Covid-19 and the co-opting of the Pride flag
A reflection on Pride from April to August: what do we stand for?
Photo by Caleb Chen on Unsplash
April
It is April. As I take my first sanctioned daily walk down the street in the peripheral Birmingham suburb where I grew up, I find myself mentally double-checking this innocuous fact: is it really April?
A glance at my phone screen, decked out with the date and time, confirms that it is. But as I look around for a little longer, that bemusing fever-dream feeling grows. For on this strange day in April in my small, traditional hometown, Pride seems to have come early, when normally it does not come at all.
I am confused but elated as the feeling of total comfort and community cohesion that I feel for just one day each June creeps over me. Had my conventional little suburb taken a progressive turn while I studied abroad for the year? Was I finally going to introduce my girlfriend to the neighbours as a partner instead of a pal? I am suddenly hopeful. Alas, on closer inspection of each window plastered with scribbled rainbows, each roof sporting mini Pride flags, and each garden adorned with six-colour pinwheels, my exhilaration fades. Placards emblazoned with “PRIDE 2020” are missing from the mix. Instead, posters yell in aggressively cheerful all-caps: WE LOVE THE NHS!
August
Four months later, the co-opting of Pride symbolism persists. The six-striped rainbow once proudly claimed by GLBTQ+ people worldwide has (in the UK, at least) been rebranded in a seemingly innocent display of support for key workers and the NHS. The trend purportedly began with rosy-cheeked children and their encouraging, home-schooling parents virtuously crafting rainbow banners to cheer up key workers on their daily commutes - a sweet enough sentiment during a time of grave hardship, loss and isolation. However, once noticed by online entrepreneurs, the fad rapidly grew in sophistication, turning gaudy scribbled arcs into best-selling "Thank You NHS" flags, light displays and buses whose rainbows, suspiciously, do not actually replicate the traditional seven-colour rainbow.
Yes, you’ve got it. They all repurpose the very same six-colour flag that businesses hastily paste all over products each June in their feeble annual show of rainbow capitalism; not a single colour changed, added or rearranged. To add salt to the wound, UK Pride went fairly unnoticed this year with its myriad festivals and marches cancelled due to Covid-19 - never mind the fact that bravely waving the Pride flag this June would most likely have been mistaken for a sugary token of solidarity for over-worked, underpaid NHS workers, anyway. The GLBTQ+ community has responded in defence of the flag, in some cases petitioning for the reestablishment of an alternative symbol for NHS support. This double-hit to UK Pride has not only erased GLBTQ+ voices and visibility in the now, but has also erased the painful historical narratives that gave us claim over our flag to begin with: a flag that is iconic, unapologetically visible, and vibrant - a clear visual paradigm for out and proud queer existences.
A history
The history of the Pride flag is just as poignant as its immediate visual allegory. In 1978, following the chance meeting of San Francisco political official Harvey Milk and nurse Gilbert Baker, the idea of a shared symbol of queer resistance came to fruition. At Milk’s behest, Baker went about creating a symbol that would adequately represent the community and allow for its mighty efforts to be seen, understood and accepted.
Originally, the flag consisted of eight colours, each denoting a specific trait that Baker deemed fundamental to a Queer constitution: hot pink for sexuality, red for life, orange for healing, yellow for sun, green for nature, turquoise for art, indigo for harmony, and violet for spirit. With the help of around 30 volunteers, Baker dyed and sewed the first two flags of this kind by hand. When he sought commercial reproduction for the design, however, hot pink was a colour both too expensive and too rare to reproduce en masse, so Baker went back to the drawing board, and the new commercially-recognised flag became seven colours instead.
On November 27, 1978, Harvey Milk was assassinated. The bullets that killed him intended to mute the movement that had been growing in force in San Francisco; the following June, however, demand for the seven-striped rainbow was greater than ever. Both Baker and his commercial producers churned out flags of this design until the 1979 Pride Parade Committee requested to use the flag to show solidarity for the strength of the community following Milk’s assassination. Unusually, they wanted to display its colours split on the two sides of the parade, necessitating the loss of one stripe to leave an evenly divisible number. And so, in the legacy of Harvey Milk, the flag’s stripes were reduced in number once again to become the six-striped icon that we know today, commercially recognised by the International Congress of Flag Makers.
The Pride flag is a symbol of unity, resistance, visibility and personality. But most importantly, it carries the heavy history of the sweat, blood and tears of its makers, its bearers and the countless leaders of the global GLBTQ+ community who have sacrificed their lives for our right to love.
But what now? Who will the six-striped flag represent in the ongoing aftermath of Covid-19?
The argument is not that GLBTQ+ communities have the ultimate claim to the symbol of the rainbow. It is worth noting that other, smaller movements do use rainbows as a symbol of hope after hardship, including mothers who celebrate Rainbow Babies - healthy babies born after a previous miscarriage. Few, however, have so blatantly appropriated the official Pride flag. Rather, the argument is that in directly rebranding those selfsame products once used to (insincerely but at least visibly) support our existences, businesses have extracted capital gain from Queer history and erased it in one fell swoop.
Enabling them to do so is a blissfully ignorant swathe of non-GLBTQ+ folks, who remain so far distanced from Queer history that they fail (or perhaps refuse) to realise the complex implications of their futile but well-intentioned support for the NHS. Thankfully, larger corporations and state organisations have leaned tactfully away from Pride symbolism, instead demonstrating solidarity for NHS workers through turning "NHS blue" an ineffectual but sympathetic gesture that does manage to sidestep the silencing of GLBTQ+ voices. However, if anything, the thoughtless co-opting of Pride symbolism goes to show how much more work there is to be done until queer existences manage to attain legitimacy in middle-class suburbia.
A vague reference to Marx’s commodity fetishism and the masking of power relations would not go amiss in this analysis either. Aside from its total disregard for Queer history, the very act of purchasing cheap, for-profit renditions of the Pride flag exacerbates the hidden issue underlying the trauma experienced by GLBTQ+ people and key workers alike: exploitation for economic gain. Funnelling money into a global system that oppresses masses of labourers in favour of an elite few only perpetuates the intersectional exploitation of the poor, the disabled, GLBTQ+ folks, and people of colour. Many of these folks are, in fact, the key workers for whom rainbow flags are being raised. But to what end?
Would the pleasure of purchasing and displaying the Pride flag in support of the NHS be diminished if consumers truly engaged with its history, or with the ethical dilemmas of its commercial production? Would we find a less illusionary way of demonstrating solidarity for our workers? Would we vote differently, purchase more tactfully, and make real change? I would hope so.
September
This September, I know that I am not alone when I confess that the warm feeling of community support I once felt each time I saw our six-striped rainbow has faded, replaced by a striking indifference towards the colours splashed carelessly across the grey landscape. Will there be a rainbow, so to speak, after this storm?
Despite the morosity of the situation, I sense a silver lining. After all, the GLBTQ+ community has a knack for enduring, adapting to and overcoming the hardest of blows. Perhaps now is the moment to reassess the current symbolic representation of our values and give Pride a facelift. Should our six stripes turn officially to the Philadelphia eight? Or to 11, as proposed by queer activist and artist Daniel Quasar? While we face the brunt of Covid-19, we must stand more proudly and more visibly for the trans, Black and Brown members of our family who are often hit hardest by adversity. So, amidst the plight of 2020, here’s to reclaiming a Pride that stands for what we do: progress, inclusion, and intersectionality.
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