“Part of me,” Monts said, “hopes that it is a step towards a more liberatory queerness that rejects homonormativity and all the nonsense that comes with it.” “People want to feel seen, and we should let them.” Still, Monts worries that this change may be mere performance, creating the impression of inclusion without real commitment. “I celebrate adding new colors to the Pride flag, especially when those colors remind us to center historically marginalized … members of the queer community,” Ari Monts, a 30-year-old religious educator based in Texas, told me. The queer people I spoke with conveyed mixed emotions about the flag’s many versions and whether they succeed at stitching together the community. And despite the flag’s noble intentions, its latest iteration garnered plenty of online vitriol. Read: Pride can’t go back to what it was beforeīut having a Pride flag to represent us contributes to the controversial idea that there is an us to represent. Tilleczek argued that expanding the symbolic range of the Pride flag, for example, can have real-world effects, enhancing intra- and intercommunal bonds by creating a sense of belonging: “Shared symbols … can interpolate people into a collective sense of community.” candidate at the University of Toronto who is researching queer activism, told me. “Flags as symbols facilitate sociality between strangers, inviting community between people who may never actually meet,” Elliott Tilleczek, a Ph.D. They represent what the historian Benedict Anderson called “imagined communities”-self-constituted entities, united less by shared experiences than by shared beliefs in shared experiences. And this year brought another version from Intersex Equality Rights UK, featuring a yellow triangle and purple circle to represent the intersex community, or people born with a reproductive anatomy that doesn’t fit typical male or female definitions.įlags are political symbols, borrowed from the vocabulary of nationalism, with similar overtones of citizenship, belonging, borders.
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One year later, the Oregon-based graphic designer Daniel Quasar added the trans flag’s stripes as a horizontal chevron to make the Progress Pride Flag. In 2017, Philadelphia’s Office of LGBT Affairs introduced black and brown stripes to the Pride flag to recognize queer and trans people of color. When I was young and newly out of the closet, around 2013, I saw LGBTQ flags for every community imaginable online, including esoteric variants, such as the green, black, white, and grey aromantic flag, and a pale pink and yellow flag for slim, hairless 20-something twinks. The now-familiar six-stripe flag is actually a redesign. Later that year, though, the flag lost its pink stripe because of fabric unavailability at the local manufacturer, and turquoise fell off the year after for the same reason. That earliest iteration included pink and turquoise stripes, symbolizing sex and art, respectively-parts of queer life that the designers thought were worth fighting for. Obviously, this list is not exhaustive, and there are regularly more pride flags being created to reflect different groups, but hopefully this information can prove useful as you learn about and champion the LGBTQ+ people in your life.Since its first flight at 1978’s Gay Freedom Day Parade in San Francisco, the rainbow flag has evolved multiple times. "Though I started reading about gender and sexuality right away in my college library the first semester I started there, the online component allowed me to browse through forums and articles and to chat with people who seemed to identify like I did when I was in the process of figuring it all out." "Online communities have been tremendously influential, giving people a virtual space to do research on possibilities and especially to find others who feel similarly," they said. Marilyn Roxie, the designer of the genderqueer pride flag, told Majestic Mess that the rise in social media platforms and other internet hubs for queer people has been hugely important in leading to the creation of new flags.
There has been a meaningful uptick in new pride flags since 2010, with variants for intersex, non-binary, and agender people produced. Some, like the two-spirit pride flag and the updated pride flag, incorporate Baker's original design while adding more colors and elements to acknowledge both Native Americans and the broader POC community, respectively. Since Gilbert Baker first created the original rainbow pride flag back in 1978, designers and activists of all genders, identities, and sexual orientations have made different iterations to reflect unique communities. It's also a celebration of the beauty and diversity of the experience, flown at pride events all throughout the month of June. Over the last 40-plus years, the rainbow pride flag has become a symbol synonymous with the LGBTQ+ community and its fight for equal rights and acceptance across the globe.