At the beginning of The Wizard of Oz, Dorothy’s character sings “somewhere over the rainbow” or “somewhere over the rainbow«. This rainbow is a symbol that represents the struggle to find something better, something more. May the misunderstood or different find their place where they can be free and happy. And now I find that this rainbow was the origin of the LGBTI flag that we know today! Another example of the power of Hollywood and the great stars of those days.
From the rainbow of “The Wizard of Oz” to the LGBTI flag
Qwhy the rainbow became the official LGBTI flag? That rainbow in the LGTBI world makes perfect sense.
In this scene from the Wizard of Oz, Judy Garland (who has also become a gay icon) sings hoping that on the other side there is a place for the misunderstood, for those who are living a life that is not the one they want to live.
Many gay viewers recognized Dorothy as their personal story. Such was the influence of the character played by Judy Garland in “The Wizard of Oz”, that “Friend of Dorothy» (FOD as it was usually abbreviated) became the password for identifying with homosexuals in the United States in the 1960s.
And his “over the rainbow«, a song that Dorothy sang without looking up from the sky, is the one that inspired the artist Gilbert Baker to create the LGBTI flag in 1978, when the organizers of the San Francisco Gay Pride asked him to create a unifying symbol. for the collective.
“We needed something to express our happiness, our beauty, our power. And the rainbow did it,” Baker said in an interview two years before his death.
The Wizard of Oz and Gay Pride
It all started there, in a bar called Stonewall Inn, in the West Village, the gay district of Manhattan. It was him June 28, 1969. And they were transvestites who, tired of police repression, took to the streets and said enough!
What exactly happened on June 28, 1969 in this bar in New York? Well, a bunch of transvestites were at his “home,” ie Stonewall Inn, having a drink. The day before, actress Judy Garland, a true gay icon, had died. That’s why homosexuals at the time, who, you may remember, identified themselves as “Dorothy’s friends,” which is the name of her character in The Wizard of Oz, had a drink together. In this wonderful film, the actress (a child prodigy when she filmed it in 1939) sang that behind the yellow brick road was the rainbow. And that there was a place for us beyond this rainbow. It is the famous Over The Rainbow, where our dreams can come true… Somewhere above the rainbow, high up.
The day after her death, police entered Stonewall and arrested “Dorothy’s friends” at the bar. But it turns out that, precisely on that day, they decided not to shut up and put up with it, but to go out into the street, with their feathers, their wigs. And they said they would not tolerate more repression, more insults, more humiliation. No arrest. On that day, “Dorothy’s Friends” gave birth to Gay Pride, now 50 years old and renamed lgbt pride.