Dr. Kaila Adia Story’s New Book Highlights Real LGBTQ+ Solidarity

When we interrogate the symbolism of the LGBTQ flag, we can disrupt the myth that queer communities have always been harmonious.

When I was a girl, my mama and I would frequently travel to Ohio from our home in Ann Arbor, Michigan, to visit her family. While I loved spending time with my grandparents in their tiny town of Middleton, I would often beg to visit my aunt and uncle in Cincinnati under the pretense of playing in their large and lavish house.

Truthfully, I just wanted to see their art. All of the Black art. They had busts, sculptures, and paintings on almost every wall, and I would gaze for hours at every item. There was a particular piece that captivated me each time I laid my eyes on it. The painting, which I found out later was a poster, had a melancholy-faced Black woman sitting in what looked to be a bathroom or subway terminal because of the white-tiled walls behind her.

There was a phrase written next to the woman’s despondent face, etched in exquisite rainbow lettering. It read: “for colored girls who considered suicide when the rainbow is enuf.” It wrecked me every time I read it. I would wonder, Why was this beautiful Black woman contemplating suicide? And why was she referring to herself as ‘colored’ when it was 1988 and most Black people I knew called themselves ‘Black American’ or ‘African American’?

Prior to seeing the poster, I had never heard of suicide in reference to Black women before. The only knowledge I had of suicide was when it was uttered during a Lifetime movie my mama made me watch during one of our weekend movie marathons. Even then, there weren’t any Black women in that film, or in any Lifetime movie in the 1980s that we watched.

Even though I had all of these silent contemplations about my aunt and uncle’s magnificent poster, I never posed these questions to them or my mama. Instead, I would just stare at it in awe anytime I visited.

I wasn’t introduced to Ntozake Shange’s work and didn’t learn about the political and cultural significance of for colored girls who have considered suicide/when the rainbow is enuf until I was a graduate student and had the opportunity to read her 1975 choreopoem. for colored girls is a Black girl’s song, an ancient yet contemporary tune that allows a Black girl like me to begin to know herself, see herself. It allows Black girls to become familiar with their own voices, souls, and genders.

Shange’s work enlightened me to the complexities of living within the intersection of gender and race, and how those complexities related to the life chances and choices for me as a Black lesbian woman. Although I had been living within this identity all of my life, I had not yet thought about my existence theoretically: how my reality was interconnected with those who came before me and with those who would come after me.

Shange’s work showed me how my sociopolitical embodiment directly affected my ability to even dream about something as universal as love. Like Shange’s characters, I would have to navigate a racist, homophobic, and sexist world that chose not to recognize my humanity, nor my fragility as a sentient being in ways it did for others. Through its words I realized that I wasn’t the only Black girl, now woman, grappling with these realities.

Shange’s work, love, and now ancestral light for Black girls has remained a great influence on my work. Her metaphorical use of the rainbow as a symbol of the multifaceted and complex lived experiences of Black women struggling with and surviving racial and gendered oppression, within and outside of Black communities, is a brilliant illustration of the difficulty of unearthing and unraveling the complex and intricate nature of a people who represent multiple axes of difference.

Her metaphorical use of the rainbow as a symbol of the multifaceted and complex lived experiences of Black women struggling with and surviving racial and gendered oppression, within and outside of Black communities, is a brilliant illustration of the difficulty of unearthing and unraveling the complex and intricate nature of a people who represent multiple axes of difference.

The rainbow is a longstanding image for queer and trans communities. In fact, it was a tiny rainbow in the corner of a shop located in Ann Arbor, Michigan’s gayborhood that drew me in. I was still a gayby at the time, and the rainbow represented a pathway into a new queer world. The shop turned out to be an LGBTQ+ bookstore that housed documentaries, films, and books about LGBTQ+ history, politics, and life.

I would spend hours after school devouring the anthologies dedicated to coming-out stories, watching what happened at Stonewall, and flipping through the photography books that showed our community members in beautiful and resilient ways. It was also in this bookstore that I learned that in 1978, artist and peace and AIDS activist Gilbert Baker was commissioned by the openly gay politician Harvey Milk to create the rainbow flag to represent the multidimensional nature and pride of LGBTQ+ people.

Each color of the rainbow was intended to represent the diversity and solidarity of our communities, visually capturing our nuances, our differences and sameness, and our complex identities. The flag was created as a symbol to not only spread love and inclusivity but also to counter sexual and gendered regulation within mainstream society. Leaders, community change makers, and inclusive businesses display the flag in stores, offices, and schools as a symbol of solidarity with LGBTQ+ folks and to express their support and welcome of people belonging to such communities.

However, throughout time, some of the most vulnerable yet resilient people within our communities have not found the rainbow marker to symbolize diversity, inclusion, or solidarity. For many, it has symbolized terror—racialized and gendered terror to be specific—causing many to disidentify from the flag’s symbolism, use, and consumption.

For example, in 1973 when Sylvia Rivera took the stage at one of the first gay Pride parades and celebrations in New York, she was booed, told to “shut up,” misgendered, and subjected to objects being thrown at her by the mostly white, mostly cis, and strikingly racist audience. She repeatedly stated, “Y’all better quiet down.”

As an activist, Rivera, along with Marsha P. Johnson, founded the Street Transvestite Action Revolutionaries (STAR) shortly after the Stonewall rebellion in 1969, and both she and Johnson worked tirelessly to protect transgender and street youth whose needs and identities weren’t being recognized by early gay groups. Desiring to untether the Mafia’s control over LGBTQ+ bars and night life, Johnson and Rivera created the first LGBTQ+ shelter in the U.S., the first sex worker labor organization, and the first trans women of color organization.

