The first ever rainbow flag has just been unearthed
The first ever rainbow flag has just been unearthed Long a symbol of the LGBTQ+ civil rights movement, the first ever rainbow flag has been unearthed. Jack King looks at the history behind the colourful symbol that marked a major change in society Jack King Flags are flown to establish and identify communities, to carve out space, to inspire. Our mouths become agape when they burn. In times of mourning, we fly them at half-mast: a near-universal marker of respect, ignorant of cultural and physical borders. In territories unknown, they shed a familiar warmth. We look to them for comfort, like a lantern's glow breaching the darkness.
For most of the LGBTQ+ population, the rainbow flag is our lantern in the dark. Owing in no small amount to the work of grassroots activists over the past 50 years, great strides have been made towards queer emancipation, but the fight is not relegated to the annals of history. One needs only look to our hideously rising homophobic hate crime statistics or to the exponentially rising hostility towards transgender people in Britain, increasingly born out of mythologies peddled by a violent broadsheet commentariat.
Suffice to say, the flag still needs to fly. But it hasn't always been the ubiquitous symbol of LGBTQ+ freedom that it is today. "The flag emerged in the context of debates from the late 1960s into the late 1970s about what symbol would best represent the gay movement, as it was known at the time," says Gerard Koskovich, the cofounder and curator of San Francisco's GLBT Historical Society, the first institution of its kind, dedicated to the finding, preservation and exhibition of queer historical artefacts.
New York's Gay Activists Alliance, formed by renegades of the Gay Liberation Front six months after the famous Stonewall rebellion, promoted the Greek letter lambda. "A number of gay publications and organisations, including San Francisco Pride, proposed reclaiming the pink triangle in the mid 1970s," Koskovich says. This one is slightly better known, given many of us will recall it being explicitly covered, albeit briefly, in school textbooks: it was originally used by the Nazis to mark out gay men in Germany during the Holocaust.
That symbol's re-appropriation by activists, suggests Justin Bengry, of the Centre For Queer History at Goldsmiths, University Of London, was to "change [its] direction, to be more hopeful than violent", while reflecting, too, on its violent past. Those versed in the cultural and political histories of the HIV pandemic in the global north might recognise the triangle too, through its use in the street activism of direct action groups such as the Aids Coalition To Unleash Power. Most famous is the "Silence = Death" poster, originally the work of a six-person art collective and appropriated by ACT UP for their protest paraphernalia.
When it comes to the rainbow flag, we know, for sure, how and when things began. On 25 June 1978, San Franciscans across the city celebrated Gay Freedom Day, as the annual Pride celebration was then known. The first had occurred eight years prior, attracting just a handful of marchers. By 1978, the event boasted almost a quarter of a million revellers from across the United States and, indeed, the globe.
The 1978 parade began on Market Street and ended with a festival in front of San Francisco City Hall. "To reach Civic Center, the route turned just once, veering to the right of United Nations Plaza," says Koskovich. "At the Plaza entrance, marchers were welcomed by an exceptional sight: in place of the United States and United Nations flags usually flown from a towering pair of flagpoles, two enormous rainbow banners billowed overhead." Their contemporary symbolism had yet to be established, of course, but as Koskovich asserts, "They created a beautifully paradoxical impression, at once festive and awe-inspiring."
The flags, sizing in at around thirty feet high by sixty feet wide, were the brainchildren of the Gay Freedom Day Decorations Committee, cochaired by Gilbert Baker and Lynn Segerblom – "self-proclaimed hippies", Koskovich says. "Each had eight stripes in rainbow colours," he continues. "One also featured a corner square of tie-dyed white stars on a blue field, a suggestion from Segerblom as a response to the United States flag." While little attention is generally paid to the semiotic meanings of each colour in the present, Baker himself attributed pink for sex, red for life, orange for healing, yellow for the sun, turquoise for magic, blue for serenity and violet for spirit.
The original flags were thought lost for decades. Last week, however, the GLBT Historical Society announced that a segment of one flag, measuring at around 28 by 12 feet, was exhumed, authenticated and delivered to the society by the Gilbert Baker Foundation, to be the centrepiece of a new exhibition celebrating Baker's life and work.
