Gilbert Baker's Drash at Family and Friends Shabbat
Gilbert Baker came to speak at Family and Friends Shabbat on June 17th. Read his inspirational speech below!
New York City - June 16, 2011
Gilbert Baker
The Rainbow Flag is in your face political art. John Kennedy said, “art is not a form of propaganda, it is a form of truth.” When people fly the rainbow flag, put it on a bumper sticker, or t-shirt, or use any of its endless variations, they are saying something. Right out front they’re saying, “this is who I am.”
To come out is to be true to one’s self.
When I was a kid in Sunday school we’d sing “this little light of mine - I’m gonna’ let it shine”, and I believed I was loved by God – even while those around me thought otherwise. My whole life was a silent rebellion against a programmed inner hatred for who I really was. But somewhere deep in my soul, I knew even as a child in Kansas, that my love was just as good as everyone else.
Jesus said, “No one lights a lamp and puts it in a place where it will be hidden, instead he places it on its stand so that those who come in may see the light.”
Visibility is power - it is the way to freedom.
In the Bible, God speaks in the first person - Genesis 9:13 - and says “I set my bow in the cloud as a sign of a covenant between me and the earth.” We are a part of life from the beginning.
The gospel according to Madonna, “It’s better to live one year as tiger than a hundred as a sheep.”
People find out I’m from Kansas and they always ask me “Oh, are you a friend of Dorothy? And I always tell them - I am Dorothy.
I had your typical unpleasant suburban black and white childhood, a Freudian nightmare of parents, friends, atomic bombs, assassinations, and the lonely fears of being different.
I loved rock and roll and my dog Brusier. I liked to dance and dress up, and most of all I liked to draw and play the trumpet.
But I was afraid of what would happen to me because I was gay. I had to lie to survive in a world where being gay was illegal and you could be locked up and electro-shocked. I had to lie to everyone all the time, trying get thru yet another day of insults and punches on the playing fields of teenage cruelty. My parents took me to a psychiatrist when I was in Junior High because they thought I might be a latent homosexual, but there was nothing latent about it. I was born gay and I always knew it.
I invented my own art therapy as an answer to suicide.
At night I would read the encyclopedia and any books and magazines I could find and then dream of a life somewhere over the rainbow.
Then one day it happened, the sixties, civil rights, the Vietnam War. And when the tornado came - I ran right for it saying, “take me away.”
And it did … to San Francisco. Exploding in color and revolutionary ideas. I learned how to sew to express fabulous ideas. I’d push the gowns aside and stitch up protest banners, my craft was always my activism, it connected me with community and when I made the rainbow flag in 1978 it changed my life.
In 1978, as the rainbow flag took shape, Harvey Milk said, “Power is never given, it always taken.” He faced the same opponents we face today with a personal courage that inspired a movement. The battle for our human rights has never stopped.
Our foes have packaged their relentless campaign of fear and violence in the morality of a phony master race marching in lock-step hatred. We have taken a beating, we have been murdered, but we will never give up.
Our foes will argue their religions and perversions - we must answer them with love and truth. They will argue special rights, but it is they that have them.
Today, we celebrate our freedom, but are mindful we celebrate a struggle.
Emily Dickinson said, “Flags are a brave sight, but no true eye ever went by one steadily.”
We must do more than fly flags and have parades; we must enlist ourselves, right now, in every way with every resource of mind and action. The stakes are freedom and democracy itself. Brothers and sisters everywhere must join hands to turn the tide or we will drown in apathy.
Change will not come if we wait for some other person or some other time. We are the ones we’ve been waiting for. “We are the change we seek,” to quote Barrack Obama. But that won’t happen if we are a silent majority.
In the long history of the world only a few generations have been granted the role of defining freedom in its hour of maximum danger – we will not shrink from this responsibility, we welcome it.
Our movement is built on the shoulders of individuals who stand for freedom and equality. One at a time, in every town, in every country, people who live openly, truthfully. Each one of us is a drop of water in a wave of change for human rights and justice.
We are a rainbow of love that wraps around the Earth.
That light shines all the colors of the rainbow — take your own color and be just that.
In my view the rainbow flag is unfinished, as the movement it represents, an arc that begins well before me, its breadth far broader than all of our experiences put together, reaching the farthest corners of the world with a message of solidarity and a beacon of hope for those who follow in our footsteps.
In the beginning the Rainbow Flag was about liberation, about breaking free of an existence limited by fear and conformity, the right to express the spectrum of love and sexuality without shame or retaliation but truthfully, freely and equally.
The Rainbow Flag is direct visibility action that gay people are doing everywhere. The rainbow is a connecter, a global channel, a conscious thought. Brave and fearless, use it with pride.
It belongs to everyone, for a true flag cannot be designed, it is torn from the soul of the people.
