Suddenly, they are everywhere: stretched across balconies, flapping from car antennas, and pinned to coat lapels the world over in a moving display of solidarity with the community that was brutally terrorised on Sunday after a bigoted assault at a gay nightclub in Orlando, Florida. At first glance, the rainbow flag’s joyous refraction of colour may seem a strangely sunny response to the dark savagery of the deadliest mass shooting in US history. But as we watch its jubilant stripes bind together communities around the globe, it is worth pausing to reflect on the origin of a cultural symbol that was propelled into iconic status nearly 40 years ago by heartbreaking tragedy.
突然间，它们变得无处不在：在阳台间飘扬，在汽车天线上迎风舞动。在佛罗里达州奥兰多市一家同性恋夜总会周日受到疯狂攻击后，它们被作为一个移动标识，呼吁惨遭恐袭打击的社会团结起来，被全世界人民别到胸前。乍看之下，彩虹旗喜庆的色彩似乎是对美国历史上最致命的枪击案本身黑暗野蛮的一种奇怪的正面响应。但是，当我们看到它的欢腾条纹将全球社区联和为一体时，值得停下来深思一下这个文化符号的来源：是近 40 年前那个令人心碎的悲剧才使它具有了象征性意义。
According to the US gay activist Gilbert Baker, who is credited with creating the emblem in the late 1970s, the idea behind the flag’s bold design emerged in 1976 – the year the United States celebrated the bicentenary of its independence as a republic. Still reeling from the twin traumas of withdrawal from the Vietnam War in 1973 and the first ever resignation of a US President in 1974, following the Watergate scandal, America strove to conjure from national malaise a feeling of patriotism. Key to the summoning of such spirit was the restorative display across the country of the Stars and Stripes, whose simple geometry masked the intensity of the psychological, political, and social turmoil seething underneath.
美国同性恋活动家吉尔伯特•贝克（Gilbert Baker）被认为是这一标志的发明者，当时还是上世纪 70 年代末期，而该标志大胆设计背后的理念却出现在 1976 年，这一年，美国举行了庆祝独立 200 周年的纪念活动。在 1973 年从越南战争撤军及 1974 年水门事件后美国总统第一次辞职的双重打击下，美国力图从全国的低迷情绪中感召爱国主义精神。当时美国在全国各地到处飘扬着星条旗，它简单的几何图面下掩饰了强烈的心理、政治和社会动荡。
It was against this turbulent backdrop that San Francisco City Supervisor Harvey Milk, the first openly gay person ever to be elected to public office in California, encouraged Baker in 1977 to devise a unique symbol for the gay community – an insignia of pride capable of affirming social independence. “Flags”, Baker has since asserted, “are about proclaiming power.” As a drag queen whose appetite for flamboyant clothes in the glam-obsessed 1970s was bigger than his wallet, Baker became a dab hand with a sewing machine – a skill he would later put to use in producing political banners. Hypnotised by the talismanic intensity of the US flag and its ability to transmute itself in art and fashion – from pricey Pop Art paintings by Jasper Johns to grungy denim patches – Baker was drawn to the deceptive simplicity of a field of stacked stripes as a symbol for many stitched together as one.
正是在这个动荡背景下，旧金山市监事哈维•米尔克（Harvey Milk），即第一个在加利福尼亚公开同性恋身份的公职人员，鼓励贝克在 1977 年设计一个同性恋社区的独特象征，一种能够肯定其社会独立性的骄傲标志。贝克曾断言，“旗帜是力量的宣言。”作为易装皇后（即男扮女装者），贝克对 70 年代华丽服装的痴迷大于赚钱的诱惑，他后来成为使用缝纫机的能手，并将这种技能用于随后的政治旗帜生产中。从贾斯培•琼斯（Jasper Johns）昂贵的波普艺术绘画到破旧的牛仔布补丁，贝克着迷于美国国旗的护身符力量及其在艺术和时尚领域自我蜕变的能力，他也被这种多个堆叠条纹合为一体的符号的迷惑性简单艺术所深深吸引。
In contemplating how, precisely, he should reinvent that pattern, Baker was aware that any design he produced would compete in popular imagination with a painful, if resilient, logo by which the gay community had long been identified. In Nazi concentration camps, men imprisoned because of their homosexuality were marked out by a pink triangle affixed to their clothing. In the decades following the end of World War Two, gay communities around the world stripped the pink badge of its intended humiliation and defiantly re-inflected it with pride. But however heroic that reclamation of meaning may have been, in Baker’s mind the symbol was still haunted by the ghosts of Hitler and the Holocaust. The gay community, he believed, deserved a fabulous emblem entirely of its own fashioning. “We needed something beautiful,” Baker concluded, “something from us.”
