Happy Pride!

June 1st launches pride month and June 2nd was Gilbert Baker's birthday, he passed away on March 31, 2017.  We learned of Gilbert's birthday as we launched google and saw today's doodle honors him.

Gilbert was the world-renowned artist who created The Rainbow Flag, the international symbol of LGBT pride and liberation.  The original rainbow flag had 8 colors, "each with an individual meaning: pink for sex, red for life, orange for healing, yellow for the sun, green for nature, turquoise for magic, blue for serenity, and purple for the spirit. “This was the hippie, 1978 meanings for the thing,” Baker said."

A little more about the original flag and the commercialization was considered in a flash collective lead by Avram Finklestein.

From Avram Finkelstein: Collectives are like organisms. Each one has its own temperament. When the visionary Dan Fishback asked me to conduct a second Flash Collective for The Helix Queer Performance Network, I could tell during the first round that this collective would not shy idea from big ideas. By our first break we had zeroed in on the way assimilation is privileged over radical forms of queer resistance. This project is a meditation on the ubiquitous rainbow flag, which we decided to re-orient. The Tumblr page mounted by the collective clearly explains why: "When the rainbow flag was first designed in 1979, each color represented a different aspect of queer life, including hot pink for sexuality and turquoise for magic and art. By the 1980s, those two colors were removed, and quickly forgotten about. We oppose the erasure, corporatization, and commercialization of any radical aspects of queer culture, and so, we reclaim the colors that remain"

We are incredibly saddened reading what is going on in Chechnya at the moment and our current administration's lack of any strong denouncement of imprisonment, torture and murders of gays.  In 2017 Chechnya is far from the only country unsafe for the LGBTQ community.  

We recently learned of the organization RAINBOW RAILROAD and their efforts to save LGBTQ lives. We will be donating 10% of sales of our rainbow pin and READ MY LIPS tees to help with their efforts.

#rainbow #GilbertBaker #Chechnya100 #RainbowRailroad #SaveLGBTLives #queercrisis #lgbtpride #lgbtqpride #gaypride #pride