no adieu

That flag in the first image wasn't an original, it was the sewing machine that was.

Clearer pic of the sewing machine plaque:

Artist Gilbert Baker used this SEWING MACHINE to craft the first rainbow flag. Before the flag, the pink triangle was the symbol of the gay liberation movement.

Blurry but bigger pic of the flag plaque that reads

Spurred on by Harvey Milk in 1978, Gilbert Baker, a self styled "gay Betsy Ross," created the RAINBOW FLAG, a new international symbol of gay pride. The flag originalyhad eight colors, but turquoise and pink dyes were hard to mass-produce at the time. Today's flag has six stripes. This version of the eight-color flag was signed by Bakerat the top.

in aotearoa, june isn’t our pride, it’s theirs. marsha p johnson and sylvia rivera are their historical figures, not ours. the phrase that “you owe your rights to Black trans women” is true there, but here we owe our rights to (mostly) Māori historical figures. i have the freedoms i do because of the legacy of an entirely different set of people operating in an entirely different context at entirely different times.

But because of american cultural imperialism, most queer people in Aotearoa don’t even know our own queer history. Carmen Rupe, Ngahuia Te Awekotuku, the Dorian Society, Gillian Laundon, Georgina Beyer, and the Wolfenden Association are some of our queer history. We should know their names! we should know what they did for us! but because of the power of the american imperial machine, we don’t.

our national pride month should be july, the month that the Homosexual Law Reform Act passed in 1986. our two largest cities hold their pride festivals in february and march, respectively. american queer history has very little (or nothing, depending on who you ask) to do with our queer history. anecdotally, from my own queries, queer youth in aotearoa know more about american queer history than our own.