“The rainbow is a part of nature, and you have to be in the right place to see it. It's beautiful, all of the colors, even the colors you can't see. That really fit us as a people because we are all of the colors. Our sexuality is all of the colors. We are all the genders, races, and ages.”Tagged: Rainbow Flag, sexuality, gender, Race
“In most of the world, it’s still not cool to be gay. You can be murdered in these places. You can be thrown in jail. Being gay in San Francisco is fun. Being gay in Saudi Arabia—that's a whole other matter.”Tagged: gay rights, Homophobia, San Francisco, Saudi Arabia
“A true flag is not something you can really design. A true flag is torn from the soul of the people. A flag is something that everyone owns, and that's why they work. The Rainbow Flag is like other flags in that sense: it belongs to the people.”Tagged: Rainbow Flag
“When I fell in love, all the shame and guilt I carried with me for years suddenly vanished.”Tagged: Falling In Love With Someone's Soul, Guilt, Shame
“You don't have to live a lie. Living a lie will mess you up. It will send you into depression. It will warp your values.”Tagged: Living a Lie, Depresion
“We needed something to express our joy, our beauty, our power. And the rainbow did that.”Tagged: Joy, beauty, Power, Rainbow Flag, LGBT
“My parents and I didn’t speak for 10 years. It took a long time to rebuild that relationship.”Tagged: Homophobia, Coming out
“[Gay] people were psychopaths, criminals. I was afraid my family would lock me up and give me electroshock. I was a screaming queen.”Tagged: Psychopaths, Criminals, Electroshock Therapy, Homophobia
“We took the gay pride parade with 50,000 people to 500,000. Anita Bryant had the effect of galvanizing the whole gay movement. She was somebody whom everybody could hate. She was easy to hate.”Tagged: Anita Bryant, Gay Pride Parade, Homophobia, Hate
“It works because the song is beautiful. The lyrics are about the longing to be free.”Tagged: Songs, Somewhere Over The Rainbow, Freedom
“Anita Bryant is an important figure in gay history because she enraged a generation of people who got active.”Tagged: Anita Bryant, Gay History, Homophobia
“Up until the rainbow flag, the pink triangle was the dominant symbol for our movement. But it was negative. It had a depressing origin. You know, Holocaust and murder was put on us by Hitler. We needed something from us.”Tagged: Pink Triangle, Rainbow Flag, LGBT, Holocaust, Hitler
“That's what flags are for. Flags are about proclaiming power...that visibility is key to our success and to our justice.”Tagged: Power, Success, Justice, LGBT, Rainbow Flag
“I think that there's some prison factory in China somewhere where LGBT people can't come out, are living lives of desperation, and they're churning out rainbow tchotchkes for gay pride parades for people that don't even know the history of what they're wearing and waving.”Tagged: LGBT, Chinese Factory Labor, Gay Pride Parade, tchotchkes, Rainbow Flag
“They had a whole code of emblems that they used to oppress people, and we needed something to answer that.”Tagged: LGBT, Rainbow Flag, Homophobia
“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, how important it was to come out, and that was the single most important thing we had to do. Our job as gay people was to come…”Tagged: Harvey Milk, San Francisco, Gay Pride, Rainbow Flag
“I decided that we should have a flag, that a flag fit us as a symbol, that we are a people, a tribe if you will. And flags are about proclaiming power, so it's very appropriate.”Tagged: LGBT, Rainbow Flag, Power, Tribe