What is the significance of the rainbow for gays

Baker then took the design to Paramount Flag Company, which sold a version of the flag without hot pink and turquoise, which were replaced with blue for practicality purposes. After the assassination of Harvey Milk on November 27, , demand for the rainbow banner only increased.

Popularity spiked again a decade later when a West Hollywood resident sued his landlord over the right to hang his flag outside his residence. In the years since, the rainbow flag has only grown in popularity and is now seen around the globe as a positive representation of the LGBT community. Baker died on March 31, , at the age of 65, just two years after the legalization of same-sex marriage throughout the U. His legacy lives on in the six-colored flag that flies proudly every Gay Pride month, recognizing the lives, and loves, of LGBT people worldwide.

But if you see something that doesn't look right, click here to contact us! Twice a week we compile our most fascinating features and deliver them straight to you. Each color had its own symbolic meaning. By , the flag has since collapsed to six colors — for practical reasons. Pink dye was prohibitively expensive, and blue and turquoise were "merged" into royal blue.

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 I realized I would have to make some compromises in order for this to really function as a symbol. Closeted gay people have also historically used bright colors to signal their homosexuality to each other, as Forrest Wickman wrote in Slate.

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. During the Holocaust, Nazis forced gay men to wear pink triangles as a symbol of sexual deviance. The rainbow flag was a way of taking these various colors and turning them into a coherent symbol, reclaimed by the LGBT community.

It came from such a horrible place of murder and holocaust and Hitler. We needed something beautiful , something from us. The rainbow is so perfect because it really fits our diversity in terms of race, gender, ages, all of those things. The rainbow also has some pop culture significance for the LGBT 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.

Baker's rainbow pattern has since moved on from just flags. And, yet, it has gone through a cultural tug of war over the years since it was first developed in San Francisco, in , by Gilbert Baker, Lynn Segerblom, and James McNamara. Since that time, the Pride flag has become the basic model for numerous flags representing the spectrum of identifications via gender, sexuality, and fetish.

Some might say it has been overproduced and lost its meaning even within the gay community. It seems like the Pride flag changes just as quickly as the latest smartphone. Does that make the original Pride flag outdated? It readily appears as a queer symbol even when it is not in its original format and functions as a stand-in for all these original core values, as well as the continued pursuit of human rights and equality, in terms of issues such as the decriminalization of homosexuality, the age of consent, and the right to get married and adopt children.

The rainbow also relates to gender identity, discrimination based on this identity, and the general stigma around homosexuality that regards it as something taboo and debased. However, in the midst of the pandemic, the rainbow suddenly became a symbol for the NHS in the United Kingdom and the association it once had with the gay community quickly dissipated.

One friend suggested that the difference was that the rainbows supporting the NHS were handmade but the rainbows for the gay community were mechanical. The rainbow enamel pins that had been used by doctors and nurses to suggest alliance with the gay community were now just an inane form of self-promotion. It gets more complicated.

We cannot forget that President Donald Trump banned the Pride flag from being flown on official embassy flagpoles in and it is still currently banned by the Pentagon on United States military installations.

And this act even occurs among some churches and community centers which hang the Gay Pride flag in solidarity with the gay community. There is a dark undercurrent of homophobia perceptible in similar acts of hatred played out on video games such as Minecraft shared anonymously on YouTube as play-by-play videos.

In some communities, this violent act is considered a hate crime and the consequences can be severe, such as in the case of Adolfo Martinez , who was sentenced to 17 years in prison after burning a Gay Pride flag at Ames United Church of Christ in Ames, Iowa in