It’s PRIDE month, yippee. A whole month of celebrating diversity and acceptance (in some countries) and for others a time for protest and being visual. But, what the hell is that rainbow flag all about...
Now
before anyone says “I’m sick of pride month” or “why do the gays get a month of
celebration”. Until LGBT+ people have EQUALITY and are SAFE all around the
World there will always be a need for PRIDE month. Gay Pride was not born of a
need to celebrate being gay, but our right to exist without persecution. So
instead of wondering why there isn’t a Straight Pride movement, be thankful you
don’t need one. And yes, I also agree there are other issues that need
highlighting too, so get off your ass and do it!
You
will see loads of Pride flags over the next few weeks so read on to learn more.
Before The Pride Flag.
A flag
isn’t just a representation of a country, club or association. It is firstly
borne from the need to identify oneself. This of course has been done for the
wrong reasons in the past, the most notorious would be by the Nazi’s and their
use of tattooing a number on a Jewish persons wrist. The Nazi’s also identified
gay people with a pink triangle and lesbians and other “asocial” people with a
black triangle. It’s sometimes forgotten that the Nazi’s didn’t ONLY want to
rid the World of all the Jewish people. They also murdered 1,000’s of Gypsies
and I’m sure would have worked through all the groups that didn’t fit into
their perfect World order. A selection of the identifying patches can be seen
below:
Even
then the patch for gay people was bright and cheerful. This pink triangle was
liberated and used by the LGBT community but the connotations from the War and
the holocaust could never be forgotten. Gay victims of Nazism were not
officially recognised in the immediate aftermath of the Third Reich but Berlin
now has a memorial to homosexuals persecuted under Nazism next to the
original Jewish Holocaust Memorial site. It takes the form of a
concrete cube with a slit on one side – through which visitors can see video of
two men kissing.
My Pride Flag.
One of
the most ubiquitous and recognisable symbols today was created over 40 years
ago by Gilbert Baker. It was against the turbulent times in the late 1970’s in
America that San Francisco City Supervisor Harvey Milk, the first openly gay
person ever to be elected to public office in California, encouraged Gilbert
Baker in 1977 to devise a unique symbol for the gay community – an insignia of
pride capable of affirming social independence.
Baker
loved the idea of using a field of stacked stripes as a symbol for many
stitched together as one. The gay community, he believed, deserved a fabulous
emblem entirely of its own fashioning. “We needed something beautiful,” Baker
concluded, “something from us.” With his machine sewing skills (self taught drag
queens always had to make their own outfits) he designed a flag of 8 stripes,
two more than the version now recognised internationally as an emblem for the
LGBT community – and each colour was assigned a symbolic meaning. A band of hot
pink (representing sexuality) ran across the top of the flag in the original
scheme, followed by red (which stood for life), then by orange (for healing),
yellow (sunlight), green (nature), turquoise (art/magic), indigo (serenity/harmony), and
violet (spirit) at the bottom.
Displayed
for the first time in the United Nations Plaza in downtown San Francisco in
June 1978, this eight-striped version was produced by a team of 30 volunteers
commandeering the washing machines of a public laundromat in order to rinse the
dye from the fabric and the wide attic space of a gay community centre, where
the individual strips were ironed and sewn together. When Baker approached a
company to mass-produce the flags, he found out that “hot pink” was not
commercially available. The flag was then reduced to seven stripes.
In November 1978, San Francisco’s lesbian, gay and bisexual community was stunned when the city’s first openly gay supervisor, Harvey Milk, was assassinated. Wanting to demonstrate the gay community’s strength and solidarity in the aftermath of the tragedy, the Pride Committee decided to use Baker’s flag. The indigo stripe was eliminated so that the colours could be divided evenly along the parade route - three colours on one side and three on the other. Soon the six colours were incorporated into a six-striped version that became popularised and that, today is recognized by the International Congress of Flag Makers.
It was not accidental that the day we voted for Marriage Equality in Ireland is also Harvey Milk Day - 22nd May.
Baker died on March 31st 2017 at the age of 65 but not before an original flag got a place of honour in the World renowned New York’s MOMA (Museum of Modern Art). Read more HERE.
I’ll finish with this quote from Baker
“We needed something beautiful, something from us. The rainbow is so perfect because it really fits our diversity in terms of race, gender, ages, all of those things. Plus, it’s a natural flag—it’s from the sky!”
John
The Captain Ryan
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