Tuesday, June 25, 2024
Via Daily Dharma: Presence and Ancestors
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Via Dhamma Wheel | Right Intention: Cultivating Appreciative Joy
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Via White Crane Institute // The RAINBOW FLAG
Noteworthy
1978 -
The RAINBOW FLAG is first displayed in the San Francisco Gay Pride Parade. While Gilbert Baker is widely recognized as the creator of the Rainbow Flag, the origins of the flag remain controversial.
The late activist and author, Lee Mentley asserted -- we think correctly -- that it was made by artists from Eureka Noe Valley Artist’s Coalition, The Hula Palace, and Gay Freedom Day community volunteers in Top Floor Gallery.
It was the summer of 1978, and the Gay Community Center in San Francisco swarmed with dozens of young people, flitting between ironing boards, swewing machines and trash cans filled with colorful dye. They had been tasked with making two enormous flags to fly above the city's Gay Freedom Day Parade, and they wanted something bright. Something inclusive. Something hopeful.
Unbeknownst to them, their colorful project, the rainbow flag, would become the international symbol for LGBTQI rights, seen practically everywhere: atop City Hall in West Hollywood, in countries like Uganda, where homosexuality is still illegalm in the Target clothing aisle during Pride Month.
The design and sewing of the first rainbow flag often is solely credited to the self-described "gay Betsey Ross," Gilber Baker -- a well-known activist and drag queen who died in 2017 -- with little or no mention of the artists and volunteers who helped that summer.
Lynn Segerblom, who co-chaired the 1978 Gay Freedom Day decorations committee that year with Baker, remembers the conceptualization and creation of the rainbow flag as a joyous collaboration with friends. Segerblom and Paul Langlotz, who both witnessed the making of the giant banners, said Baker had been their friend and roommate but as soon as he started traveling the world promoting the flag, the stories of the other artists eventually fell by the wayside. In the interest of history, without Segerblom and a seamster, James McNamara, who died of HIV-AIDS in 1999, the flags wouldn't have happened.
Mentley, in his recent book, The Princess of Castro Street [ISBN-10: 1533323844 - ISBN-13: 978-1533323842], disputes the origin story of the flag told by Gilbert Baker who claimed the flag design as his own. According to Mentley:
“…Gilbert Baker who could barely finish any project he ever started was the 1978 co-chair of the Gay Day Decorating Committee would later … claim he created the rainbow flags all by himself, at Harvey’s [Milk] request nonetheless—but the artists knew he was no Betsy Ross!
“Lynn Segerblon who was the other co-chair with Gilbert Baker of the Gay Day Decorating Committee, along with Hula Palace artist Robert Guttmann, presented their original idea to the Pride Board of the rainbow flag concept.
“The Pride Foundation requested and found funding through the Hotel Tax. Lynn was the rainbow artist for Capezio downtown and professionally known as Faery Rainbow Argyle. It was Ms. Faery who, working with others, chose the colors and mixed the dye for one thousand yards of bleached muslin and designed the Rainbow and Rainbow American Flag, with a sole star placed within the stripes symbolizing “The State of Consciousness.”
“More than one hundred artists worked on this amazing project.”
The flag consisted of eight stripes: hot pink: sexuality; red: life; orange; healing; yellow: sunlight; green: nature; turquoise; magic/art; indigo: serenity/harmony; and violet: spirit. After the assassination of Harvey Milk, there was an increased demand for the flags. To meet that demand, the Paramount Flag Company began selling a version of the flag using stock rainbow fabric consisting of seven stripes of red, orange, yellow, green, turquoise, blue, and violet.
In 1979 the flag was modified again. When hung vertically from the lamp posts of San Francisco's Market Street, the center stripe was obscured by the post itself. Changing the flag design to one with an even number of stripes was the easiest way to rectify this, so the turquoise stripe was dropped, which resulted in a six stripe version of the flag - red, orange, yellow, green, blue, and violet. Naturally, in the modifications, the two color elements that were lost: sex and magic/art. In the early years of the AIDS epidemic, AIDS activists designed a "Victory Over AIDS" flag consisting of the standard six-stripe rainbow flag with a black stripe across the bottom. Leonard Matlovich, himself dying of AIDS-related illness, suggested that upon a cure for AIDS being discovered, the black stripes be removed from the flags and burned.
