For International Day of Disabled People, here is a blog about the latest iteration of the Progress Pride Flag designed by our Training and Funding Officer Rachel Stelmach.
Rachel has written about the history of the flag and her new design which includes disabled people. We also have a Cwrdd event for all our members taking place online, in Cardiff and in Powys where you can add the gold thread to your own flag. Learn more here.
The Flag is Up
Has anyone seen the latest iteration of the Progress Pride Flag?
Let’s have a look at the history of the flag, because it’s more complicated than you might think.
The original Gay Pride flag has been around since 1978, designed by Gilbert Baker, with pink for sex, red for life, orange for healing, yellow for sunlight, green for nature, turquoise for magic, indigo for serenity and violet for spirit. It was later re-organised to just the 6 colours we are familiar with now – due to the lack of the right pink material apparently.
In 2017, Philadelphia City Hall in the United States revealed a pride flag designed by Amber Hikes, including black and brown stripes to highlight the discrimination of black and brown members of the community.
A year later, the US city Seattle added five new colours to the rainbow flag: black and brown to represent people of colour, and pink, light blue and white to represent trans, gender non-binary, intersex and those across the gender spectrum, from the original trans flag by. Monica Helms.
But as you can see, it was getting kind of crammy on that flag. In 2018 Daniel Quasar resolved this design issue by placing the black, brown, light blue, pink and white stripes in the shape of an arrow, on the left of the Progress Pride flag. This solution not only sought to improve the flag's legibility, but also placed discriminated minorities at the forefront.
"The arrow points to the right to show forward movement […] and illustrates that progress [towards inclusivity] still needs to be made".
-Daniel Quasar
In 2021 Intersex columnist and media personality Valentino Vecchietti designed the new rendition of the rainbow Pride flag. The flag was officially unveiled by the advocacy group Intersex Equality Rights UK in late May but has since spread virally on social media.
So, you might have thought I meant this inclusion of Intersex people with the yellow circle. But no, I mean this one:
What’s the difference between this one and the Intersex Inclusive version? Can you see that there’s a thread of gold stitched through the flag 25% of the way from the edge. And here’s why.
Disabled people are around 25% of the population - depending on where you live and the age of the population. And we are just as likely to be gay or lesbian, bisexual, trans, asexual, intersex and or to be from a global majority population. We are not just disabled, we also so many more identities than that.
When the first Gay Pride flag in 1978 came about disabled gay people felt represented in one aspect of their life, but not in another. In 2017 and 2018 when the colours of Black Lives matters and Trans and gender spectrum identities were added to the flag, disabled black people and disabled trans people felt included in one or more aspects of their lives, but not another. When Daniel Quasar redesigned the flag to look cooler, disabled people still knew an aspect of their lives was not represented. In 2021 when Valentino Vecchietti added the yellow circle to represent Intersex Inclusion as an issue in its own right[1] then Intersex people felt included too but disabled intersex people were also left feeling that there was a part of them still not included.
So here we are in 2024. Why didn’t anyone notice that the disabled people, including the gay disabled people, the trans disabled people, the racially diverse disabled people and the Intersex disabled people were not at the party? Probably because the party was on the 5th floor of a walk up building and all the disabled people were downstairs boycotting it.
So, we want everyone to get hold of those 2021 Flags, don’t throw them away, that’s wasteful. But grab yourself a piece of gold ribbon, gold thread or even just gold paper or paint and show that disability is an issue that’s not on top of other identities, not underneath other identities but threaded through the fabric of who we are, and that we matter, we have value, we are made of strong material.
[1] (as opposed to gender spectrum identity)