A Full and Fair Exchange of Feelings About Flags
A Random Sidewalk Stranger had some unsolicited opinions about our Progress Pride flag.
Summertime is outdoor project time at Wiscolina House*, and one of the current tasks is replacing most of the grass on the driveway side of my front yard with a garden of pollinator-friendly native plants. We’re making fairly decent progress — the river rock border is laid, the mulch is spread, and the detailed planting guide is curated, sourced, and drawn to scale. The butterfly weed and baptisia are planted, and a good number of the other seedlings I started this spring are now big enough to transplant.
The only problem is that between my chicken-scratch handwriting and the number of times I’ve erased and redrawn in the same spots, that scale model planting guide is getting a little bit hard to read. All of this is why I was standing outside on a Tuesday afternoon in late June with a tape measure in one hand and taped-together sheets of smudged and wrinkled graph paper in the other, trying to decipher whether the rudbeckia is supposed to go beside the coneflowers or in front of the liatris.
I noticed out of the corner of my eye that someone was walking along the sidewalk, but beyond a mutually nodded “hey/hello,” I wasn’t expecting much more in the way of conversation with a random stranger. I certainly wasn’t planning to have said stranger spontaneously unload her unsolicited opinions about my Progress Pride flag. Alas, into every garden a little rain (and at least one self-righteous busybody) apparently must fall.
What follows is my best recollection of our full and fair exchange of feelings about flags. May the Reader receive it in a better spirit than it was given, and enjoy it much more than I did at the time. Here goes:
ME, executing Universal Head Nod of Acknowledgement: “Hello.”
RANDOM SIDEWALK STRANGER (RSS), stopping mid-stride at the end of my front walkway: “Do you live here?”
ME: “Uh, yeah. Sure do.”
RSS: “That flag is awful.”
ME, deciding this new situation now requires my full attention: “Excuse me?”
RSS: “I said I don’t like that flag. I think it’s awful.”
ME, shrugging: “Okay.”
RSS, indignantly: “There are kids who live on this street!”
ME: “I know. My kids live on this street.”
RSS: “That flag is not appropriate for children.”
ME: “Well, as their mother, I think I get to decide that.”
RSS: “What about the kids who walk past here to come play in the park? Did you ask their parents what they think about it?”
ME, a born smartarse: “Ma’am, I didn’t even ask what you think about it.”
RSS, undaunted: “I think you should take it down.”
ME, now grinning: “You know what? I think you ought to walk on up to 5th Street and tell the guy with the 'God, Guns, & Trump’ flag, the 'Fuck Your Feelings’ banner, and all the bird-flipping decals on his truck windows to take all that down. His neighbors’ kids see that mess every day, and so does everybody who uses his block to get to Main Street. You go tell him you think his stuff is inappropriate for children, then come back and tell me what he says."
RSS, backtracking: "He has security cameras everywhere."
ME: "So do I. You’re on at least one of them right now.”
RSS, backtracking even more: "That's his private property."
ME, beginning to reach the limits of my last good nerve: "And this is mine! Why do you think it’s okay to tell me what to do with my property , but you don’t want to do the same to him?”
RSS: “Well, I … ”
ME, zeroing in: "I think we both know why. You think the worst thing I'll do is cuss you out and tell you to leave. You’re afraid he’ll hurt you if you get in his face, and honestly, I can’t promise that he won’t. Now, which one of us is the actual threat, and which flag is that person flying?"
RSS, hypocritically: “It’s not the same.”
ME: “You’re right. His are vulgar and threatening, and mine is not.”
RSS, ever-so-predictably: “His flags are about politics. Yours is about gay sex.”
ME: “A Progress Pride flag has nothing to do with gay sex. How can you be so sure something is offensive if you don’t even know what it means?”
RSS, because of course she did: “Well, I know that homosexuals-”
ME, officially fed up: “Nope, we’re not doing that. If you don’t like Pride flags, nobody is going to make you fly one. Mine is staying right where it is. You can be as mad as you like about that but you’re gonna have to go do it somewhere else.”
RANDOM SIDEWALK STRANGER: EXITS, in white capri pants and a huff, but not pursued by any sort of bear.
Image credit: Wikimedia Commons
For those of you who may not already be familiar, American artist and designer Daniel Quasar created the Progress Pride flag in 2018 to represent the forward momentum of the Pride movement and to illustrate that more progress toward inclusivity still needs to be made. From top to bottom, the six horizontal red, orange, yellow, green, blue, and purple stripes represent life, healing, sunlight, nature, serenity, and spirit, just as they do in Gilbert Baker’s original 1978 rainbow Pride flag. The light blue, pink, and white chevrons incorporate the colors of the Transgender Pride flag, created in 1999 by Monica Helms. The brown chevron acknowledges the racial injustices that non-white queer and trans people continue to endure in addition to homophobia and transphobia, and stand as a statement against that intersectional marginalization. The black chevron represents “those living with AIDS and the stigma and prejudice surrounding them, and those who have been lost to the disease.”
If someone at a professional development seminar had asked, or if I was preparing a queer history and culture classroom unit for, say, upper middle grades and above, I would have gladly taken the time to explain the Progress Pride flag’s origins, purpose, and meaning. That level of research, explanation, context, and effort would have been wasted on Random Sidewalk Stranger, who didn’t have any interest in the information in the first place and wouldn’t have had room to store it amongst all her preconceived biases and ready-made animus. I’ll do free intellectual labor under the right circumstances, but I will not perform it on demand for a hostile audience who is either going to ignore, twist, or weaponize nearly everything I say.
Random Sidewalk Stranger and I could still have had a pleasant conversation if she had approached me in good faith and framed her interest in curiosity instead of hostility and entitlement. It wouldn’t have had to be anything as formal as a seminar or as uncomfortable as an interrogation. It could have just been something as simple as “Hey, can I ask you about your flag?” We could have talked about why I fly it and what it means to me. We could even have talked about what she’s been led to believe about it, and whether she’s willing to consider that some of those things maybe aren’t true.
But all of that would have depended on her being able to see me and everyone else represented by that flag as actual human beings instead of political puppets or performers of imagined sex acts, which she clearly wasn’t able or willing to do. Should we ever meet again on a day when she’s ready to change her mind and fix her heart, maybe we can have a do-over. Until such time, all I have to say to people like her is, “I found your nose. It was in my business. Kindly take it with you, and wave to the camera as you go.”
* Yep, our house has a name! “Wiscolina” is a portmanteau smashup of “Wisconsin” and “North Carolina,” where Dear Spouse and I respectively hail from.
© 2022-2025 Misty Gedlinske, All Rights Reserved
Contact: blog@queeringthediscourse.com