在考虑如何才能准确地重新设计这一样式的时候，贝克意识到，他的任何设计都将要与人们所熟知的同性恋社区所经历的痛苦与坚韧不拔的想象力相符合。在纳粹集中营，许多男子因为同性恋原因被囚禁，他们的衣物上会贴有粉红色三角形。二战结束后的几十年里，世界各地的同性恋社区将带有故意羞辱意味的粉红色标记建成条状，他们怀着骄傲，大胆地将其重新活用。尽管英雄主义可能已经复苏，但在贝克心里，这个符号依旧受到希特勒和大屠杀阴影的困扰。他认为，同性恋社区应该有一个完全自己塑造的理想标志。贝克总结道，“我们需要一些美好的事物，它们来自我们中间。”
Blue sky thinking
蓝天思路
Journalists and historians have expended a great deal of energy speculating how, exactly, the rainbow eventually suggested itself to Baker in 1978 as an appropriate phenomenon for conversion into the dimensions of a flag. A frequently cited hypothesis links the rainbow to the resplendent aura of the actress Judy Garland, long considered a gay icon (her role in the film The Wizard of Oz has yielded the colloquial slang-phrase “friend of Dorothy” as a term for a gay man), and to her famous performance of the song Over the Rainbow.
记者和历史学家花费了大量精力猜测 1978 年的彩虹标志究竟怎样浮现在贝克的脑海中、并被他转化为旗帜的。一个常被引用的假设是，将彩虹标志与女演员朱迪•嘉兰（Judy Garland）的辉煌光环以及她著名的歌曲——“飞跃彩虹”（Over the Rainbow）联系起来。嘉兰也长期被视为同性恋偶像（根据她在《绿野仙踪》电影中的角色，同性恋者已被通俗的称为“多萝西的朋友”）。
Other writers have noted that strong bright colours (such as the green carnation Oscar Wilde wore to signify his sexual orientation) have for centuries served as shorthand for homosexuality. But in an interview that Baker gave last year to the Museum of Modern Art, after the flag’s prototype was acquired for its permanent collection, he suggested that the rationale for selecting the rainbow was more elementary than these theories assume: “It’s a natural flag”, he insists. “It’s from the sky.”
其他一些作家则注意到，几个世纪以来，有强烈对比的颜色可以用来简单指称同性恋（如作家王尔德佩戴的绿色康乃馨表明了他的性取向）。但在去年，在第一面彩虹旗被永久收藏后，贝克接受现代艺术博物馆的采访时透露，他选择彩虹标志的理由比这些理论假设要简单得多：“这是一面自然的旗帜，”他坚持说。“它来自于天空。”
It also has echoes in history, though its use in earlier cultural contexts around the world did not deter Baker from persevering with his sprightly spectral design. Since at least the late 15th Century, and the incorporation of the rainbow flag by the German theologian Thomas Müntzer in his reformist preachings, the symbol has been seized upon by religious and social activists to draw attention to their causes. A version was unfurled in the 16th Century during the German Peasants’ War to signify the promise of social change. In the 18th Century, the English-American revolutionary and author of the influential political tract Rights of Man, Thomas Paine, advocated for the adoption of the rainbow flag as a universal symbol for identifying neutral ships at sea. The flag has since been flown by Buddhists in Sri Lanka in the late 19th Century as a unifying emblem of their faith, by Indians annually on 31 January to commemorate the passing of the spiritual leader Meher Baba, and, since 1961, by members of international peace movements.
它在历史上曾引起共鸣，但在世界各地早期文化背景下的使用并没有打消贝克想保留这一风格明快的光谱型设计的念头。至少自 15 世纪后期以来，在德国神学家托马斯•闵采尔（Thomas Müntzer）将彩虹旗与他的改革派布道结合起来以后，这个标志已经被宗教和社会活动家用来提升社会对其事业的关注。其中一个公开的版本是，16 世纪德国农民战争期间，它被用来表示对社会变革的承诺。18 世纪，英裔美国革命家托马斯•潘恩（Thomas Paine）主张采用彩虹旗作为海上识别中立国船只的通用符号。他曾撰写有影响力的政治手册——《人的权利》（Rights of Man)。自 19 世纪后期以来，彩虹旗被作为佛教徒信仰的一个统一象征在斯里兰卡飞扬；每年 1 月 31 日，印度人会用彩虹旗纪念其精神领袖美赫巴巴（Meher Baba）的逝世；而自 1961 年以来，彩虹旗也被国际和平运动的成员广泛使用。
Colour therapy
色彩疗法
In its initial incarnation, Baker’s rainbow flag consisted of eight colours – two more than the version now recognised internationally as an emblem for the LGBT community – and each colour was assigned a symbolic meaning. A band of hot pink (representing sexuality) ran across the top of the flag in the original scheme, followed by red (which stood for life), then by orange (for healing), yellow (sunlight), green (nature), turquoise (magic), indigo (serenity), and violet (spirit) at the bottom.
