Andrew Watts

The problem with the Pride flag

Last month, the Pride flag was updated by the Intersex Equality Rights UK campaign group — the simple rainbow was not considered inclusive enough for intersex people. Other pressure groups had already added stripes for black people, brown people, trans people and people with Aids.

The Gay Pride flag first flew 43 years ago this week. It was sewn by the American gay activist Gilbert Baker, who performed under the drag name of ‘Busty Ross’, claiming kinship (of a sort) with the 18th-century Quaker upholsterer Betsy Ross, who sewed the first American flag. Baker had been asked by Harvey Milk, the most famous openly gay politician in America, to design a flag for the San Francisco Gay Freedom Day Parade. Mass movements need symbols: until then, the only symbol the gay community had was the pink triangle and Milk thought, not unreasonably, that it was time to stop outsourcing their visual branding strategy to the Nazi concentration camps.

Instead Milk outsourced it to an activist rather than a vexillologist. And that is why it is so hideous. You look at it and think the person who cobbled that flag together is a stranger to the rules of tincture. Colours should never be placed on other colours unless separated by yellow or white.

The original version was even worse: as well as the colours of the rainbow, it had shocking pink at the top. This was dropped when the flag went into mass production by the Paramount Flag Company. Hot pink is very 2021, but in 1978 fabric in that colour was virtually unobtainable. Baker accepted this — after all, hadn’t Betsy Ross changed Washington’s idea of six-pointed stars to five-pointed ones, which were easier (and so cheaper) to cut? — and next year streamlined the colours to six.

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