The Redesigned Rainbow Flag, Monstrously Ugly

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.

A Very Queer Notion About LGBT Literature

Entertainment Weekly's Pride Double Issue for June 2020 published a Q & A article by David Canfield called "The Library Is Open." These interviews involved four up and coming queer (I hate that term) authors and was conducted via Zoom.  (It should be noted that the authors--Nicole Dennis-Benn, Naoise Dolan, Akwaeke Emezi, and Garth Greenwell--are all under the age of 45.)

Sandwiched between the article title and Canfield's byline is a headnote briefly introducing the
four authors. The headnote immediately makes this startling statement--"There's never been a more exciting time for queer literature." I don't know who to blame for such a false pronouncement, Canfield or one of the magazine's editors. Whoever wrote that statement is clearly unaware of the enormous amount of gay and lesbian literature that came out of the 1980s and 1990s. During those decades, I was writing for the New York Native and the Lambda Book Report and was reviewing some of those books.

In the 1980s and '90s,  there was an explosion of novels, short stories, plays, and poetry coming from black gay writers, for example. Melvin Dixon, Randall Kenan, Thomas Glave, Assotto Saint, and Essex Hemphill are a few black gay names that come to mind. Plus there were several black gay literary journals that were being published back then. Among them were Blackheart, Pyramid Periodical, and Other Countries.

Other gay and lesbian writers included David Leavitt, Christopher Bram, Audre Lorde, Rita Mae Brown, Alice Walker, Felice Picano and his fellow Violet Quill writers.

Anyone who had ever set foot in a gay bookstore like the Oscar Wilde Memorial Bookstore in Greenwich Village and its nearby competitor A Different Light and marveled at the hundreds, perhaps thousands, of LGBT books and periodicals on their shelves would scoff at the idea that today is "a more exciting time for queer literature."

Celebrating World Pride And Stonewall 50 Together

 I went to the World Pride parade in the Chelsea section of Manhattan yesterday. Boy, was it crowded and super long. When the parade ended, it was almost 12:30 in the morning!

A recent sighting: Propped up outside one of the display windows of the Bank Street Bookstore, an Upper West Side of Manhattan establishment that specializes in children's books, was a small black message board with removable letters of the alphabet. On it was this message, with one letter missing: "[I]T'S PRIDE BITCHES. SHAKE YA ASS!" It was placed in front of a display of Pride-themed children's books.

I couldn't resist the urge to put it in my tote bag and take it home where it will be put in a prominent place because it is such a novelty item. I may even take a photo of it and put it in one of my photo albums.

Happy Pride Month

Today is the first day of Pride Month! I hope everyone will have a happy Pride Month. I'm looking forward to the Stonewall 50 celebrations, which will probably last until the end of the year.

This month also marks the twentieth anniversary of  the publication of Fighting Words: Essays by Black Gay Men, an anthology I edited. It was published in 1999 by Avon Books.

Happy Pride Month 2018

I hope everyone has a happy pride month.

I'm looking forward to Stonewall 50 next year when we celebrate the 50th anniversary of the Stonewall uprising in Greenwich Village.

"Growing Up, Out, And Powerful": An Excuse To Rant

Alternating between militancy and humor, Growing Up, Out and Powerful is a semi-improvisational, autobiographical theatre piece. "[Its intent is] to detail and dramatize the process of becoming a sane, healthy, lesbian/gay, progressive person of color in a world that tends to be otherwise," said John Patterson, the director.

Through poetry, songs, monologues, and discussion, the five performers (Patterson, Colin Robinson, Pam Lewis, Nestor Millan, and Lourdes Perez) attempt to fulfill that promise.

It runs through June 27 [1987] at the Castillo Cultural Center, 7 East 20th Street, in Manhattan, in six evening performances. Each of  those shows spotlights different guest poets, and is part of an overall celebration of Gay Pride Month.

Of the five, Patterson was the only experienced actor, which was obvious--he was the one who gave an unstilted, self-confident, and joyful performance.

Surrounded by the audience on three sides, Patterson and company occupied a sparsely furnished set that represented, said the press release, a living room in a railroad flat. Frankly, I couldn't tell where it was supposed to be.

Initially, the dialogue was lively and humorous as they exchanged reminiscences about being black or Latino homosexual adolescents. After about the first 20 minutes, the show began to go downhill. With the exception of Patterson, the autobiographies began to ramble; nothing significant was said. Other problems I found annoying were Nestor Millan's heavily accented English which made it hard to understand him and Pam Lewis's soapbox histrionics. In addition, the show ran close to three hours, with no intermission. It should have been cut to 90 minutes, have as its main focus the lives of three people, not five, and have a more cohesive structure.

