Somewhere Over the Rainbow

By Sally Kohn

In 1974, a gay man named Gilbert Baker met the prominent gay rights leader Harvey Milk, who, four years later, would be assassinated just months after becoming one of the first openly gay people ever elected to public office in the United States. Milk challenged the gifted sewer, to come up with a symbol for gay pride. And so Gilbert Baker designed the rainbow pride flag.

The rainbow flag has been the international symbol of gay pride ever since, and when I was in college in the late 1990s, I owned every decorative rainbow flag item imaginable. I went to college at the George Washington University in Washington, DC, only a few hours away from my hometown of Allentown, Pennsylvania, but light-years away culturally. Allentown had one small gay bar with blacked-out windows. Washington had a whole gayborhood, with bars and restaurants and coffee shops. And stores. Where I bought all the rainbow stuff. I had earrings and necklaces and T-shirts and socks and shoelaces and you name it. All of which I often wore at the same time. I wanted the entire world to know that I was gay—very gay—and proud of it.

My parents were always supportive, from the moment I came out of the closet in high school to every month during college when, thankfully, they paid the bill for the credit card that paid for all the rainbow stuff. They also helped pay for flights to visit my high school girlfriend, who was in college in Massachusetts and whose parents had openly disapproved of us both when they found out about our relationship. So I had this strange mix: my own parents being intensely loving and supportive, my girlfriend and I sneaking around behind her parents’ backs. Still, many kids had it way worse, and even my girlfriend’s parents eventually begrudgingly accepted us—though years later, when we were living together, they would visit and literally not talk to me, so that was weird. But like I said, others had it worse.

Which is to say, other than my girlfriend’s resentful parents, I’d never really dealt with anything I felt to be homophobia. Despite the larger climate of homophobia in America in the 1980s and 1990s, I had a gay-friendly family. I went to a pretty gay-friendly high school where there were other openly gay kids and couples. And then I went to a gay-friendly college in a gay-friendly city where, every Halloween, drag queens raced in high heels down the main street in the gayborhood. I was living a charmed, pride-flag-laden gay life.

Or that’s how I remember it, anyway. Reality was a bit more complicated. I felt that my girlfriend’s parents really hated me and my existence, and certainly our relationship, and they were a constant source of strain. And all around me there was a growing reactionary right-wing movement and a rising cultural backlash against the sorts of acceptance and progress I felt in other parts of my life. And then there was one afternoon during my freshman year, when I came home from class to find that someone had written a homophobic epithet on the message board on my dorm room door. I actually don’t remember what it was. I think it was faggot, but I really don’t remember. And that’s the point. At the time, I was devastated, furious, shattered. I thought I’d come to this gay mecca, far away from my girlfriend’s hateful parents and the anguish they caused me, surrounded by cool, cosmopolitan kids who all were down with the gay thing. And then someone pierced my bubble with a single word scrawled...