Douglas Murray, a New York Post columnist, described the rainbow flag in his column (January 24, 2025) as "a perfectly pleasant symbol of gay liberation" that "has gotten more monstrously ugly with each year." Amen!
The flag designer Gilbert Baker's simple six-color horizontally striped flag can be put in the If-it-ain't- broke, don't-fix-it category. Redesigning the flag by adding, to quote Mr. Murray, "a triangle and a little circle" to make it more inclusive with regard to race, ethnicity, and gender makes no sense to me. The flag's colors have nothing to do with any of that because they stand for much broader meanings.
It's obvious Mr. Murray has no knowledge of those meanings when he says, "[I]f the colors of the flag were meant to represent different races, then who were the orange and red stripes meant to represent[?]. Was it gays with too much fake tan on? Or white lesbians who had been left out in the sun too long?"
He concludes this part of the column by saying, "Even thinking that the flag was about race was a demonstration of Olympic-level stupidity." But then he fails to explain what each color symbolizes. That would have helped his readers to see the flag's universality.
Since he doesn't seem to know about each color's meaning, I would suggest Mr. Murray get a copy of Out in All Directions: The Almanac of Gay and Lesbian America, published in 1995.
The brief entry on the flag, by Steve Vezeris, points out that the flag originally "had eight horizontal stripes, from top to bottom: hot pink for sex, red for life, orange for healing, yellow for sun, green for serenity with nature, turquoise for art, indigo for harmony, and violet for spirit."
Indigo was later replaced by royal blue. And, according to the 2006 documentary Rainbow Pride, the colors hot pink and turquoise were dropped. The reason: those colors were not on the palette of flag makers.
No comments:
Post a Comment