Over the Rainbow

The Rainbow Flag

One of the most frequent petty arguments that I see happening all around the world is that of the Rainbow. Those of us who identify as queer, or any other title under the LGBTQ2S+ umbrella are often accused of claiming the Rainbow for ourselves and this is often seen as a negative point for those who are homophobic. They say that it is unfair for us to claim "everything rainbow" as a Rainbow is not something that can be owned by any one group of people and most of us would tell you that we don't, however, if they're going to accuse us of it anyway then perhaps we should. This, however, is not the point of the Rainbow Flag. The first emergence and iteration of the Rainbow flag can be traced back to a then young artist named Gilbert Baker of San Francisco, California. It was in 1978 that, implored upon by friends, Gilbert Baker conceptualized the Rainbow Flag.

The Pink Triangle

Before this point, the go-to symbol for the Queer Liberation movement, then called the "Gay Rights Movement", was the pink triangle. The Pink Triangle is still used today but it is the history of the Pink Triangle that pushed Baker to create something new for the young members of the movement to rally behind. You see it was Hitler himself who created the Pink Triangle in the first place, it was used to identify Queer folk as the Star of David was to identify Jewish folk. It was not just the Queer folk that were identified with a pink triangle, it was all of those deemed "sexually deviant" and so the Queers of World War II were categorized with the likes of Pedophiles and Rapists. It was during this time as well that the most advanced research into sexuality and gender was destroyed, but that is a topic for another post. At the beginning of the modern Queer Liberation movement though, the Pink Triangle was claimed and subverted, used as a symbol through Bricolage, no longer a symbol that marked LGBTQ2S+ for death but instead to remind them what they were fighting for.

The Colourful Meaning

After the assassination of Harvey Milk the popularity of the Rainbow flag escalated, due to demands and limitations, the pink stripe was removed from the original concept. In recent years the collection of colours on the flag may shift from place and time but the meanings still remain for each colour. of the original flag the colours mean as follows:

Pink: Sex/Sexuality

Red: Life

Orange: Healing

Yellow: Sunlight

Green: Nature

Turquoise: Magic/Art

Blue: Serenity

Purple: Spirit

Some newer iterations of the flag include black, brown and white stripes. 

Black/Brown: Race Inclusivity

The black and brown stripes were added as an acknowledgment of the intersectional issues that are created by gender, sexuality, and race when they meet.

White: Rememberance

Finally, we come to the white stripe, this is an acknowledgment of all those that we have lost along the way. Those who died because they were queer, because of violence against the community, because of ignorance and disease, and even just those who did not live long enough to see their battles come to fruition.

I would like you to take some time now that we are at the end of this post and think about those we have lost, can you name many people? Why or why not? In other posts, we will explore some of those people that you may or may not already know about.

Until then,
Keep dreaming of Freedom,
Rei

References

Shankar, L. (2017, April 19). How the Pink Triangle Became a Symbol of Queer Resistance. Retrieved April 3, 2019, from https://hiskind.com/how-the-pink-triangle-became-a-symbol-of-queer-resistance/

Baker, G. (n.d.). Rainbow Flag: Origin Story. Retrieved April 3, 2019, from https://gilbertbaker.com/