Living in a big city can make life easier to be out and proud of who you are. Should the same question be applied to people who tag along to parades? If that’s your one action of solidarity for the whole year, should you be wearing a rainbow at all? Then again, sincere or not, showing the world that much rainbow doesn’t seem so bad either.Īhalya Srikant, Research Fellow: I agree with Jason that sometimes we have to put aside our own standards for the good of the community as a whole. Josie Colt, Gear Fellow: My question is: Do corporations ever fly flags out of sincere support? Unless they’ve shown other actions of allyship, rainbow-washing seems like an attempt to appear hip, hop on the current bandwagon and make a few bucks while they’re at it. Capitalism! But in this case, it also means seeding a homophobic world with more symbols of love and support. Obviously companies want to look cool and sell stuff. Purple also became a popular symbol of gay pride in the 1960s and 1970s, when San Franciscans tried to make a symbol of the Purple Hand and gay Bostonians put up posters emblazoned with a. Even our stupid cable company supports him.
DIFFERENCE BETWEEN RAINBOW AND GAY PRIDE COLORS TV
Then their cable company-distant, bureaucratic, soulless-tweets, I don’t know, a rainbow flag on a TV screen. Maybe they’re religious, or don’t have gay friends, whatever. Jason Kehe, Senior Associate Editor: To be perfectly frank, I don’t know what the big deal is. (I mostly just bring this up to mention Food 4 Thot, because they’re very funny and everyone should listen.) The magenta represents same-sex attraction, the blue represents. So I imagine it’s something that’ll be discussed for a while. According to, the top 40 of the flag is magenta, the middle 20 is lavender, and the bottom 40 is royal blue. If I were a parent of a child in the Boy Scouts, after seeing gay pride. I was actually at a live taping of the Food 4 Thot podcast last weekend and this very topic came up and I was kind of relieved that most of the panel had the same mixed feelings. But my issue isn’t specifically with Apple, a company that actually has a track record of supporting LGBTQ+ causes (and an openly gay CEO), it’s with the way rainbow imagery gets co-opted to benefit groups and individuals who aren’t LGBTQ+. It irritated me that this massive tech company would be making money off a symbol that not only represents joy and celebration, but also the LGBTQ+ community’s long history of struggle and oppression. Justice Namaste, Social Media Coordinator: Well Angela, I really started thinking about the idea of rainbow-washing after seeing Apple’s ‘Pride Edition’ Apple Watch wristband that they announced during the WWDC keynote a couple of weeks ago. What about you guys? Justice, I think you were the one who first mentioned rainbow-washing the other day. Johnson and Sylvia Rivera take on the cops at Stonewall to sell T-shirts?” And honestly, I don’t know if I’ll ever have an answer to that question. Sometimes I walk past a window display and think “Did Marsha P. Over time, my feelings have gone back and forth. They might’ve been shallow attempts, but they always seemed better than the days when companies didn’t want their names associated with LGBTQ+ people at all. For a long time, I would get excited when I saw companies doing Pride-related ads etc. It's amazing to be told you're saving lives.Angela Watercutter, Senior Associate Editor: I’ll start, but I’ll keep it quick. After she aided in the development of a directive outlining how the VA should treat trans veterans, she wrote: "Our. The black and brown stripes on Philadelphia’s new rainbow flag are inspiring hope in some and anger in others. The colors are traditional: "light blue, for boys, pink for girls." It's the white stripe in the middle that's arguably most significant, which she says represents "those who are transitioning, gender neutral, or intersex." The idea, she says, came to her fully formed, and was with her one morning when she woke up. By 2013, the flag design had spread outside of the US, and in 2014, her original flag was donated to the Smithsonian.
The US Department of Veterans Affairs says that was the same year she unveiled her trans pride flag at a Phoenix, Arizona Pride parade, years after Michael Page - creator of the bisexual flag - encouraged her to make one to represent her community. Monica Helms says that in 2000, she made the move to Atlanta - in part because it allowed her access to Washington, DC, where she became a trans advocate.