贝克最初的彩虹旗设计由八种颜色组成，比目前国际上公认的同性恋、双性恋及变性者（LGBT）社区象征版本要多出两种颜色，并且每一种颜色都被赋予一个象征意义。根据最初的方案，亮粉色彩带（代表性）穿过旗帜的顶部，下面依次为红色（代表生命）、橙色（代表愈合）、黄色（代表阳光）、绿色（代表自然）、天青色（代表魔力）、靛蓝色（代表宁静）和底部的紫色（代表精神）。
Displayed for the first time in the United Nations Plaza in downtown San Francisco in June 1978, this eight-striped version was produced by a team of 30 volunteers commandeering the washing machines of a public laundromat in order to rinse the dye from the fabric and the wide attic space of a gay community centre, where the individual strips were ironed and sewn together. This is the version that Harvey Milk would have known, if all too briefly, in the few short months before he and the Mayor of San Francisco, George Moscone, were shot to death in City Hall on 27 November by a deranged former colleague of Milk’s.
1978 年 6 月，八色彩虹旗第一次在旧金山市中心的联合国广场上展示。这面八色彩虹旗是由 30 名志愿者共同制成，他们占领了一个公共洗衣店的洗衣机，用来冲洗布料上的染料，并在一个同性恋社区中心宽敞的阁楼间内，将单个的布条熨平并缝制在一起。哈维•米尔克（Harvey Milk）本应有机会见到这一版本，尽管时间短暂。就在八色彩虹旗出现几个月之后的 11 月 27 日，他和旧金山市长乔治•莫斯康尼（George Moscone）在市政厅被米尔克的一个疯狂的前同事射杀身亡。
Demand for the rainbow flag accelerated in the aftermath of the murders for display at gay pride parades and at events organised in honour of the slain champion of LGBT rights. For a variety of practical reasons, Baker was forced to whittle the design down, first by dropping the top band of hot pink (a pigment that proved difficult to source) and then turquoise (inclusion of which, for reasons of symmetry, made displaying the flag as a vertically-hung banner from lampposts awkward). In the 38 years since Baker offered his invention as a universal symbol of gay pride, proliferation of its prismatic joy has been impressively steady. In 1994, a mile-long version of the flag, which streamed through the streets of New York to mark the 25-year anniversary of the 1969 Stonewall riots in Greenwich Village (a crucial moment in the gay liberation movement), set a record for the longest flag ever produced and helped plant the symbol permanently in social consciousness.
在谋杀案余波的同性恋骄傲游行中，在对被杀害的 LGBT 权利支持者组织的纪念活动中，对于彩虹旗的展示需求在急剧升温。由于各种实际原因，贝克被迫简化设计，首先去掉了顶部的亮粉色彩带（被证明是缺少颜料来源），然后去掉了天青色（出于对称原因，为了便于将旗帜垂直挂在路灯柱上）。自从贝克提供自己的发明作为同性恋骄傲的通用象征以来，已过去 38 年，但它所带来的棱镜般的喜悦却与日俱增。1994 年，为了纪念 1969 年发生在格林尼治村的石墙暴动（同性恋解放运动的一个关键时刻）25 周年，一面长达一英里的彩虹旗在纽约街头涌动，它创造了最长旗帜的记录，并帮助这个象征标志在社会意识中生根。
Now the flag is everywhere. On 12 June, it was waved by marchers in the first major gay pride rally ever held in Ukraine. Between 24 and 26 June, the flag will be flown for the first time above the UK Parliament to celebrate the London pride weekend. In 2015, Facebook introduced a rainbow filter afterthe US Supreme Court decision ruling that same-sex marriage was legal nationwide. But the backlash to that in Russia and the Middle East, and events in Orlando, are reminders that this is not just a flag for celebration. Though ostensibly ebullient in its design, Baker’s creation is nevertheless threaded by perseverance and tinged by pain. “Flags”, he is said to have exclaimed on the 20th anniversary of the symbol’s birth, “are torn from the soul of the people.”
目前，彩虹旗已出现在世界的各个角落。6 月 12 日，在乌克兰有史以来第一次重大的同性恋骄傲游行中，彩虹旗被游行者挥动。6 月 24 日到 26 日，它首次在英国国会上空飞扬，用来庆祝伦敦的同性恋骄傲周末。2015 年， 在美国最高法院判决裁定同性婚姻合法后，Facebook 推出了彩虹滤镜功能。但彩虹旗在俄罗斯和中东受到强烈抵制，加上奥兰多事件，这些都在提醒大众，彩虹旗并不仅仅只是庆祝的标志。虽然彩虹旗设计在表面上让人感觉热情洋溢，但贝克的作品仍然代表着百折不挠和痛苦的忧伤。贝克在该标志诞生 20 周年的时候宣称，“旗帜是从人的灵魂中扯下来的”。