At the 2018 New Yorker Festival, a fan asked how she felt about being a gay icon in country music. I like to think of those elements as in every person everyone shares that." The rainbow flag endures as a symbol of Pride and Musgrave's 2020 song fits naturally with the theme. "Pink is for sex, red for life, orange for healing, yellow for sun, green for nature, turquoise for magic, blue for serenity and purple for the spirit.
You put a rainbow flag on your windshield and you're saying something." Each colour of the rainbow flag stands for something, Baker explained.
"Flags are about power," he told ABC7 News in 2017. In 1978, San Fran gay activist Harvey Milk asked artist Gilbert Baker to create something to replace the pink triangle, a gay symbol co-opted from the Nazis who had used it to "identify homosexuals." Baker decided on a flag. It's all of our responsibilities, especially in the majority to fight for the minority." "True Colors" is the lead single and title track from her 1986 sophomore album, which also included the more obvious choice for Pride anthem, "Boy Blue", a song dedicated to a friend who died of AIDS. Because when one group's freedom is up for grabs, that means your freedom could be next. It's a slippery slope when one group is not free. "You can't sit by while your friends and family are being treated like second-class citizens … Equality should matter to everyone regardless if you are in the majority or the minority. "In the '70s and '80s, I saw incredible discrimination and had to speak out," she told the Georgia Voice in 2010. She has friends and family in the community, including her sister, Ellen, who is a lesbian. Throughout her career, she has campaigned for equality through charities and gay pride events. Here's Lauper on a float at Toronto's Pride Parade in 2015. 'True Colors' by Cyndi Lauper The Canadian Press/Chris Young/CP Images Still, this snappy song of determination from "Funny Girl" features lyrics like "Get ready for me, love / Cause I'm a commer / I simply gotta march / My heart's a drummer", making it almost scandalously Pride Month-friendly. Of course, any song about a parade could feasibly fit the Pride Parade playlist mandate. From here grew the annual tradition of gay-pride parades. They presented a petition to the government with 10 demands for equal rights and protections. And a year after that, on August 28, 1971, about 100 people gathered in the pouring rain on Parliament Hill for Canada's first Gay Liberation Protest and March. A year later, New York gay activists held a Pride Parade to commemorate the anniversary. It received royal assent on June 27, the day before New York's Stonewall Riots. On May 14, 1969, Canada decriminalized "homosexual acts between consenting adults" with the passage of the Criminal Law Amendment Act.
'Don't Rain On My Parade' by Barbra Streisand Columbia/Kobal/Shutterstock Chauncey also offers a theory on how the closet connection was made: "It may have been used initially because many men who remained 'covert' thought of their homosexuality as a sort of 'skeleton in the closet'." This song's lyrics speak of renewal in general, but this infectious dance hit, which peaked at #5 on the Billboard 200 in August 1980, is a natural fit for Pride Month. He wrote that gays adopted the phrase from debutante balls, where young upper-class women "come out" in society because they want the world to know that they are ready to date and marry eligible guys. So even though we were skeptical when he wrote in 'Gay New York' that "coming out" didn't mean "coming out of the closet," we figured that this guy has serious gay history cred, so it's best to hear him out. He also wrote 'Gay New York: Gender, Urban Culture, and the Making of the Gay Male World, 1890-1940'. George Chauncey is so good at history that he gets to teach it at Columbia University. 'I'm Coming Out' by Diana Ross Roth Stock/Everett Collection/CP Images