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Here's a history lesson that FuzzyGeff reminded me of.
Everyone knows that the rainbow flag means LGB, right?
But, did you know the original symbolism?
The rainbow is all the colors. ALL.
The rainbow flag was to represent everyone, all of us.
To show that there was a place for everyone, in a time when there wasn't a place for homosexuals.
So, if the rainbow flag included everyone, even the cis and straights, then why would someone need to make a new flag outside that inclusion to represent them?
The only thing I can think of is to exclude people not like themselves.
That, ironically, means excluding the boring same-sex relationships of the everyday homosexual because they're too much like the cis-normative oppressors!
Am I the only one getting that vibe from them?
Of course, I've been doing the straight but not narrow thing so long I remember when it was just LGB and those 'B's' were looked at more askance than us straights.
No, you aren't the only one who has noticed.
ReplyDeleteAnd the Rainbow People stole the Rainbow from little girls.
Currently, regular gays (gays, lesbians and bi) are being run out of the inclusiveness group by the weirder, more outre, more freaky peoples. The MAPs and NAMBLAS and gender fluids and gender trans and all the other weirdnesses out there.
I remember back when the rainbow thing was Apple's logo... Before the LGB-etc crowd took it over. Well, the Apple logo only preceded it by a year, but out in podunk center (Iowa) we didn't hear much about LGBT stuff so the rainbow flag didn't associate until many years later. Of course Apple went to the monochrome logo a long time ago. Largely from what I understand due to confusion between their logo and the rainbow flag, even though the color bands weren't the same. The story is that Apple adopted the rainbow logo originally to empasize that the Apple II had color, which it's most direct competitors, the Commodore PET and the Tandy TRS-80 (aka Model 1) did not. Ironically the first Macs back-tracked on that and were monochrome only. But when the rainbow started getting associated with LGBT issues it apparently hurt Apple's sales in stodgy business markets, and further promoted Macs being targeted towards "those creative types" so Apple dropped it completely by 1999 even though Macs had color by then.
ReplyDeleteAnyway... funny how meanings of things shift over time and how symbols of inclusion can flip. And how these things can affect politics and business in odd ways.
-swj