Accessible Gay Space Communism

Hundreds gathered in San Francisco’s Chinatown as city leaders and community members celebrated the opening of the world’s first Chinese LGBTQ museum. Mayor Daniel Lurie joined supporters for the ribbon-cutting ceremony at the OUT Museum, a space dedicated to preserving and sharing Chinese queer history and culture. The museum was founded by Chinese artist and LGBTQ advocate Xiangqi Chen, who spent more than 20 years promoting queer visibility in China before moving to the United States in 2023.

This needs to be the loudest, most unapologetic, in your face, obnoxious Pride Month in history. Show these motherfuckers we are here, we’re fucking queer and we aren’t going anywhere.

The original sampler maker was a teenaged girl called Loara she’s the only one known of seven siblings in that family. She was born approximately 1632 and had passed before her father had in 1656 which they know because it was mentioned in his will.

So in the 1630-40s a girl made a sampler, in 1991 a woman had put in years of research before recreating the sampler as Loara had 350 years earlier , and I’m reading about it in 2024.

Embroidery keeps women alive in history, and it’s part of why I love samplers so much.

Here’s a quote from samplers that I think about often:

When I am dead and in my grave

And all my bones are rotten

When this you see remember me

Its colors are fine; red, white, and blue are the most common flag colors, three colors is a reasonable number to have, and they match in saturation and value.

Design-wise it's questionable. Stars, cantons, and stripes are perfectly acceptable, however there are too many stripes at 13 or too many stars at 50. Together with the blue canton they make a flag composed of 64 elements, which is far too many and makes the flag rather busy.

It bears its greatest sins in proportion. If its height is 1 unit and we base all measurements on that, it has a width of 1.9, not 1.5 or 2 but 1.9! The canton has a height of 0.5385, or 7/13 rather than have a thinner stripe section underneath. The canton's length is 0.76 entirely because of the year 1776! The distance horizontally between each star center is 0.126, but vertically the distance is 0.108! You may notice that half of 0.108 is 0.54, which is rounded up from the 7/13 of the canton height.