That’s a lot more elegant than some of the conversation surrounding the new flag, like people asking for a white stripe, or people claiming that adding to the two colors to the flag is disrespectful or that it’s racist for not explicitly including white people.Īnd those sentiments have been met with a vocal, spirited response: Though Beal believes that Philly’s adaptation of the rainbow flag should be viewed as an independent symbol from the one Baker created, he acknowledged that he supports the intentions behind it. “The only thing we would ask is that other people would not take it and put Gilbert’s name on it, because they didn’t do it in consultation with him, and he didn’t do it.” (Baker died earlier this year, on March 31.)
Gay pride symbol skin#
“The stripes were not chosen for skin color - they were chosen to reflect the spectrum of color in nature,” a longtime friend of Baker’s, Charley Beal told NBC.
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The flag has historically represented LGBTQ people as a whole, and critics of Philly’s changes to it believe those changes are unnecessary, since the flag is already a symbol of unity. Philadelphia’s initiative to be more inclusionary toward nonwhite LGBTQ people comes from a good place, but its reception has been marked by controversy. To fuel this important conversation, we’ve expanded the colors of the flag to include black and brown.” Especially when it comes to recognizing people of color in the LGBTQ+ community. A lot of good, but there’s more we can do. “In 1978, artist Gilbert Baker designed the original rainbow flag,” the campaign states. The colors, according to the Philadelphia Office of LGBT Affairs’ More Color More Pride campaign, represent inclusion of people of color in the LGBTQ community. Judy Garland, the star of The Wizard of Oz, has a large following as a gay symbol, and is famous for singing "Somewhere Over the Rainbow" in the movie.The city of Philadelphia recently learned that the rainbow flag, a symbol of LGBTQ pride, isn’t quite as unifying as it may seem.įor Pride Month, Philly added two colors - black and brown - to the existing pride flag, and hoisted it outside City Hall. The rainbow also has some pop culture significance for the LGBT community. The rainbow is so perfect because it really fits our diversity in terms of race, gender, ages, all of those things." We needed something beautiful, something from us .
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It came from such a horrible place of murder and holocaust and Hitler. "It was necessary to have the Rainbow Flag because up until that we had the pink triangle from the Nazis - it was the symbol that they would use. The rainbow flag was a way of taking these various colors and turning them into a coherent symbol, reclaimed by the LGBT community. During the Holocaust, Nazis forced gay men to wear pink triangles as a symbol of sexual deviance. Oscar Wilde wore a green carnation, and yellow served the same purpose in Australia, and purple provided that function in some communities in the United States.
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I realized I would have to make some compromises in order for this to really function as a symbol."Ĭloseted gay people have also historically used bright colors to signal their homosexuality to each other, as Forrest Wickman wrote in Slate. "Even to do four-color printing for photographs like this was complicated.
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"One of the reasons I had to adapt the eight-color version to the six-color version of the flag - the one we use today - is because in 1978 eight colors was expensive," Baker told the Museum of Modern Art. With six colors, the flag could still be evenly split to line two sides of the street for a march in protest of Milk's assassination in 1979. Pink dye was prohibitively expensive, and blue and turquoise were "merged" into royal blue. The contemporary version has six colors, but the original had eight. Each color had its own symbolic meaning:īy 1979, the flag had collapsed to six colors - for practical reasons. People knew immediately that it was our flag." "We stood there and watched and saw the flags, and their faces lit up," Cleve Jones, an LGBT rights activist present at the parade, told The New York Times.