I'm so over the rainbow.
Gay Pride month may happen in June, but in my neighborhood - San Francisco's Castro - Gay Pride happens every day. Rainbow banners fly from lamp posts, shop windows, and flutter from Victorian houses. Rainbow coffee mugs, socks, and t-shirts are for sale all over the place, and Castro street's intersections feature rainbow-painted crosswalks illuminated by - what else? - rainbow street lights. And, above it all, a 40-foot rainbow flag flaps at the corner of Castro and Market.
Now, I love the colorful flag and the whole "Go Team Gay!" pep rally feeling. And I'm certainly in favor of gay pride - I've been out for about 35 years. But I'm not sure it's OK we have hijacked the rainbow.
Rainbows - once a staple of kindergarten finger paint art, leprechaun pots of gold, and groovy 70's posters - have become indelibly associated with the gay movement.
As a result, nowadays, everything with a rainbow theme - from rainbow connections to rainbow coalitions, from Rainbow trout to Rainbo bread, from "Reading Rainbow" on PBS to the peacock logo on NBC, from Broadway's "Finian's Rainbow" to the Rolling Stones' "She's a Rainbow" - seems to be about gay pride.