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Yahoo
6 days ago
- General
- Yahoo
Pride Month 2025: What colors are on a rainbow flag and what is their meaning?
Happy Pride Month! June marks the 55th anniversary of the first LGBTQ+ Pride march held in the United States. Since its creation in 1978, the Rainbow Pride Flag has become a universal symbol for the LGBTQ community. While the flag's image is well-recognized, its history may not be as well-known. Here is the history of how the Rainbow Pride Flag came to be and the meaning behind its colors. Held in June every year, LGBTQ Pride Month is dedicated to the celebration and commemoration of lesbian, gay, bisexual, transgender and other sexualities. It seeks to honor LGBTQ history and the challenges the community faces, past and present, according to Cathy Renna, Communications Director for the National LGBTQ Task Force. According to History, Pride Month is held in June due to honor the 1969 Stonewall Uprising in New York City. The riots began on June 28 when police officers raided the Stonewall Inn, a gay club located in Greenwich Village, which led to days of protests and violent clashes with law enforcement. USA TODAY notes that in the year following the riots, some of the first Gay Pride parades were held in Chicago, San Francisco, Los Angeles and New York. Early Pride celebrations still excluded pivotal members, such as trans women and other women of color. Celebrations soon expanded on their activist roots in the 1980s and 1990s with the onset of the HIV/AIDS epidemic. More recently, activists have used the celebrations to shed light topics from marriage equality to racial justice. As for why it is called "pride," it again goes back to the Stonewall Riots. Bustle explains that Brenda Howard, a bisexual woman, is known as the "Mother of Pride" for her work in organizing the first LGBTQ Pride March back in 1970. It was also noted that Howard's peers and other key figures popularized the word following its inception. June became known as Pride Month in the United States when former President Bill Clinton first recognized it in 1999, referring to it as "Gay & Lesbian Pride Month." Former President Barack Obama declared June "LGBT Pride Month" in 2009. Most recently, former President Joe Biden declared June "LGBTQ+ Pride Month" in 2021, including all sexualities under the acronym. Each of the flag's six rainbow colors has a unique meaning: Red: Life Orange: Healing Yellow: Sunlight Green: Nature Blue: Serenity Purple: Spirit In recent years, many flags also feature black and brown stripes to represent marginalized LGBTIQ+ people of color and the trio of blue, pink, and white from the trans flag. There are also more than 25 different variations of the Pride flag to represent different communities, including lesbians, transgender people and asexuality. In the 1970s, Harvey Milk – the first openly gay elected official in California – tasked activist Gilbert Baker to design a symbol of hope for the gay community. "Harvey Milk was a friend of mine, an important gay leader in San Francisco in the '70s, and he carried a really important message about how important it was to be visible," Baker said in an interview with the Museum of Modern Art in 2015. "A flag really fit that mission, because that's a way of proclaiming your visibility, or saying, 'This is who I am!'" The original pride flag had eight stripes, with colors symbolizing: Hot pink: Sex Red: Life Orange: Healing Yellow: Sunlight Green: Nature Turquoise: Magic Indigo: Serenity Purple: Spirit Before the rainbow flag, the pink triangle was used as a symbol for the LGBTQ+ community, according to Baker. In Nazi Germany, people were forced to wear pink triangles. While the symbol was reclaimed, the community wanted a new symbol. "We needed something beautiful, something from us," Baker said in the MoMA interview. "The rainbow is so perfect because it really fits our diversity in terms of race, gender, ages, all of those things." The original Pride flag was flown for the first time at the San Francisco Gay Freedom Day Parade celebration on June 25, 1978, the History Channel reports. The original flag was made by hand, but as the flags started to be mass-produced, the hot pink stripe was removed due to manufacturing difficulties, the New York Times reports. Parade organizers also wanted the rainbow to have an even number of stripes so they could "split" the flag and use the halves to line the street along parade routes. Baker then removed the turquoise stripe and replaced the indigo stripe with blue, the History Channel reports. This article originally appeared on Palm Beach Post: Pride Month 2025: What do all the colors in the pride flag mean?