They expanded their mission and goals to other cities until the organization’s collapse in the mid-1970s. Marsha “Pay It No Mind” Johnson stood at the helm of LGBTQ+ rights for nearly 25 years, serving as a central figure and activist, not only for queer and trans rights but also an advocate on behalf of sex workers, prisoners, and victims of police brutality.

She became a resounding voice for those living with HIV/AIDS, and for those Black and Latinx LGBTQ+ folks who had to navigate and suffer through gay racism. As a political agitator who lived at the intersections of racism, homophobia, and transphobia, Johnson, along with Rivera, helped to transform public consciousness when it came to queer liberation. Yet, in 1992, Johnson’s body was found floating in the Hudson River, and the circumstances surrounding her death remain a mystery to this day. Rivera died in a homeless shelter of liver cancer in 2002.

Thus, even before Baker’s creation of the Pride flag, many Black and Latinx queer and trans folks dealt with antagonism, violence, ridicule, disregard, and neglect by members of their own communities, despite the mainstream perception of unity.

So, I wasn’t surprised to learn that in 2017 the office of LGBT Affairs in Philadelphia was met with backlash when they unveiled a remix to Gilbert Baker’s 1978 version of the Pride flag with the addition of the colors black and brown to the bottom of the rainbow. Many people that I was in community with saw the gesture as moving in the right direction, finally illuminating the need to confront issues of racism, sexism, and transphobia.

The office’s More Colors, More Pride campaign seemed to feel similarly. Their press release read, “In 1978, artist Gilbert Baker designed the original rainbow flag. So much has happened since then. . . . Especially when it comes to recognizing people of color in the LGBTQ+ community. . . .To fuel this important conversation, we’ve expanded the colors of the flag to include black and brown.”

While marginalized folks saw this move as one that spoke to their everyday experiences, many white cis gays and lesbians felt that the revised version of the flag was racist and unfair, and some even felt that the color white should also be added in the interest of keeping things equal. Some took to Twitter to express their anger and frustration with the new flag, while others wrote op-eds to express their discontent.

In the years that followed, other cities, countries, and Pride festivals began to adopt the new version of the Pride flag to show solidarity with those of the LGBTQ+ community who don’t feel represented by the original flag. A London volunteer who leads the LGBTQ+ social and support group Rainbow Noir wrote an op-ed for the U.K. news outlet Gay Star News in response to the anger about the modified flag, following Manchester Pride’s announcement to adopt it for their festival.

“We are worn out; physically sick and tired from having to defend our right to be seen, both individually and as queer, trans, and intersex people of color (QTIPOC) collectively.” They argued throughout their essay that the rainbow flag for many Black and Brown queer and trans folks has never felt like it was created for them, and that the “racism and silencing that has ensued since Pride’s announcement is a painfully clear example of why the stripes were included in the first place.”

On June 27, 2018, Stonewall, the United Kingdom’s leading charity for the equality of LGBTQ+ people, released a report about the extensive and longstanding discrimination and racism within the LGBTQ+ community. They reported: “Half of Black, Asian and minority ethnic (BAME) LGBT people (51%) faced discrimination or poor treatment from the wider LGBT community.” They further stated that the “situation is particularly acute for Black LGBT people: Three in five (61%) have experienced discrimination from other LGBT people.”

The study, which was based on 5,000 participants, revealed the longstanding problem that queer and trans communities are also plagued by racism, sexism, cisnormativity, and even homonormativity. Before I came out, I wasn’t aware of this fact, either. I neither recognized nor thought about the fact that LGBTQ+ communities, like Black communities, weren’t monoliths or communities made up of unmitigated unity. I never thought about how intricate, nuanced, complex, and diverse they were.

After I came out, my experiences began to reflect the respondents’ voices, not only those in the Stonewall study but also sentiments voiced by the activist collective Rainbow Noir. When I came into my own grown Black queerness, I finally understood that some white queer and trans folks would never cede their own racial privilege over creating the necessary solidarity with queer and trans people of color.

It was and is this reality that has led me to interrogate my own relationship to the rainbow flag, trouble the contention that LGBTQ+ communities have always been and are harmonious, borrow from the genius and nuance of Shange’s use of the rainbow, and assert that whiteness, cis-ness, wealth, and the like aren’t the only signifiers or representations of queer and trans identities.

This excerpt, adapted from The Rainbow Ain’t Never Been Enuf: On the Myth of LGBTQ+ Solidarity by Kaila Adia Story (Beacon Press, 2025), appears by permission of the publisher.

Kaila Adia Story is a Black woman with long locs

Kaila Adia Story Ph.D., is an associate professor in the Departments of Women’s, Gender, and Sexuality Studies and Pan-African Studies, as well as the Audre ‪Lorde Endowed Chair at the University of Louisville. She is also the co-creator, co-producer, and cohost of Louisville Public Media's Strange Fruit: Musings on Politics, Pop Culture, and Black Gay Life, a popular award-winning podcast. Her research examines the intersections of race and sexuality, with special attention to Black feminism, Black lesbians, and Black queer identity. In 2017, Story was named an LGBTQ+ community leader and change maker by NBC’s inaugural #Pride30. In 2021, she was recognized by Michelle Obama's nonprofit organization, Reach Higher, for creating safe spaces for LGBTQ+ students in and out of higher education. Story was chosen as the 2022 Champion of Pride for the state of Kentucky by The Advocate.