Put Out More Flags

My heart sinks down when I behold
A rainbow in the street.

With the end of June, in sight, I’m hoping for a break from the corporate waterboarding of the rainbow flag and its ever-morphing journey toward meaninglessness and cultural oblivion. With all this “pride”, eleven months of shame might be a relief.

I realize that this is more than curmudgeonly especially given that the rights of same-sex attracted people are clearly in the sights of Republicans. With abortion rights protections overthrown, certain judicial extremists are considering their next move. The egregious Clarence Thomas wrote:

In future cases, we should reconsider all of this Court’s substantive due process precedents, including Griswold, Lawrence, and Obergefell.

(In Griswold v. Connecticut, 1965, the court ruled that married couples have a right to access contraceptives. Lawrence v. Texas, 2003, established that states could not outlaw consensual gay sex. And the court’s 2015 decision in Obergefell v. Hodges established a constitutional right to same-sex marriage.)

This from the man credibly accused of sexual harassment. Interesting too, that Thomas did not mention Loving v. Virginia (1967) in which the Supreme Court ruled that laws banning interracial marriage violated the Equal Protection and Due Process Clauses of the 14th Amendment. This was the very rule cited as precedent in court decisions that held restrictions on same-sex marriage unconstitutional, including the Obergefell v. Hodges decision.

But I digress from “Pride” and my growing aversion to the rainbows.

First, a little history

My first pride event was in London in 1972 – fifty years ago this July.  I had attended some occasional Gay Liberation Front meetings at the London School of Economics in the previous months and was drawn into some of the discussions and the novelty of the thinking. I remember a tiered lecture hall, a few dozen participants mostly male, and a few impassioned speakers, all male, and not much else. It all felt a bit like the Militant group I kind of hung out with in my second year at Cardiff University only this time the men were gay.

I know there were women in the GLF, it’s just that I didn’t connect with them. In 1971, for example, GLF women leafleted the Gateways Club which is probably how I had heard of the GLF in the first place. I was not in the club the night the activists unplugged the jukebox and started to make speeches. As can be imagined, this was not a popular move and the bar owner, Gina Ware, had them removed. I think she called the police. This was much talked about for months. Outrage expressed. Lines drawn. Sides taken. Radical feminists were not welcome if they wanted to talk politics and disturb the universe. And anyway they dressed funny.

The march on Saturday, July 1st was billed as Gay Pride Carnival and it was part of a series of events and happenings that stretched over two weekends. This being 1972 – and the GLF always sincere in its efforts to be politically intersectional – those events included a vigil outside the US Embassy. NLF/ GLF – it was an easy transition.

I don’t remember going to the march with anyone but I remember milling about in Trafalgar Square and then setting off with the crowd plus a heavy police escort up Charing Cross Road to Oxford Street. It didn’t feel particularly daring and certainly not scary. Others have reported facing hostility but that’s not what I recall. In fact, the whole event seemed to be very orderly and sedate. 

Perhaps it was just the contrast with Grosvenor Square 1968 where I had been in the middle of a protest that turned very violent. I do remember feeling somewhat self-conscious marching down London’s main shopping street on a Saturday afternoon. I dare say I would still feel that way today. 

It was a march through, and not a parade. There were banners and people wearing lots of badges and buttons. That was the big thing – visibility. I don’t think I wore one. 

The march ended at Hyde Park and after a bit more milling about I left. Whether I went down the Gateways or back home I don’t remember. 

The first issue of Gay News came out that week. In response to a request for start-up money David Hockney is said to have responded, “If you want to bring out a nice magazine with lots of pictures of men, then I might be interested, but I don’t want anything to read.” 

Socialist revolutionaries did not have much appeal for many gay people trying to get on with their lives and funding was hard to come by. Gays in the establishment did not welcome the attention and were threatened by it. Life was bad enough already without bomb-throwers tossing the whole apple cart into the air. 

The first issue of the feminist magazine Spare RIB came out in June.  The pace of social change was heating up and going mainstream.  It was a heady time for politics. 

