Surely you’ve seen them, those rainbows.
They’re like the ’90s version of the happy face. They’re everywhere. On decals. Coffee mugs. Keychains. Bikinis. Golf towels. Anklets. Bracelets. Lighters. Pencils. Book markers. T-shirts. Caps. Candles. Serapes. Wallets. Coasters. Welcome mats. Magnets. Bras. Pillows. Clocks. Watches. Umbrellas. License plate holders. Kites. Suspenders. Condoms.
They’re also on a variety of products that can’t be described in a family newspaper.
At the North End, a gay and lesbian bar on Halsted Street that displays beaucoup rainbow flags (along with leather and bear flags -but more on those later), bartender David Gough explains.
“The rainbow is a symbol of gay pride,” he says. “All the different colors means that we don’t exclude anyone, that we accept everyone.”
On North Halsted, the rainbow’s an awfully popular little icon. On a recent weekday, more than half the cars parked between the North End and the Brown Elephant Shop, the thrift store whose proceeds go to the Howard Brown Memorial Clinic, a mostly gay medical service center, displayed some sort of rainbow decal. On side streets such as Fremont and Kenmore, Roscoe and Buckingham, rainbow flags and wind socks adorn front lawns, back porches and mailboxes.
For this wild proliferation of rainbows, at least in Chicago, the person to blame is Rich Pfeiffer, one of the founders of the local Gay and Lesbian Pride Committee and the coordinator of the city’s pride parade. (This year the kickoff is at 2 p.m. Sunday and will run, as always, along Halsted and Broadway to Lincoln Park, where there will be a rally, food and entertainment.)
“We first heard about the rainbow flag sometime in the early 1980s, at a national meeting for pride coordinators,” says Pfeiffer. “I really tried to push it. I took flags around to the many gay businesses and asked them to sell them for us, as a fundraising tool. But at first, it didn’t really take off. I’d drop off 10 flags and maybe one would sell.”
Rainbows mean big business
Dorothy Mason, one of the owners of Be Proud, a Seattle-based pride products company, knows what Pfeiffer’s talking about. When she and her partner started selling gay and lesbian pride earrings, pins and bolos in 1990, the rainbow items were slow to move. Within a couple of years, however, everybody seemed to want rainbows on everything.
“Now we’ve got about 2,000 rainbow items,” she says with a laugh. “The decals are the mainstay. The friendship bracelets, knitted or beaded, are probably the most popular after that.”
It’s big business too: Be Proud, widely regarded as the biggest of about 200 pride products companies, expects to gross $750,000 this year alone, with customers all over the U.S., Europe, as well as Australia, Japan and Brazil.
“Everybody buys the rainbow,” says Shelly Rosenbaum, who owns Gay Mart on North Halsted Street and carries many of Be Proud’s products. “Gay people, people just coming out, people who want to make a statement, straight people, old, young, everybody.”
In Chicago, Pfeiffer got behind the idea of the rainbow flag because he liked its positive associations, the inclusivity implied by the multiple colors. In nearly all traditions, the rainbow’s a good luck sign, a means of communication between heaven and earth. For Buddha, it was a stairway to heaven; in Islam, the colors reflect divine qualities; in the Book of Genesis, it alludes to the covenant made between God and Noah not to destroy the Earth again by flooding.
“I thought it was a great symbol to bring (gays and lesbians) together,” says Pfeiffer. “All year long, we’re a part of different communities, but once a year, during pride (week), we come together under this flag.”
According to “The Alyson Almanac: A Treasury of Information for the Gay and Lesbian Community,” the rainbow became gay-identified in 1978 when a San Francisco artist named Gilbert Baker created an eight-striped flag in response to a local activist’s call for an inclusive, positive gay community symbol.
Baker’s first flag featured stripes in pink (for sexuality), red (life), orange (healing), yellow (sun), green (nature), blue (art), indigo (harmony) and violet (spirituality).
Like Betsy Ross, Baker dyed and sewed the first flag himself. But when Baker went to a commercial flag company to mass-produce his flag, he discovered “hot pink” flag fabric was not commercially available. So the flag got reduced to seven stripes.
Later that year, following the assassination of Harvey Milk, San Francisco’s first openly gay supervisor (member of city council), that city’s pride parade committee decided to use Baker’s flag as a symbol of unity in its march. The indigo stripe was eliminated so that the flag could be divided into two sets of three colors to run on each side of the parade route. The six-striped version is what’s recognized by the International Congress of Flag Makers.
`Statements of solidarity’
“The rainbow, and other pride products, are statements of solidarity,” says Anne Christophersen, one of the owners of Chicago’s Women & Children First, a feminist bookstore in the Andersonville neighborhood that carries a variety of rainbow and other pride items. “It’s code.”
It is, by no means, the only code. Gays and lesbians seem to thrive on metaphor to signal affinity within the community — using playful language and symbolism that is the legacy of centuries of having to hide their identity from mainstream society.
At the North End, the leather flag — black, blue and white with a red heart in the corner — refers to the leather community, which Gough describes as “people into leather, S&M, fetishes, `hellfire’ (aggressive sex play).” Also on display is the bear flag, which is linked to “people who are large, furrier, lumberjack types,” explains Gough. The flag is brown, yellow and white and has a big claw in the corner.
In 1990, singer Alix Dobkin included in her “Yahoo Australia” CD a song called “Lesbian Code” that identified a variety of cryptographic terms including, but not limited to, POU (positively one of us), friend of Dorothy’s, Lithuanian, Lebanese, “vagitarian,” member of the team and, perhaps most significantly in the rainbow discussion, somebody who colors outside the lines.
Although gays and lesbians have attempted to popularize other symbols in the past, few are as inclusive in their meaning as the rainbow,
The pink triangle, for example, comes from the markers used on gay prisoners during the Holocaust and was very popular with gay liberation groups in the 1960s.
The lambda, a Greek letter closely related to our Roman L, was first used in 1970 by the New York Gay Activists Alliance as a symbol for liberation. The ancient Spartans used it to represent union, and the Romans considered it “the light of knowledge shed into the darkness of ignorance,” according to the Rainbow Room page on the Internet.
Lesbians have their own symbol: a double-sided ax called a labyris and used by the mythological Amazons as a weapon and a harvesting tool. At Women & Children First and at Woman Wild, a feminist jewelry and craft store next door, there are fistfuls of labyris earrings, pins and pendants.
A lavender rhino?
Perhaps the most curious gay icon of all, however, is the lavender rhinoceros, created in 1970 by two Boston men, Daniel Thaxton and Bernie Toale.
“The idea was that the rhino was ridiculed and maligned in spite of being gentle and fun-loving — and, you know, the horn is known for its aphrodisiac qualities,” Mason says. “We have rhino jewelry, but it’s never really caught on.”
Up on North Broadway, Julie Northrup listens to the story of the lavender rhino and shakes her head. She’s wearing a necklace featuring a set of rings in rainbow colors. “I’d much rather wear the rainbow,” she says. “I mean, it’d take an hour to explain a rhino. You don’t have to say anything about the rainbow. You just look at it and it makes you feel good.”
