Gay Pride #2: Sharing our Stories: Learning our Legends

Tuesday June 25, 2013 

I wrote a five part series and posted them on Facebook this year to commemorative Gay Pride and Gay History.  Day 2.

Raising the LGBT Rainbow Flag this morning, as my Facebook Cover Photo, 35 years today, after it first appeared/was flown in San Francisco.  Here are few random facts about the rainbow flag, gay icons, some factual dates and fun myths around the last week of June as we continue through PRIDE Week.

• June 25, 1978 Gilbert Baker designed the rainbow flag for San Francisco Gay Freedom Day Parade. The rainbow has been seen as a symbol for diversity, and was possibly inspired for the gay rights movement by the lyrics from Judy Garland’s lifetime classic “Over the Rainbow” which she sang in the motion picture, The Wizard of Oz, at age 16 in 1938.
• June 22, 1969 Judy Garland was found dead in a London house of “an incautious self-overdose of barbiturates.”
• June 27, 1969 Judy Garland’s funeral was held in New York, New York.
• Later that night, in the early morning hours of June 28, 1969 The Stonewall Riots occurred in Greenwich Village, New York and recognized as the start of the gay rights movement.

Though there are no real correlations between Garland’s death and the Stonewall riots, homosexual men frequenting the Stonewall Inn were a bit more marginalized from society, used pseudonyms to mask their identity and sign-in at the door. “Judy Garland” was often one name used. It is Garland’s life struggles that spoke strongly to many closeted gay men, and her voice in song yearning for a world beyond the rainbow, perhaps which led others to celebrate and memorialize her life for years to come after her death, making her an icon to drag queens, gay men and dreamers for a better place.

All a bit of the fluff, the legends and the history that make us celebrate the journey known as Gay PRIDE.