The Pride flag’s canton also had stars, although more flower-like, and was influenced by the patriotism from the bicentennial that took place two years prior. One of the two flags also had a canton, or upper quadrant, similar to what the American or Australian flags have. These included hot pink for sex, red for life, orange for healing, yellow for sunlight, green for nature, turquoise for magic and art, indigo for serenity, and violet for spirit. They flew for one day on Gay Freedom Day on June 25, 1978.īoth of his flags initially had a total of eight stripes, each one symbolizing an aspect of the movement. Wikimediaīaker, working with James McNamara, Lynn Segerblom, and some 30 volunteers, dyed and sewed the fabric for a pair of flags to adorn the flagpoles at the UN Plaza in San Francisco’s Civic Center. Picture of the original rainbow Pride flags flown in 1978 in San Francisco. A flag is something that everyone owns and that’s why they work,” he once said.
A true flag is torn from the soul of the people. “A true flag is not something you can really design. We all felt that we needed something that was positive, that celebrated our love.”īaker would conceptualize the iconic flag that would become universally adopted, though he didn’t claim sole credit in designing the flag. “It functioned as a Nazi tool of oppression. “Adolph Hitler conceived the pink triangle during World War II as a stigma placed on homosexuals in the same way the Star of David was used against Jews,” said Baker. Many, Baker included, did not like the symbol and its roots in Nazi oppression. When the Gay Freedom Day Parade - as initial Pride marches were known - was being planned in San Francisco in 1978, Harvey Milk and others sought a symbol that would replace the triangle. The Original - Gilbert Baker’s Pride flag Pink triangles would become common again after The Men with the Pink Triangle, the first autobiography of a gay concentration camp survivor, was published in 1972.
Lambda, a letter in the Greek alphabet, became the first worldwide-adopted symbol of many LGBTQ organizations. Purple colors, coming from the mixture of red (and pink) and blue, became an associated color of queer people. That led LGBTQ people to begin organizing as a larger community in the 1950s and 1960s prior to Stonewall. When the Lavender Scare started, which increased discrimination and ostracization of LGBTQ people, being gay or trans became associated with communism and thus, the destruction of life and society. In America specifically, gay people still had little rights or recognized community. Prisoners wearing the pink triangle at the concentration camp at Sachsenhausen, Germany, are marched outdoors by Nazi guards on December 19, 1938.
Many saw incarceration well into the 1970s, and Germany would not end incarceration for gay people officially until 1994. Women who were “asocial,” including lesbian women, were given a black triangle.Īfter the end of the Nazi reign, the pink triangle no longer served that purpose, although many gay men were not freed after the Allies took control of Germany in 1945. The pink triangle was used in Nazi Germany concentration camps during the Holocaust to signify that a male prisoner was gay or queer. The first symbol that has widespread adoption around LGBTQ people was the pink triangle. Prior to World War II, there wasn’t a universal sign or object for gay, trans, and/or queer people to use to build a community around in America, let alone around the world.
Blue pink white flag update#
Just as people complain that the list of letters and numbers to describe LGBTQ people keeps growing, making an “alphabet soup” of the community, people complain every time a Pride flag update or design is announced, but the man credited as the original creator of the flag himself, Gilbert Baker, would revise the Pride flag to better represent diversity. For example, there are genderqueer and genderfluid flags, and bisexual, pansexual, and polysexual flags despite some folks’ inability to tell the difference between the words, let alone the flags.
0 kommentar(er)
