Into the new century, usage has plummeted, at least in my experience, but that may just be because I’m aging!įunnily, just as I’m writing this post, a badge for my municipal political party of choice here in Montreal, Projet Montréal, landed on my doorstep, so they’re not dead yet. Throughout the 70s and 80s and into the 90s, badge wearing was almost ubiquitous and certainly near compulsory at any political demonstration. Badges provided a cheap and easy opportunity for us to do that.
Is a triangle a gay pride symbol free#
Hippiesīadges, in various forms, have existed for more than 150 years but I would say that they didn’t come into mass usage until the hippie/counterculture revolution of the 60s where we all wanted to not only wear our heart on our free love sleeve, but also to wear our political opinions and identities on our clothing. For North Americans, badges are what sheriffs wear, but we’ll manage. Since the vast majority of my badges come from my UK days, that is the term I will use. What are called badges in the UK and Australia are called buttons in Canada and the US. I decided that, for this post, instead of continuing the roughly chronological story of my life, I would instead tell you the stories behind some of the badges in this antique collection of mine.įirst of all – terminology.
Is a triangle a gay pride symbol full#
Looking for those old badges led me to re-discover a musty-smelling bag full of around 175 old badges, buttons and pins of mine sending all kinds of memories whirling through my head. Judy Garland, the star of The Wizard of Oz, has a large following as a gay symbol, and is famous for singing "Somewhere Over the Rainbow" in the movie.In my last post, I talked about the trouble that I and my fellow lecturers got into for wearing anti-racism badges at our college. The rainbow also has some pop culture significance for the LGBT community. The rainbow is so perfect because it really fits our diversity in terms of race, gender, ages, all of those things." We needed something beautiful, something from us . It came from such a horrible place of murder and holocaust and Hitler. "It was necessary to have the Rainbow Flag because up until that we had the pink triangle from the Nazis - it was the symbol that they would use. The rainbow flag was a way of taking these various colors and turning them into a coherent symbol, reclaimed by the LGBT community. During the Holocaust, Nazis forced gay men to wear pink triangles as a symbol of sexual deviance. Oscar Wilde wore a green carnation, and yellow served the same purpose in Australia, and purple provided that function in some communities in the United States. I realized I would have to make some compromises in order for this to really function as a symbol."Ĭloseted gay people have also historically used bright colors to signal their homosexuality to each other, as Forrest Wickman wrote in Slate.
"Even to do four-color printing for photographs like this was complicated. "One of the reasons I had to adapt the eight-color version to the six-color version of the flag - the one we use today - is because in 1978 eight colors was expensive," Baker told the Museum of Modern Art. With six colors, the flag could still be evenly split to line two sides of the street for a march in protest of Milk's assassination in 1979. Pink dye was prohibitively expensive, and blue and turquoise were "merged" into royal blue. The contemporary version has six colors, but the original had eight. Each color had its own symbolic meaning:īy 1979, the flag had collapsed to six colors - for practical reasons. People knew immediately that it was our flag." "We stood there and watched and saw the flags, and their faces lit up," Cleve Jones, an LGBT rights activist present at the parade, told The New York Times.