Yahoo
10-05-2025
- Yahoo
Sam Nordquist to be honored at Stonewall Inn in June
ROCHESTER, N.Y. (WROC) — Sam Nordquist, a Black trans man that was tortured for nearly three months before found being found dead in Hopewell earlier this year is set to be inducted into the 'Wall of Honor' at the Stonewall Inn in New York City. Communications Director for the National LGBTQ Task Force Cathy Renna said this year's focus on transgender trailblazers and changemakers shows the current climate for transgender individuals. 'As we continue to fiercely battle against attacks on our trans and nonbinary communities, we are honored to uplift their legacies. Their courage inspires our ongoing fight for liberation, both within the Task Force family and across every queer advocacy organization,' Renna said in a news release. Nordquist traveled from Minnesota to New York but was subjected to violence and torture before he was killed. His body was then taken to a field in Yates County. This all happened between December 2024 and February 2025. Seven people have been charged with murder. Seven individuals will be inducted into the National LGBTQ Wall of Honor at Stonewall Inn on June 26 — in celebration of Pride Month. Copyright 2025 Nexstar Media, Inc. All rights reserved. This material may not be published, broadcast, rewritten, or redistributed.
Yahoo
14-02-2025
- Politics
- Yahoo
‘Transgender' and ‘queer' wiped from Stonewall website in ‘blatant attempt to discriminate'
Outraged LGBTQ+ activists and human rights advocates gathered in Manthattan's Greenwich Village Friday afternoon to protest against the Trump administration's latest — and perhaps boldest — attack on the community. A day earlier, internet users noticed that all references to the words 'transgender' and 'queer' had been removed from the Stonewall National Monument website, a move described by New York State Sen. Brad Hoylman-Sigal as 'one of the darkest moments in American history.' The anti-LGBTQ move — seen as a deliberate attempt to rewrite history while further marginalizing trans people — sparked a near-immediate response from members of the community, who gathered on Friday at Christopher Park, just across from the historic Stonewall Inn, to express their fury and frustration. Waving transgender and rainbow Pride flags and signs that read 'No LGB without the T' and 'You can't spell Stonewall without the T,' politicians, activists and community members came together to protest against the change while renewing their commitment to fight against the current administration's relentless attack on LGBTQ+ rights. 'It's just another part of the chaos and cascade of attacks that the queer community is facing under the Trump administration,' Cathy Renna, spokesperson for the National LGBTQ Task Force, told ABC7. 'I think this one hurts, particularly because this is really, for so many of us, a place where we come when good things happen.' The Stonewall Inn bar, the first U.S. national monument dedicated to LGBTQ+ history, is where in the summer of 1969, trans women of color, homeless LGBTQ youth, lesbians, drag queens, gay men and their allies rioted, protested, got arrested and changed the course of history. As recently as Wednesday, anyone visiting the National Park Service page for the Stonewall National Monument website would read the following paragraph: 'Before the 1960s, almost everything about living openly as a lesbian, gay, bisexual, transgender or queer (LGBTQ+) person was illegal. The Stonewall Uprising on June 28, 1969 is a milestone in the quest for LGBTQ+ civil rights and provided momentum for a movement.' On Thursday, however, a chilling modification to the text replaced 'living openly as a lesbian, gay, bisexual, transgender or queer (LGBTQ+) person' with 'living openly as a lesbian, gay, bisexual (LGB) person.' The change stunned LGBTQ+ activists, who pointed out the pivotal role transgender women — particularly trans women of color— played in the Stonewall Uprising. 'Let us be clear: Stonewall is transgender history,' the Stonewall Inn said in a statement shared with the Daily News. 'Marsha P. Johnson, Sylvia Rivera and countless other trans and gender-nonconforming individuals fought bravely, and often at great personal risk, to push back against oppressive systems. Their courage, sacrifice, and leadership were central to the resistance we now celebrate as the foundation of the modern LGBTQ+ rights movement.' The decision is just another example of the Trump administration's 'blatant attempts to discriminate against and erase the legacies of transgender and queer Americans,' a GLAAD spokesperson told the News. 'The White House's attempt at LGBTQ erasure not only distorts U.S. history but also contradicts factual evidence,' Sen. Hoylman-Sigal, who's openly gay, told the Daily News. It also 'signals the continued, morally reprehensible effort by the White House to demean, demoralize and discriminate against an entire population of Americans.'