The enduring rainbow flag design incorporates only six colours, broadly the result of logistical limitations as opposed to artistic choice. In the wake of Gay Freedom Day, Baker wanted to arrange commercial fabrication, the first hitch being that flag fabric was unavailable in hot pink. When he sat down to redesign the flag for the following year's parade, this time with the mind to "festoon the route with hundreds of flags", Koskovich says, a lawsuit over funding nearly halted the project. Baker's artistic proclivities did, however, play a central role in turquoise being dropped, obliged to cut the colour by his preference for an even number of stripes on the flags to adorn the streetlamps of Market Street.
More difficult to determine is how, why and when the flag gained its globally recognised symbolism for LGBTQ+ pride. "We know it was adopted early on the West Coast of the United States, which is not surprising given the contacts between San Francisco and Los Angeles. We also know it began to appear at Pride celebrations in the US around the mid 1980s." Koskovich further notes that Baker withdrew personal involvement with the flag amid turbulence in the wake of the 1979 celebration, but later became a stalwart ambassador for the flag, promoting its use at events across the United States.
The current international ubiquity of the flag, too, transcends Pride events and even LGBTQ+ nightlife and commerce. The rainbow motif is a frequent staple for corporate Twitter accounts, for example, who decorate their logos with rainbow colours across Pride month – with mixed appreciation. "The commercial side of things is difficult to navigate because it's an important symbol of community, belonging and a signal put out by LGBTQ people," notes Bengry, "and also one that feels appropriated by commerce, by big business, by advertising."
Some argue, even, that the political potency of the flag has diminished in recent years, owing to said corporate appropriation. It's hard not to agree, particularly when firms with international interests fail to celebrate Pride on the social accounts for their Middle Eastern offices; you can appreciate why this is read as hypocritical exploitation of a disproportionately cash-rich demographic, such as with gay men. But, as Bengry points out, it isn't singularly used by corporate Twitter handles. For many, it's still that proverbial lantern in the dark. "It's difficult to dismiss it as this overly commercialised image that's been appropriated," he says, "because it is still used very effectively by community groups."
It isn't just Sainsbury's or Argos that put their make-up on for Pride, after all. Small LGBTQ+ businesses, from bookstores to bars and cafes, dress up in the flag year-round. "It's powerful because it's known," Bengry continues. "I do notice when I go into shops, when there's a little discreet triangle [flag]... As an able-bodied, white, cis man, I don't feel like I'm in danger in 99.9 per cent of spaces I encounter, but I do feel slightly more comfortable. It lets me know that this person, the proprietor, the staff, at least shares values with me." Indeed, the waters paddled by gay, white, cisgender men are far less choppy than those fought by others in the LGBTQ+ population. It serves to suggest that if you belong to a queer or trans identity that feels the sting of subjugation all the more profoundly, perhaps the flag remains an important hand on the shoulder.
In recent times, conversations around broader, more open inclusion across the LGBTQ+ space has spawned new variations of the flag. Some promote racial equity, vis-à-vis the addition of black and brown stripes, while others emphasise transgender identities with stripes that are blue, pink and white. In Britain, the use of the rainbow motif by groups in support of NHS key workers amid the coronavirus pandemic was met with existential fear by some LGBTQ+ activists.
Others welcomed such a challenge: as with all political and community symbols, the rainbow flag is one that has been shaped by the moment, its form and function adapting to the requirements of the time. "As much as I have a personal investment in the flag, I want to be able to let go of it," says Bengry. "And now we have the chance to rethink the flag to more readily include stripes that acknowledge people of colour and trans people. What a fantastic opportunity this is to say: the basic rainbow stripes, really important, really valuable; now we're moving forward, honouring that history and doing more."
As for the international future of the flag, Koskovich is uncertain – or, at least, appreciably unwilling to prognosticate. "One thing historians can't do is predict the future," he says. "The one thing I can say is this: the cultural and political processes that produced the rainbow flag, and the subsequent diversity flags, are ongoing. It will be intriguing to see which flags gain and retain popularity." That it will. Until then, we'll continue to march under the flag's lofty shadow, one that stretches through temporal space, all the way back to a sunny June day in 1978, when hope beckoned from around the corner or, perhaps, just over the rainbow.
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