Secondly, NYC Pride doesn’t see its role as prescribing a brand onto a community. They aren’t simply symbols for people of different backgrounds coming together under one cause. For one, the colors in the rainbow flag actually have specific meanings (including sex, life, and nature). Given the complexity of this approach, you might ask, why not just re-embrace the rainbow flag as the core of Pride, with its array of colors depicting inclusion of anyone who’d like to take part? Wouldn’t that be simpler? Maybe, but the approach wouldn’t work. “You can identify as a woman, and you can identify as queer, and those things aren’t mutually exclusive-and that’s just one example.” Dimant also notes that mixing all these gradients side-by-side celebrates the natural intersectionality of genders and sexualities in ways that modern, single-serve flags don’t.
So in 5 or 10 years or 20 years, NYC Pride can include people who aren’t being acknowledged today-and the logo will only be more colorful as a result.
“The idea is that this kind of diversity is additive,” says Dimant. But there’s no limit to what other flags can be appended next. Today, those additional flags include intersex, asexual, trans, pansexual, bisexual, lesbian, nonbinary, gay, and polyamorous. Because when you see it animated, that gradient breaks its rainbow, shimmering to reveal all of the other pride flags. At first glance, the new logo is a gradient rainbow flag made up of the letters NYC.
GAY PRIDE NYC 2022 PRO
The core of the updated brand is a new logo-created as a pro bono project by the creative consultancy Lippincott (a firm that is perhaps best known for creating the modern Starbucks siren). (The rebranding arrives in the wake of some controversy regarding NYC Pride’s handling of the annual Parade and its inclusion of police and major sponsors-which has led the Reclaim Pride Coalition to offer a Pride Parade alternative called the Queer Liberation March.) Short of adding and adding and adding to one long list of letters, what we believe is that it’s really important to really embrace each of those individual communities and what is most meaningful for them.”Īnd so, with an ambitious new brand, NYC Pride wants to unify the Pride movement while celebrating the individuality of its ever-growing list of emerging communities. “And I think the challenge for us is to understand that there are many, many more communities than we could ever fit into the LGBTQIA+ alphabet. “Some people call it the alphabet, but I think it’s much more than that,” says Dan Dimant, media director for NYC Pride. In the late ’80s, many activists pushed for the movement’s expansion, creating the LGBT acronym-an acronym that has swelled over the decades to LGBTQIA+ (the meaning of which can differ depending who you’re talking to). People created new flags to depict Pride, specifically for people who are transgender, nonbinary, and pansexual. And by 1978, artist and gay-rights activist Gilbert Baker created the powerful icon that became synonymous with the Pride movement: a rainbow flag.Ĭapping the story there makes for a tidy ending to the Pride brand. A year later, on the anniversary of the riots, thousands of people marched in the streets of New York, San Francisco, Chicago, and a few other large cities in what would become the first Pride parades in the country. Five days of protests in the area followed as the beginnings of the gay rights movement was ignited. But this night, the clientele, who usually acquiesced to the constant police harassment, fought back.
On the night of June 28, 1969, NYC police raided the Stonewall Inn, one of the most popular bars in New York.