Recently a good friend of mine made the comment "I am SOOOO over all this rainbow crap." I immediately replied, "I've been out for almost 21 years now, and I have to agree with you". During the following couple of weeks I started to reflect on the "rainbow thing" and tried to determine just where that attitude came from. And I realized that I had spoken in haste.

Preceding and during my coming out, (in 1979 at a Halloween party in Grinnell, Iowa... another story...), I went through what many questioning men did to find out about what they feared they may be... gay. It was hard enough saying the word in context of one's own being, so we started by looking through books in libraries, attempting to find out more about "the other" we discovered in ourselves. Other than the politics expressed in the tattered copies of Gay Community News (imported by the library at great expense all the way from that hotbed of radical thought, Boston), and outdated psychology books that stated I was "diseased", History was the Dewey decimal section where most of the information on homosexuality was found. It was here that I discovered the sinister symbols given to minority groups by Hitler's Third Reich.

Already familiar with the "Juden" yellow star, as featured year after year in Sunday school classes and film reel footage, I was shocked to discover the Nazis had a whole scheme developed for easy, representational images to place on and dehumanize those they found less than human. Here I found the pink triangle. Then, in the late 70s, it was a symbol embraced by gay rights advocates and freely used to tell one of "the other" from another before I developed my own "gaydar". While I readily embraced this symbol, I felt uncomfortable using this triangle of hate as a visual statement of my own liberation. I didn't see fellow Jews wearing yellow Stars of David as to embrace their heritage, so why would I want to wear a symbol that represented one of the most horrific of times to my newly "adopted" social group?

I am familiar with the argument that to take a symbol of oppression and to use it as a self-identifier is an act of positive force, or such like. (Similar to how the word "queer" is used in our communities.) Why not a symbol that embraces the positive, present nature of coming out, as opposed to a symbol of hatred and the past?

Enter the "benign" rainbow flag.

I'm not sure when I first became aware that this little multi-colored image was representational of the gay "movement". Used in large flags carried in miles-long marches for civil rights, it soon was EVERYWHERE. From bumper stickers to sun-catchers, hanging in the front of coffee shops or any other business seeking the gay dollar, whether gay-owned or not. I remember joking, as we would see a rainbow-bedecked bumper on the road, that maybe they're not gay -- maybe they just like RAINBOWS". This was further confirmed as we would pass the hetero octogenarian couple with rainbows all over the interior of their Chevy Impala. But there always was, and is, that thrill of seeing those lines of color in a place where one doesn't expect; on a new co-workers desk, or on the bumper of that hot plumber who fixed your water heater, or in the window of your neighborhood bookstore.

At this point in my life, I still find it hard to believe that there are people out there who DON'T know the relationship of the rainbow flag image to gay people. I've encountered straight tourists in Provincetown whom, upon entering a "Pride" shop remark "Wow, look at all the rainbow stuff!", without a clue as to what it represents. And maybe that's a good thing.

Perhaps by now, we're slipping it under the straight folks' radar. The rainbow flag is a big neon sign to the rest of us that the display of such a symbol is sympathetic, in SOME manner or fashion, to our existence or state of life. And even if the presence of the rainbow only makes us THINK that we will be well received, it may lessen the fear that many of us carry through our daily lives that our "expression of affection" WILL be rejected by the mainstream. If we go in with the expectation that we will be accepted for who we are, just perhaps we will be. And every little step in that direction makes it that much easier for the next person down the road. It's this way, with the backing of our "rainbow power", that we become accepted for who we are, as individuals and couples and as a group in society, and not just as "symbols" easily dismissed by others.

Hal Hillman lives in Rhode Island and operates Ursa Travel.

RELATED LINKS

• A brief history of the rainbow flag

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