The Gay Rainbow

There is a lot to think about in the gay pride rainbow flag; there is more there than they know.

 

Color has been a signal in the gay community. Oscar Wilde was famous for wearing a trademark green carnation on his lapel, a look other Londoners and Parisians of the late 19^th and early 20^th centuries to express their orientation. Novelist Robert Hitchens described the phenomenon in 1894’s The Green Carnation, and the book in part spurred Wilde’s trial for sodomy. Yellow was used for the same purpose in Australia according to the book Sunshine and Rainbows, a study of gay culture in Queensland. The "purple hand" was an early symbol of the gay liberation movement and an effort to show resilience in the face of anti-gay attacks.  It is said the term originates from Oct 31st 1969 when activists protested the San Francisco Examiner's series of anti-gay articles in front of the newspaper building. Employees of the newspaper dumped purple ink on the peaceful protesters. The activists used the ink to draw slogans on the building and to make a visible mark of gay uprising.

Apparently a Purple Rhino was used as a symbol but it was understandably arcane and failed. During the Holocaust, gay men were forced to wear pink triangles, and that symbol has since been reclaimed by the gay community at an annual commemoration event at Twin Peaks in San Francisco.

 

In 1978, San Francisco artist Gilbert Baker designed what is believed to be the first modern gay pride flag by combining eight stripes, each a different color with its own symbolism: pink for sex, red for life, orange for healing, yellow for sunlight, green for nature, blue for art, indigo for harmony, and violet for the human spirit. When he wanted to manufacture the flag for sale, he found that hot pink wasn’t as available as the other colors, and so the flag dropped to seven colors. Baker later dropped indigo to maintain an even number, and the flag arrived at its contemporary six colors. When San Francisco gay activists marched to protest the 1978 assassination of city supervisor Harvey Milk, they marched with Baker’s flags. 

There is an unscientific element that argues that individuals in their sexuality are more tabla rasa, less predetermined, than previously thought. Betty Freidan's The Feminine Mystique says astonishingly that gender behavior is actually culturally determined. (No one believes this but a very few hard core. Some have actually said there is a conspiracy regarding hormone research.) So one wonders if the rainbow is a better symbol than they know. It is a banner of gradualism, as one wavelength merges into another. So each life becomes part of a spectrum rather than an individual packet. Every entity with more or less frequency, more or less wavelength, could be another. And all are part of the white light.

So Jenner is more a slid-step, less a leap.