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On a warm evening in June, I find myself at a large gathering. It’s joyful and raucous. There's a stage where live music is being performed, people are dancing, and there are games being played. It is a celebration of love, of dignity, of individuality, of Pride. Painted in the golden light of the sunset, all throughout the crowd there are flags in a myriad of colors and combinations. People hold them aloft over their heads or hang them from any number of nearby structures. Amongst the myriad chromatic variations one flag stands out most prominently, a six colored rainbow, the flag from which all these are flags draw their inspiration from. I myself am holding one on a pole in my right hand as my left hand holds my partner’s hand, she is holding a flag clearly inspired by the six colored rainbow, but in pink, blue and white. This rainbow flag I hold is the symbol for the reason anyone is here on this summer day. It's a Pride flag, the symbol of the  Pride movement, the ongoing fight for the liberation of all queer people. But Pride didn’t always exist and neither did the flag.

For me being openly and proudly queer has always been an act of blatant rebellion. Pride for me was rebellious and joyful. Stepping away from the shame and guilt that the religion I grew up in gave me and choosing to be myself was the most difficult and rebellious choice I made. Growing up in a small rural community whose largest church was of the crazy pentecostal variety, being queer and being proud of it was about as controversial as you could be. The people in my community responded to my queerness in a way that only drove me further into rebellion. I was shunned by most of the religious community of my hometown (that is to say most of my hometown generally). In school people would make very public prayer circles dedicated to me and the like three other queer kids in our school.I responded to their rejection of me with rejection of my own by engaging with all the things deemed wrong and immoral by my community I adopted the aesthetics of satanism, I started to read people like Peter Kropotkin and Karl Marx, I dyed my hair pink, I smoked weed, I had promiscuous sex, and I had fun doing all of those unashamedly prideful in it as I rubbed it in the face of the community that never really accepted me. Towards the end of my teen years and into adulthood this rebellion drove me to travel to Kansas City regularly to be part of the Kansas City Hardcore scene. (KCHC Never Die!). This is where I first met a lot of the queer people I hold dearly today, it’s where I met my partner and it’s where I learned about making my rebellion mean something more than just lashing out blindly. We wrote songs in solidarity with queer people across the world, we turned out hatred for the religion that shamed and rejected us into blistering social critique, we connected the liberation of our queer community with the liberation of all marginalized communities, and on more than one occasion we rioted, an act that was in many ways an echo of our forebears whose riot built our future

In the Summer of 1969 in New York City a riot broke out at the Stonewall Inn, a popular, but illegal, like most similar establishments of its time, it was run by organized crime. Police had come to shut down the establishment at 1 AM when the bar was at its liveliest. At first the patrons of the establishment complied with the orders but when the police were seen being rough with a woman, years of resentment among the gathered crowd of queer people exploded into violence. Coins, rocks, and burning objects were hurled at the police forcing them to retreat back into the bar until a riot team came to rescue them (Geoghegan). As someone who has been involved in a riot or two in my time I both highly relate and fully support this behavior. There’s an axiom I hear often among my fellow queer friends and comrades, and one I personally love dearly, “the first Pride was a riot” the Stonewall Riot is the event being referred to in that phrase, it birthed the modern movement for queer rights. This is a moment I am incredibly proud of for me I relate it to the moment I truly decided to accept who I was and live my truth proudly and without shame. I would also be remiss to point out that it was a riot caused largely by police brutality, as the 2020 Black Lives Matter protests show, we are still very much fighting the same battles today that we were half a century ago. This riot inspired a movement characterized by a rebellious fighting spirit demanding rights rather than the courteous, docile, assimilationism that had characterized previous activism for queer rights (Geoghegan) , a movement unafraid of being loud and truthful. Rather than be ashamed of who we are and meekly act like we are just like everyone else in order to get rights, we have chosen to embrace who we are and fight. In a word; Pride, and Pride would need a symbol for this fight.

The Stonewall Riot (Geoghegan)

The first time I actually sat down and thought about the pride flag I had two general thoughts. Firstly, it was very loud, almost maximalist in its aesthetic. It demands to be seen and acknowledged, it’s far too bright to simply be ignored. Secondly to me it seemed incredibly joyful, despite the oppression and discrimination queer people had faced. We had chosen decades ago, when that discrimination was far worse, to honor joy and beauty in our largest, most unifying symbol. In 1978 Gilbert Baker was discussing with his friend the filmmaker Artie Bressan Jr. about the need for a new symbol to represent the new fight for queer rights. At the time the queer rights movement used the pink triangle, a symbol that the Nazis had used for gay people during the brutal oppression of queer people under its rule, and I get why it was used, it honors and remembers those that we had lost to a horrific period in history but it is also so overwhelming bleak, I can’t imagine living in a world where the defining symbol of my community was one of historical trauma rather than Joy.  Baker and Bressan believed rightfully that they needed a more positive symbol to celebrate love rather than one based in collective trauma (Baker). Baker thought of the flags of the United States and France and thought of how the nations of both flags owe their existence to riots and revolutions, he thought “a gay nation should have a flag too, to proclaim its own idea of power” (Baker).

