kaleidoscopepridemagazine-blog

[kaleidoscopepridemagazine-blog]

Hello!! Kaleidoscope PRIDE Magazine is an up-and-coming magazine based in Connecticut, USA. Our goals are to provide easy access to LGBT health and safety information, to give LGBT artists a platform for sharing work and receiving feedback on work, to write articles on the history from the gender and sexuality movement so far and the history being made today, and, most importantly, to create a safe space to celebrate the LGBT community with pride and no fear.

Our first issue is slated for a late September 2017 release. We have big things planned as we expand in the next coming months! If you’d like to support us, you can do so by subscribing to us. Subscriptions can be done through tumblr messaging or email (kaleidoscopepridemagazine@gmail.com)--all you need is as little as a message that says, “subscribe,” and we’ll take it from there!

Our website will go live closer to the release of the first issue, as will our other social media. Submissions for art, anything from nails to photography to jewelry to drawings, will be accepted starting from the second issue.

Below the read more is an excerpt from an article that appears in our first issue, Spilling the Paint Bucket. We’d include photos of some featured art, but this is tumblr, so one thing did have to go wrong while making this post. Trust us that it’s pretty.

Thank you for your support, we hope to see you at our first issue!!

“The flag is an action – it’s more than just the cloth and the stripes. When a person puts the Rainbow Flag on his car or his house, they’re not just flying a flag. They’re taking action” (sftravel.com).

The most vibrant and wonderful colors of pride were introduced to the world in the 70s. Gilbert Baker, a San Francisco drag queen, noticed the American flag suddenly becoming popularized on the bicentennial of the United States. It inspired him to start thinking about the kind of symbol a flag offers, where the flag’s meaning and what it represents is immediately recognized and understood.

Baker was already an established banner-maker for protest marches by the time Harvey Milk, the first openly gay city supervisor for San Francisco and Baker’s friend, approached him to make a symbol for the San Francisco Gay and Lesbian Freedom Day Parade. Milk wanted to emphasize the importance of visibility and living in truth for the gay community. He believed a flag would help spread these ideas.

Baker and his group of thirty volunteers received a thousand dollars from the parade committee. He brought his operation to the Gay Community Center, located at 330 Grove Street, where he and his volunteers took over the top floor attic and started to put together his vision. They filled large trash cans with water, natural dye, and salt, then dipped thousands of yards of cotton into them and dragged the strips of fabric onto the roof to dry. The dye was allowed to set before the fabric was taken to the laundromat to be rinsed. Because dye was prohibited from public washing machines, they waited until night after the general public was done to put in the strips. The washing machines turned all sort of fabulous colors. They then put Clorox in the machines and hoped the next users clothes could escape unscathed. After that, it took four hands to move the fabric in the sewing machine, and twenty hands to iron it.

The result was two flags: one with eight stripes of color--pink for sex, red for life, orange for healing, yellow for sun, green for nature, turquoise for magic, indigo for peace, and purple for spirit--and one American flag with the stripes of a rainbow.

The flags were raised on June 25, 1978 in the San Francisco United Nations Plaza. The plaza was strategically chosen for its connection to global human rights issues. Paraders soon flooded the streets.

“We stood there and watched and saw the flags, and their faces lit up. It needed no explanation. People knew immediately that it was our flag” (nytimes.com).

The rainbow flag offered a positive and beautiful alternative to the popular yet historically tarnished pink Nazi triangle. It was made by hand and stitched by us, not put upon us. Rainbows are a phenomenon that occur naturally. They also fit the diversity of the community, from race to gender to sex, with their motley of colors of all hues. The rainbow has been used in other flag designs over the course of history, but no use became more widespread and influential than the modern meaning given to it. Flags are intended to proclaim power, but the significance of the rainbow is not only in the power of LGBT individuals but in the sense of community and belonging it conveys by being flown. It provides a connection between individuals of the LGBT community with instant understanding of the safety it symbolizes.

“We needed something beautiful, something from us” (moma.org).

The flag was reduced to seven stripes when Baker approached San Francisco’s Paramount Flag Company about mass producing the new flag. Hot pink was not commercially available and very expensive to make at the time, so the flag was made without it. Then, in 1979, the Pride Parade Committee used Baker’s flag and eliminated the Indigo stripe so there would be an even number of colors. This allowed the flag to be divided into three colors on one side of the street and three on the other.

The flag was considered to become an international symbol when Baker was commissioned to make a mile long version for the parade celebrating the 25th anniversary of Stonewall.

Baker never trademarked the rainbow flag. He saw it as his gift to the world and believed it to be his life’s work.

“I’m amazed at the steel within our community; inside all that sorrow and all that setback, there’s this core of courage and bravery at so many people’s hearts. I’m happy that I’m living long enough to see this, but I wanted to. I want to see this so much!” (refinery29.com).