There is also an on-going controversey around the addition or changing of colors in the flag so individial communities within the LGBTQI communty can be represented. This misses the spirit of the flag. The stripes do not represent specific communities but ideals held by the community: Red represents life; orange is for healing; yellow is for sunlight; green is for nature; blue is for harmony; and purple is for spirit. The original flag had eight stripes, however there have been many iterations since. Today, the most commonly used flag, created in 1979, has six stripes.
Still, there are other versions of the rainbow flag used to represent various queer subsets. At the 2018 Met Gala, for example, Lena Waithe wore a pride flag with black and brown stripes that were used to represent marginalized LGBTQIA+ people of color. It was introduced by the city of Philadelphia in 2017. In addition to the rainbow flag, there is also a transgender flag, a bisexual flag, and a gender fluid flag, to name a few.
The rainbow flag remains a potent symbol of and for the LGBTQI Community. Daily GayWisdom pays tribute to the rainbow with the colors of every entry in GayWisdom.
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Gay Wisdom for Daily Living from White Crane Institute
"With the increasing commodification of gay news, views, and culture by powerful corporate interests, having a strong independent voice in our community is all the more important. White Crane is one of the last brave standouts in this bland new world... a triumph over the looming mediocrity of the mainstream Gay world." - Mark Thompson
Exploring Gay Wisdom & Culture since 1989!
www.whitecraneinstitute.org
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Via White Crane Institute // MICHEL FOUCAULT
1984 -
MICHEL FOUCAULT, French philosopher died on this date (b. 1926); Foucault was a French philosopher, historian, critic and sociologist. He held a chair at the Collége de France, giving it the title "History of Systems of Thought," and taught at the University of California, Berkeley.
Foucault is best known for his critical studies of social institutions, most notably psychiatry, medicine, the human sciences, and the prison system, as well as for his work on the history of human sexuality. One of the leading philosophers of the twentieth century, Michel Foucault has had an enormous influence on our understanding of the lesbian and Gay literary heritage and the cultural forces surrounding it. In his explorations of power and his examinations of the history of sexuality, Foucault traces the ways in which discourse shapes perception, focusing often on those individuals and practices considered marginal or abnormal, but finding in them keys to understanding the fragile and imperfect ways that power is deployed by the upper classes, the medical establishment, the scientific community, and the literary and political elite.
Three volumes of The History of Sexuality were published before Foucault's AIDS-related death in 1984. The first and most referenced volume, The Will to Knowledge (previously known as An Introduction in English — Histoire de la sexualité, 1: la volonté de savoir in French) was published in France in 1976, and translated in 1977, focusing primarily on the last two centuries, and the functioning of sexuality as an analytics of power related to the emergence of a science of sexuality (scientia sexualis) and the emergence of biopower in the West.
The second two volumes, The Use of Pleasure (Histoire de la sexualite, II: l'usage des plaisirs) and The Care of Self (Histoire de la sexualité, III: le souci de soi) dealt with the role of sex in Greek and Roman antiquity. Both were published in 1984, the year of Foucault's death, with the second volume being translated in 1985, and the third in 1986. In his lecture series from 1979 to 1980 Foucault extended his analysis of government to its 'wider sense of techniques and procedures designed to direct the behavior of men', which involved a new consideration of the 'examination of conscience' and confession in early Christian literature.
However, Foucault's death left the work incomplete, and the planned fourth volume of his History of Sexuality in Christianity was never published. The fourth volume was to be entitled Confessions of the Flesh (Les aveux de la chair). The volume was almost complete before Foucault's death and a copy of it is privately held in the Foucault archive. It cannot be published under the restrictions of Foucault's estate. Foucault advanced a new understanding of the birth of modern consciousness about sexual identity, finding in the concepts of the "heterosexual" and "homosexual" not only a construction of identity for the purposes of regulation, but also a starting point for subversion and resistance.
As many theorists now argue, these narrow notions of identity can be both confining and liberating.
