The White House is lit with various colors to mark different occasions throughout the year. For comparison, here is the altered image (left) and the original image (right):Īlthough this American flag display is fake, the White House was truly dressed up in red, white, and blue over the July Fourth weekend in 2017: This American flag display is a digitally altered image based on a 2007 photograph bathed in a plain white light. Elsewise, your concern isn’t to be the President of the Country, but only of a tiny minority within it. You can illuminate it with the colors of the American flag. The web site Zwinglius Redivivus was one of the pages that shared the doctored image in an article calling on President Obama to light up the White House with patriotic colors, not rainbows: The image showing the American flag displayed on the White House is a hoax that first appeared in June 2015, shortly after the White House was lit up in the aforementioned rainbow display. To see people gathered in an evening outside on a beautiful summer night, and to feel whole, and to feel accepted, and to feel that they had a right to love, that was pretty cool.” “I did not have a chance to comment on how good the White House looked in rainbow colors. “I had a chance to do the Rose Garden celebration of the court decision around same-sex marriage,” the president told CNN’s Jim Acosta. They were actually displayed in June 2015, marking the Supreme Court’s decision affirming same-sex marriage: The image showing a rainbow display on the White House is real, but it did not occur in 2016, although it did take place during the Obama administration. This image was frequently shared in a meme which purported to compare White House displays from President Barack Obama in 2016, then President Donald Trump in 2017: Designed for one parade in 1978, it's now one of the most recognized symbols in the world.A photograph purportedly showing the American flag displayed on the White House was circulated on social media over 4th of July weekend in 2017: The LGBT pride version of the flag designed by Gilbert Baker has become the most famous of the rainbow flags. And in Peru and Bolivia, the rainbow "Flag of Cusco" is a symbol of the indigenous Inca people. The Jewish Autonomous Oblast based in Birobidzhan, a sort of satellite government of Russia located on the Chinese border in Birobidzhan, uses a rainbow flag as its own symbol. In Italy, it's used as a symbol of peace, often with the word "PACE" written in white across the flag's stripes. In 2001, one version added a black stripe for AIDs awareness.Īside from LGBT pride, rainbow flags have other historic and political meanings that persist today. One version unfurled in Philadelphia this year added black and brown, for racial inclusivity. The flag has been modified in different places at different times. The White House illuminated in rainbow colors after 2015's Supreme Court ruling legalizing gay marriage. Judy Garland, the star of "The Wizard of Oz," has a large following as a gay symbol, and is famous for singing "Somewhere Over the Rainbow" in the movie. The rainbow also has some pop culture significance for the LGBT community. The rainbow is so perfect because it really fits our diversity in terms of race, gender, ages, all of those things." We needed something beautiful, something from us. It came from such a horrible place of murder and holocaust and Hitler.
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"It was necessary to have the Rainbow Flag because up until that we had the pink triangle from the Nazis - it was the symbol that they would use. The rainbow flag was a way of taking these various colors and turning them into a coherent symbol, reclaimed by the LGBT community. During the Holocaust, Nazis forced gay men to wear pink triangles as a symbol of sexual deviance. Oscar Wilde wore a green carnation, and yellow served the same purpose in Australia, and purple provided that function in some communities in the United States. I realized I would have to make some compromises in order for this to really function as a symbol."Ĭloseted gay people have also historically used bright colors to signal their homosexuality to each other, as Forrest Wickman wrote in Slate.
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"Even to do four-color printing for photographs like this was complicated. " One of the reasons I had to adapt the eight-color version to the six-color version of the flag - the one we use today - is because in 1978 eight colors was expensive," Baker told the Museum of Modern Art. The longest rainbow pride flag ever, in Key West in 2003.Īndy Newman/Florida Keys News Bureau/Getty Images