“I’m between ‘not everything needs a flag’ and ‘flags in resistance to capitalist cis-heteropatriarchy and white supremacy are useful and powerful for the people waving them,’” she wrote to me in an email. Valentine Amari, a 21-year-old New England–based artist from Los Angeles, is also ambivalent. “Still, I don’t think cutesy flags actually highlight anything for LGBT other than us look kitschy and marketable.” Shmueli argued that tacking the intersex symbol on to the Pride flag inaccurately lumps intersex issues together with the broader LGBTQ imagined community, noting that the experiences of intersex people are often invoked without context or complexity, ultimately benefiting no one. “I am happy to see intersex health care being taken more seriously within medical contexts,” she told me, referring to the ongoing fight to end surgeries forced on people born with intersex characteristics. Natalia Shmueli, a 25-year-old tech entrepreneur in Tennessee shares Monts’s skepticism. “Part of me,” Monts said, “hopes that it is a step towards a more liberatory queerness that rejects homonormativity and all the nonsense that comes with it.” “People want to feel seen, and we should let them.” Still, Monts worries that this change may be mere performance, creating the impression of inclusion without real commitment. “I celebrate adding new colors to the Pride flag, especially when those colors remind us to center historically marginalized … members of the queer community,” Ari Monts, a 30-year-old religious educator based in Texas, told me. The queer people I spoke with conveyed mixed emotions about the flag’s many versions and whether they succeed at stitching together the community. And despite the flag’s noble intentions, its latest iteration garnered plenty of online vitriol. Read: Pride can’t go back to what it was beforeīut having a Pride flag to represent us contributes to the controversial idea that there is an us to represent. Tilleczek argued that expanding the symbolic range of the Pride flag, for example, can have real-world effects, enhancing intra- and intercommunal bonds by creating a sense of belonging: “Shared symbols … can interpolate people into a collective sense of community.” candidate at the University of Toronto who is researching queer activism, told me. “Flags as symbols facilitate sociality between strangers, inviting community between people who may never actually meet,” Elliott Tilleczek, a Ph.D. They represent what the historian Benedict Anderson called “imagined communities”-self-constituted entities, united less by shared experiences than by shared beliefs in shared experiences. And this year brought another version from Intersex Equality Rights UK, featuring a yellow triangle and purple circle to represent the intersex community, or people born with a reproductive anatomy that doesn’t fit typical male or female definitions.įlags are political symbols, borrowed from the vocabulary of nationalism, with similar overtones of citizenship, belonging, borders. One year later, the Oregon-based graphic designer Daniel Quasar added the trans flag’s stripes as a horizontal chevron to make the Progress Pride Flag. In 2017, Philadelphia’s Office of LGBT Affairs introduced black and brown stripes to the Pride flag to recognize queer and trans people of color. When I was young and newly out of the closet, around 2013, I saw LGBTQ flags for every community imaginable online, including esoteric variants, such as the green, black, white, and grey aromantic flag, and a pale pink and yellow flag for slim, hairless 20-something twinks. The now-familiar six-stripe flag is actually a redesign. Later that year, though, the flag lost its pink stripe because of fabric unavailability at the local manufacturer, and turquoise fell off the year after for the same reason. That earliest iteration included pink and turquoise stripes, symbolizing sex and art, respectively-parts of queer life that the designers thought were worth fighting for. Since its first flight at 1978’s Gay Freedom Day Parade in San Francisco, the rainbow flag has evolved multiple times.

Yellow flag with red stripes