As for the special guests--poets Cheryl Clarke and Jewelle Gomez, on the night that I attended--they should not have been isolated in a separate segment but integrated among the regular cast members in a five-minute cameo appearance. In so doing, they would have been given the chance to share a few lines of poetry as well as some thoughts in a manner that would not have destroyed the theatre piece's continuity.

It became apparent to me that Growing Up, Out, and Powerful was an excuse to put forth political ideas endorsed by the New Alliance Party, the left-leaning group that runs the Castillo Cultural Center. But then again, that fact should come as no surprise to anyone familiar with NAP and their tactics.

This article was submitted to the New York Amsterdam News on June 19, 1987. It was not published.

The Rainbow Flag's Colors

In Steve Vezeris's brief entry in Out in All Directions: The Almanac of Gay and Lesbian America (Warner Books, 1995), he pointed out that "[t]he first rainbow [flag] design 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." He continued: "For  the 1979 [San Francisco Gay Freedom Day] parade, due to production constraints, hot pink and turquoise stripes were dropped and royal blue replaced the indigo stripe." According to Rainbow Pride, the documentary about the rainbow flag and its creator Gilbert Baker, hot pink and turquoise was dropped because those colors were not on the palette of flag makers.

Harlem Pride

Mark your calendars! Harlem Pride will be celebrating gay liberation June 12-26, in the Mount Morris Park Historic District, on 119th Street, in the center of a thriving "gayborhood." "This historic event," says the press release,"for the first time brings to Harlem, in one location, several LGBT institutions that have been fundamental in fostering tolerance as well as a diverse future." Organizations such as the Audre Lorde Project, SAGE,the Leslie-Lohman Gay Art Foundation, and the Human Rights Campaign will be participating on Harlem Pride Day (June 26), a block-long party, that wraps up the event, a day before the annual Gay Pride Parade downtown. So get ready to party hardy and proudly wear the rainbow colors. For more info, go to www.casafrela.com.

Proud Colors

Rainbow Pride (Marie-Josee Ferron: documentary; color; 60 mins.;2006)

San Francisco brings to mind many images, both pleasant and not so pleasant--cable cars, steep hills, the Golden Gate Bridge, Harvey Milk's assassination, the occasional earthquake. Add one more image to the mix--this one for the pleasant column--the rainbow flag, a symbol of gay pride and empowerment. It was created by Gilbert Baker, a self-described "drag queen from way back."
Baker's flag and its impact on gay culture is the subject of an hour-long documentary, Rainbow Pride, that was filmed mostly in San Francisco and Key West, Florida, and first aired on public television three years ago.
In 1977, when Baker was commissioned to design a flag to be hung from lampposts during that year's pride parade, no one could have imagined that one day its colors would become such an international symbol for the GLBT community (thanks to New York's "Stonewall 25" celebration that featured a mile-long version of the flag).
The hand-made flag originally had eight colors (each signifying a different theme). Two of them (hot pink and turquoise) were later dropped because, as one interviewee pointed out, those colors were not on the palette of flag makers.
Baker, who knew the late openly gay politician Harvey Milk, gives him credit for inspiring the flag. "Harvey's whole message, his whole life was all about gay people should be visible and that we should come out of the closet. So the flag really fit with that in terms of it being a visibility tool."
That visibility, however, can be a double-edged sword. For gays and lesbians, it becomes, as one man in the film pointed out, a "universal Red Cross" sign, a marker that says here is a safe haven when trouble arises. Homophobes also know what the colors symbolize; for them it becomes a red flag, a signal that here is a potential target for gay bashing.
Rainbow Pride, beautifully shot and edited, with an excellent musical soundtrack, tells the story of the flag's creation without voice-over narration. It relies solely on images (some of it archival) and the voices of those on-camera. The Stonewall Riots, Anita Bryant, Harvey Milk are seamlessly interwoven in the overall "narrative." These moments add significance to the rainbow flag because they are milestones in the evolution of gay pride and although the colors have been used in tacky ways--such as on key chains and license plates--their popularity arises from a need for an oppressed people to feel good about themselves and each other. Or as Ann Northrop, a longtime activist, says in the film, "It's still a brilliant signifier and connector and identifier of us as a special tribe of people."