under, winning any rights the Gay Community has won, a symbol of unity and oneness, and, obviously, a symbol of forward progress which those who do not learn real History seem to not grasp.
Just as with Stonewall, being part of a unified community seems to be a little too much to grasp, and, although there is no problem with all the various flags of people within the community to symbolize themselves as sub-categories, division has come in as a new flag has appeared on the scene to represent all of us.
In June 2017, the city of Philadelphia, not the grassroots Community, had a revised version of the flag designed by the marketing firm Tierney that added black and brown stripes to the top of the standard six-color flag to draw attention to issues of people of color within the Gay community because, apparently, it needs to be pointed out what we had assumed all along, these people had the same “virtues” as the rest of us.
Apparently, as with so much else, this flag came from a design company that imposed its design on the community and not from within the community. Once again, if we expect to be respected and recognized, we can be so as long as we do it the way we are told to. Someone made money for the design, production, and sale, and it was accepted like a grateful crumb from the masters table and was honored and cemented in place by being the basis of the Progressive Flag.
We accepted the pat on the head but seemed not prepared for the shove out the door like a good lap dog.
We were once again dazzled by a shiny object and just accepted it from the masters.
They treat us poorly, to put it mildly, but then, seeing there is money to be made, tell us what symbolizes us and bestow through their largess the symbols they choose and if the chosen symbol, a Pride flag on a beer can or clothing in stores, is challenged they will not defend their right as a private company to sell what they want and how, or show their real commitment to the Community, they cave, remove the rainbows, and all is back where it had been when the relio-fascists had been keeping us down.
But, hey, there was a rainbow on the Pride Whoopee-Cushion so they love us.
Ignoring history, and obviously unaware of what the Pride Flag stands for, in June 2018, a new design, the Progressive Pride Flag was released adding the Black and Brown stripes and the three stripes of the Transgender flag slicing to the right in a chevron through the original flag as a sign of inclusion and progress within the community because the flag representing us all did not do that, and there had been no previous progress.
Only White Gay people got their rights according to the new history and there was never any interracial activity.
In the over 40 years I have fought for the Community at one point losing my job, winning it back in a district and appellate court trial because of my advocacy for students which was successful in getting sexual orientation and gender identity into school district policy in the Bible Belt which got equality for all students of every strip on any flag it was inclusive progress.
The chevron along the hoist features black, brown, light blue, pink, and white stripes to bring those marginalized communities to the forefront, and the official description states,
“the arrow points to the right to show forward movement, while being along the left edge shows that progress still needs to be made.”
It’s the wedging across the Pride flag like the horses did at Gay rallies and that bothers me as it implies the inclusion needs to be forced on the old, the ones who were totally aware of inclusion when they were physically attacked at Gay Rights rallies, or Baptists invaded a Pride Parade hitting marchers with Bibles.
Sadly, even this attempt to be more redundantly inclusive was further modified so that the brown and black stripes and the Trans flag were reduced in size creating a triangular field of yellow with a purple circle in the middle to represent Intersexed people as the most prominent, while, unless as a person of color you are Black or Brown, you have to assume you are in the stripes of the old flag because of your virtues, but you certainly didn’t make it onto the new flag. for your race.
Where are the Two-Spirit people, the Asian and Pacific Islanders? Are they, in the name of progress getting further marginalized by having to settle with being lumped into another group’s color stripe?
During this present June, when I have gone into bars, I have seen all the various sub-categories represented by their flags which had me look many up. However, there were no Pride Flags with the stripes which left the Elders in the Community out, the ones who created the atmosphere that allows for all the flags to proudly exist.
So a symbol of unity is being carved up by the various groups within the community so the flag is now more about division than unity.
Representing sexual orientation there are 14 flags, 5 for sexual attraction, 9 for gender identity, and, now that we let society call us “Queer” again, a Queer flag because those who had to live with that word as a weapon and do not want to be called that now, are no more or just have to accept we are to be called that by those for whose future we fought to removed it, or, we have to settle for the seat in the corner Baby was never to get?
I had a Queer flag. It was the Rainbow one.
So, a unified event, Stonewall, has subsequently become competition for credit among those viewing history from a modern lens and do not bother to read beyond a friend’s text or something written on the internet by someone claiming they know something when they actually do not.
The present shot glass/brick debate.
A unified flag based on virtue not race or any other specific characteristics of a group is being divided in that same divisive action as the Progress Flag, I assume called that because “Progress” doesn’t trigger people the way the word Gay does,or, heaven forbid, using the word “Pride”.
The Philadelphia flag was found non-inclusive by one group who forced a redesign of the flag producing the Progressive Flag. Other groups are just as deserving of representation and there is that whole field in the chevron ripe for filling, so this could continue.
It all started, rightly or wrongly with the blanket term at the time, preferred over the clinical and humanity reducing term “Homosexual”, Gay. Now we have an ever increasing alphabet with disagreements over the correct order and hell to pay if someone omits a letter by mistake or violates the ever morphing correct order which is too often assumed these days to be a personal attack or an indication of the willful holding back of the Community. Most straight people and many Gays joke about this ever increasing hard to remember designation of the Community.
I have a good friend who was proud the other day to add guacamole to his BLT to create an LGBT Sandwich.
The Flag is catching up.
I am sad to admit it but, if the Progress Flag and whatever shows up next June is any indication, judging from the modern post-Stonewall revisions of history, the ever increasing alphabet, more concern for knowing everyone’s preferred pronouns which have no logic to them, in many cases, beyond personal taste rather than addressing issues, and redoing of the flag like it was just a meaningless piece of drapery in a futile effort to be inclusive while deciding who does and who does not make the flag cut when the original flag avoided all that by representing SHARED attributes and virtues, it appears that, while in the past our goal was to get equality with the tide raising all boats, the goal of the Community now is to divide from within so we can be conquered from without.
The fight is to erase Community.
I weep for the people in the past upon whom this is spit. I have the advantage they do not of being alive and able to wipe it off.
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