If you needed more proof that gay men aren’t in control of things any more – at least where the activist set is concerned – look no further than the evolution of the LGBTQ+ Pride flag. If, as Oscar Wilde once wrote, ‘Fashion is a form of ugliness so intolerable that we have to alter it every six months’, then the new Pride flag is somewhere between a prisoner of war and Frankenstein’s monster: a tortured and overburdened horror; a stitched-together crime against nature.
What was wrong with the old rainbow flag? Rainbows are happy and beautiful. Everyone loves a rainbow. And that, precisely, was the problem. You can’t strike fear into the hearts of your enemies with a rainbow. Big Gay needed something more militant.
The first edit came a few years ago, with the addition of brown and black stripes, which don’t belong on a rainbow but do belong in intersectional grievance hustling.
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