Gilbert Baker would go on that year to design and then make, with the help of his community, the original eight color rainbow flag. The colors each had a specific meaning pink for sex, red for life, orange for healing, yellow for the sun, green for nature, turquoise for art, indigo for serenity, and purple for the spirit. The flag was originally flown on 25 June 1978 at the United Nations Plaza in San Francisco for the San Francisco Gay Freedom Parade. (“The Rainbow Flag”). The ideas behind the original flag were bold and idealistic but in a turn I’ve always found incredibly funny. That flag design evolved into the modern flag design based on purely practical concerns rather than idealistic or symbolic concerns, even in our acts of joyful rebellion we are still slaves to pragmatism it seems. The flag was immediately very popular and when Baker moved to have the flags mass produced by the paramount flag company hot pink fabric was not readily available so that color was dropped, and eight colors became seven. Soon after in the wake of Harvey Milk’s assassination (if you’re queer and you haven’t watched Milk yet you are now obligated to ignore this post and go watch that movie) when many of the flags would be hung on posts turquoise was also dropped as having a more symmetric flag would make it easier (Campbell-Dollaghan). I would also take this moment to point out that even in a memorial for the death of one of our most prominent people we decided to use a joyful symbol rather than a somber one. The iconic Six color flag was born from that change and it’s been ubiquitous with the queer community ever since. 

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The Original 8 Color Flag (“The Rainbow Flag”).

While the rainbow flag became the overarching symbol for the queer community and the Pride movement, starting in the 90s other flags began to appear to represent more specific groups underneath the queer umbrella. A bisexual flag came to exist, there were several versions of the lesbian flag, some of which were quite controversial, to this day I’m still annoyed that one specific version of the lesbian flag hasn’t been agreed upon, even if it isn’t really my place.There was the pastel blue, pink, and white transgender` Pride flag which came into existence in 1999, a personal favorite of mine both for having a really pretty choice of colors and for being the flag that represents my partner, everytime I see it I can’t help but smile. In the 2010s as people came into more awareness of the myriad unique forms of the queer experience we began to see things like the pansexual pride flag, the nonbinary pride flag, the asexual pride flag, and many more (Advocate.com Editors). I’m sure most young people are familiar with the myriad highly specific pride flags that now exist on places like tumblr. As someone who was involved in online queer spaces heavily in the early 2010s I felt like every day I was encountering a new kind of pride flag, often times this was also how I was encountering Identities I had never known about, it felt like the possibilities were limitless and every identity was worthy of celebration and representation. There was even a push to acknowledge the ways in which the pride movement historically hasn’t done a good job including and valuing people of color and to move towards better supporting queer people of color by adding a black and a brown stripe to the regular rainbow pride flag. (Advocate.com Editors). 

Honestly I have somewhat conflicting thoughts about the proliferation of so many different highly specific pride flags. On one hand I’m glad we’ve come to celebrate the myriad unique ways in which queer life is experienced, that we are honoring the complex beautiful weave of identities that make up the community, and that we are making symbols to acknowledge those identities that have been historically excluded in more older less developed forms of queer activism. On the other hand I can’t help but feel that we are losing the unifying nature of the original pride flag, that we do really need that symbol of unified solidarity to acknowledge our shared experience and history, to acknowledge our culture, that we are infinitely unique and beautifully varied but we are one people. This brings me to one last flag I’d like to discuss which in turn brings me back to my story from way back at the beginning of this post. I want to discuss the Progress Flag.

On that warm evening in June I noticed one specific variety of flag. I've seen it more and more the last few years until now it’s starting to rival the traditional rainbow Pride flag in its ubiquitousness. In fact, while I may be holding a regular rainbow flag at this event, and my partner holds a transgender Pride flag, the flag I speak of is the one that flies over our home. The progress flag looks much like a traditional six color rainbow flag but on the left side a five color chevron white, pink, black, and brown to represent people of color and trans people, those who haven’t always been well represented within the community (Advocate.com Editors). The growing popularity of the flag speaks to something I think is inherent to my community. People want to see themselves represented but they also want to see their whole community honored. The Progress flag both acknowledges the more varied and unique aspects of our culture, by specifically including symbolic representation of those queer identities that have been poorly included in the past, while still honoring our past by maintaining the six-color rainbow.

The Progress Flag (Advocate.com)

These Pride flags aren’t just pretty pieces of cloth, they're symbols that hold powerful meanings. I am a queer man, I love a transgender woman. When I look at that progress flag I don’t just see stripes and chevrons, I see myself, I see my partner, I see the struggle I’ve had to accept myself in a world that felt like it would never accept me, I see the ongoing resistance to those that even now conspire to take away my partner’s medical rights, resistance against those who send us all back into hiding in closets, and yet I see the joy we’ve found in our love and the love of our community. Lastly I see the legacy of a half century of rebels, revolutionaries, and lovers that fought relentlessly for liberation and lived in Pride and strength. A legacy that even now I am the inheritor of.

Works Cited

Geoghegan, Tom. “Stonewall: A Riot That Changed Millions of Lives” British Broadcasting Corporation. 17 June 2019. https://www.bbc.com/news/world-us-canada-48643756 , Accessed 25 September 2024.

“The Rainbow Flag” GLBT Historical Society. Rainbow Flag — GLBT Historical Society (glbthistory.org). Accessed 26 September 2024.

Baker, Gilbert. “Rainbow Flag, Origin Story” The Gilbert Baker Foundation, https://gilbertbaker.com/rainbow-flag-origin-story/, Accessed 25 September 2024

Campbell-Dollaghan, Kelsey. “How The Rainbow Pride Flag Lost Its Pink and Red Stripes” Gizmodo. 26 June 2015, How the Rainbow Pride Flag Lost Its Pink and Turquoise Stripes (gizmodo.com). Accessed 25 September 2024. Advocate.com Editors. “36 Queer Pride Flags You Should Know” Advocate, 1 June 2023, https://www.advocate.com/gay-pride-parade/36-queer-pride-flags-know#rebelltitem1. Accessed 24 September 2024.

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Happy Pride Month, y’all.