Waving the Flag

The first Pride rainbow flags were unfurled six years later in San Francisco and for decades the basic six stripes version was increasingly visible as the symbol of a growing movement.

The pink triangles and the black triangles and lambdas faded in significance. I remember thinking that the rainbow flag was a brilliant piece of marketing and how it built on the idea of the Rainbow Coalition of Fred Hampson and the Black Panthers.  But it didn’t speak to me and I never felt any particular pride or sense of ownership.

It was bold, colorful, and useful as a marker for gay-friendly businesses and that was about it.  But it didn’t stand for anything as far as I was concerned.

Many gay women have always had an ambivalent relationship with Pride and particularly with its most hedonistic displays of male sexuality. So much of women’s liberation was also alienating, focusing as it did on heterosexual issues and of course, its fear of the dreaded lavender menace,

Preserving, and extending women’s and lesbian rights was never top of the gay agenda. Men’s issues always took prominence and female matters always took a back seat. But live and let live, cultivate your own patch, find your own tribe, seek allies, and who cared anyway?

AIDS and the political right turn of the Thatcher-Reagan axis brought a new urgency to activism and the emphasis shifted to survival and then toward respectability. The movement grew up and wanted to become mainstream with the right to serve in the military, to adopt children without discrimination, and – the ultimate in bourgeois conformity – the right to get married. The young radicals of the early days would be astonished. But, of course, they grew up too. 

The Colors and Symbolism of the Flag

The colors of the original flag stood for abstract concepts and not specific identities. The two original flags had eight stripes: hot pink, red, orange, yellow, green, turquoise, indigo, and violet. The colors were later assigned the concepts of sex, life, healing, sun, serenity with nature, art, harmony, and spirit. For practical reasons (hot pink was hard to produce and an even number was preferred for display) the stripes were reduced to the now-familiar six. 

After T for trans was added to #LGB the other letters of the alphabet followed. An infinite number it seems, representing a thriving – primarily heterosexual – ecosystem of personalities, behaviors, habits, and predilections including most kinks and fetishes in the known universe. It was as if all the straights felt excluded and now wanted part of the action. That, and the amazing proliferation of identities that came along when queer theory took over academia. 

This was now about identities and inclusion and that needed new symbols. The original flag had to take it all on board. The trans flag was incorporated.  And what about black and brown people and other marginalized communities? They, too, must be added. And so, a once unifying symbol that included everyone is endlessly refracted to be more inclusionary.

Below is the new and annotated “progress” Pride flag. It incorporates the baby blue and pink of the trans flag (whoever thought those stereotypical colors made sense? but whatever) and added black and brown chevrons to represent and include black and brown people and those lost to AIDS.  

Some wag has interpreted the changes in this new pride order.

Missing from that cynical version are the commercial interests, corporate sponsorships, big pharma, and the medical-industrial complex. Given all that corporate sponsorship, a more accurate version of the rainbow flag would be plastered with corporate logos like a soccer player in the premier league.

This is merely the tip of the hypocrisy iceberg:

Surely we must all object to the rainbow-washing by pernicious corporations who earnestly promote the flag at every money-making opportunity to signal just how tolerant and inclusive they all are. And yet these same corporations have no problem ripping off the world for profit, destroying the environment, and, of course remaining silent on gay rights in the places around the globe where all non-conforming gays, lesbians, and women are routinely persecuted. The hypocrisy is astonishing.

But wait: as of 2021 there’s a new version:

This flag incorporates the intersex flag.

And then there’s this display of flags that ought to be incorporated. Because we must be inclusive.

Try putting all that together.

Some even see the authoritarian world of “no debate” this way.

There’s a flag for everyone it seems.

Wave all the flags you want. I’m done. Gender ideology is bonkers.

Put out more flags,? Please don’t. Let’s instead put some thought and energy into how to protect (and now regain) essential rights at home and around the world. That would be useful.

Featured image: Howard Hodgkin.