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Gay Wisdom for Daily Living from White Crane Institute
"With the increasing commodification of gay news, views, and culture by powerful corporate interests, having a strong independent voice in our community is all the more important. White Crane is one of the last brave standouts in this bland new world... a triumph over the looming mediocrity of the mainstream Gay world." - Mark Thompson
Exploring Gay Wisdom & Culture since 1989!
www.whitecraneinstitute.org
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Via White Crane Institute // RUDOLF BRAZDA
1913 -
RUDOLF BRAZDA, believed to be the last surviving man to wear the pink triangle — the emblem sewn onto the striped uniforms of the thousands of homosexuals sent to Nazi concentration camps, most of them to their deaths — was born on this date (d: 2011). Mr. Brazda, who was born in Germany, had lived in France since the Buchenwald camp, near Weimar, Germany, was liberated by American forces in April 1945. He had been imprisoned there for three years.
It was only after May 27, 2008, when the German National Monument to the Victims of the Nazi Regime was unveiled in Berlin’s Tiergarten park — opposite the Memorial to the Murdered Jews of Europe — that Mr. Brazda became known as probably the last gay survivor of the camps. Until he notified German officials after the unveiling, the Lesbian and Gay Federation believed there were no other pink-triangle survivors. Mémorial de la Déportation Homosexuelle, a French organization that commemorates the Nazi persecution of gay people, said that Mr. Brazda “was very likely the last victim and the last witness” to the persecution.
“It will now be the task of historians to keep this memory alive,” the statement said, “a task that they are just beginning to undertake.” One of those historians is Gerard Koskovich, curator of the Gay, Lesbian, Bisexual and Transgender History Museum in San Francisco and an author with Roberto Malini and Steed Gamero of “A Different Holocaust” (2006). Pointing out that only men were interned, Mr. Koskovich said, “The Nazi persecution represented the apogee of anti-Gay persecution, the most extreme instance of state-sponsored homophobia in the 20th century.
During the 12-year Nazi regime, he said, up to 100,000 men were identified in police records as homosexuals, with about 50,000 convicted of violating Paragraph 175, a section of the German criminal code that outlawed male homosexual acts. There was no law outlawing female homosexual acts, he said. Citing research by Rüdiger Lautmann, a German sociologist, Mr. Koskovich said that 5,000 to 15,000 gay men were interned in the camps and that about 60 percent of them died there, most within a year.
“The experience of homosexual men under the Nazi regime was one of extreme persecution, but not genocide,” Mr. Koskovich said, when compared with the “relentless effort to identify all Jewish people and ultimately exterminate them.” Still, the conditions in the camps were murderous, said Edward J. Phillips, the director of exhibitions at the United States Holocaust Memorial Museum.
“Men sent to the camps under Section 175 were usually put to forced labor under the cruelest conditions — underfed, long hours, exposure to the elements and brutal treatment by labor brigade leaders,” Mr. Phillips said. “We know of instances where gay prisoners and their pink triangles were used for guards’ target practices.” Two books have been written about Mr. Brazda. In one, “Itinerary of a Pink Triangle” (2010), by Jean-Luc Schwab, Mr. Brazda recalled how dehumanizing the incarceration was. “Seeing people die became such an everyday thing, it left you feeling practically indifferent,” he is quoted as saying. “Now, every time I think back on those terrible times, I cry. But back then, just like everyone in the camps, I had hardened myself so I could survive.”
Rudolf Brazda was born on June 26, 1913, in the eastern German town of Meuselwitz to a family of Czech origin. His parents, Emil and Anna Erneker Brazda, both worked in the coal-mining industry. Rudolf became a roofer. Before he was sent to the camp, he was arrested twice for violations of Paragraph 175. After the war, Mr. Brazda moved to Alsace. There he met Edouard Mayer, his partner until Mr. Mayer’s death in 2003.
He had no immediate survivors. “Having emerged from anonymity,” the book “Itinerary of a Pink Triangle” says of Mr. Brazda, “he looks at the social evolution for homosexuals over his nearly 100 years of life: ‘I have known it all, from the basest repression to the grand emancipation of today.’ ” He died on August 3, 2011 in Bantzenheim, in Alsace, France. He was 98.
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Gay Wisdom for Daily Living from White Crane Institute
"With the increasing commodification of gay news, views, and culture by powerful corporate interests, having a strong independent voice in our community is all the more important. White Crane is one of the last brave standouts in this bland new world... a triumph over the looming mediocrity of the mainstream Gay world." - Mark Thompson
Exploring Gay Wisdom & Culture since 1989!
www.whitecraneinstitute.org
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