LGBTQ BATTLE OF THE BANNERS
Upstart ‘Progress’ flag sparks rainbow rift
A growing rift has emerged among some in the LGBTQ community over the upstart Progress Pride flag — with critics ripping it as “ugly,” “dumb” and a “monstrosity.”
The traditional rainbow Pride banner incorporates red, orange, yellow, green, blue, and violet displayed along six horizontal bars.
The 2018 Progress Pride flag, a creation of artist Daniel Quasar, added a curious mosaic of new colors — black, brown, pink, light blue and white, plastered into a triangle overlapping the original pride design.
The black and brown bars are said to reflect “marginalized LBGT communities of color, community members lost to HIV/AIDS, and those currently living with AIDS,” according to an info page from Northwestern University’s Office of Equity.
The flag also includes white, pink and light blue stripes to reflect the transgender community.
“It’s an aesthetic and design monstrosity that no gay man should approve of. It’s a disgrace to our sexual orientation,” thundered Andrew Sullivan, a longtime gay cultural critic who now runs a popular Substack page.
“The designers of this flag do not seem to understand that the rainbow symbol was always a METAPHOR,” Sullivan told The Post. “A rainbow already contains every color! We were not previously fighting for green gays and purple gays and yellow gays, and forgot to include brown gays and black gays. So it’s dumb as well as ugly.”
Sullivan, 58, is a Republicanturned-supporter of the Democratic Party and his old personal blog “The Dish” was a favorite of President Barack Obama.
“Who voted for this flag? Did anyone ask gays and lesbians and trans people before it was imposed on all of us? Was there a poll? Nope — just far-left activists corralling all of us into their ideological bubble,” Sullivan groused.
“When I see it, I cringe first and wince second. I see it as a flag of the intersectional left — not of gay people in all our diversity of opinion.”
Parade problem
Both flags have been flying in the Big Apple in June, which is Pride Month, and battle lines have been drawn, with the decision to fly one or the other increasingly taken as a political statement in the community.
Sotheby’s Upper East Side headquarters on East 71st Street proudly displays one of Quasar’s Progress Flags. The skating rink at Rockefeller Center, however, has opted for traditional pride flags. Some places like the historic gay bar The Stonewall Inn on Christopher Street in Greenwich Village simply split the difference and display both. President Biden’s official website sells merch featuring both designs.
Several prominent members of the LGBT community contacted by The Post were reticent about speaking for fear of backlash.
One man, a longtime Hollywood art director, said the new flag is “disgusting” but he would be “blacklisted” in his industry if he ever aired his concerns.
“I hate it,” he said. “It’s definitely distanced me from the traditional gay culture that we’re used to. It’s been hijacked by people looking to satisfy these minority groups.”
The traditional rainbow pride flag was designed by artist and activist Gilbert Baker in 1978.
“Everyone should wave whatever flag they believe represents them during Pride,” said GOP City Councilman David Carr, the first openly gay Republican to sit in the chamber — who added the choice for him was clear.
“The traditional flag is the one I identified with over the years, and it’s the one I’ll continue to display proudly,” he said.
wish you health and a long life.”
As illustrated by new material in the film, government-sanctioned lying began hours after the explosion, which took on the shape of a mushroom cloud as it rose out of reactor number four. Residents of Chernobyl were gently suggested to leave town for a few days due to “unfavorable radiation conditions,” as it was announced over public address systems.
As Oleksandr Sirota, who was 10 years old and living in Chernobyl at the time, said in the film, officials didn’t “tell everybody to go home and shut the doors and windows.” Instead, following government advice, parents “took kids to the playground. [There was] 10 times the radiation outside.”
Thirty-six hours after the blast, some 2,200 busses were sent to Chernobyl and loaded with residents for what was promised to be a short respite from the city. Happy to be off from school and work, people danced and sang as they waited to board. “It was all lies . . . No big deal [they were told],” former USSR Gen. Tarakanov says in the doc. “[The government claimed] the radiation level is acceptable. In fact the level of radiation was extraordinary. If we were told the truth, there would have been immense panic.”
To make sure any bad news did not spread, said Jones, “They cut the town’s phone lines.”
With government-controlled newspapers, such as Pravda, carrying a small story about the explosion buried on back pages, people in Ukraine and Russia had little clue that anything serious had transpired — and little way of protecting themselves from the dangerous radiation.
Jones said he was particularly shocked by “images of the May Day parade going ahead in Kyiv just days after the accident, when the Kremlin knew there were dangerously high levels of radiation . . . People in the crowd noticed that . . . politicians who would normally be on stage with their families were not present. [But they] allowed the parade to go ahead despite the risks to all those present.”
Hiding evidence
Meanwhile, a big deal was made about the bodies of Chernobyl workers being buried in Moscow, as if it was an honor. But, according to Jones, this was so that the government could ensure that those exposed to high levels of radiation could be secretly interred in “special graves reinforced with metal and concrete. [The Soviet government] claimed they were worried the corpses were so radioactive they would contaminate the land . . . although some people think that the real reason they insisted on burying them like that in Moscow is so that the families couldn’t exhume the bodies . . . Their deaths are still shrouded in secrecy.”
Unknown to most of the USSR’s populace, their government had been dealing with problems at the power plant prior to the catastrophe. “The Ministry of Health had a so-called Fourth Department,” Eleksiy Breus, a Chernobyl engineer, reveals in the film. “It was in charge of nuclear medicine. There were countless cases of people with radiation sickness before Chernobyl. Treatment schemes had already been developed [by the time of the explosion].”
After the incident, doctors in the classified Fourth Department played God and practiced a pitiless form of medicine that was kept tightly under wraps: “The doctors knew who would make it through and who wouldn’t from the first days. They treated those who could be treated,” says Breus.
A widow in the doc recalls being told that her husband was doing well and would be fine, only for him to perish days later.
Meanwhile, the government did everything it could to evade responsibility.
According to the doc, KGB agents pressured Soviet citizens with attachments to Chernobyl — either as workers or relatives of the deceased — to sign nondisclosure agreements forbidding them from revealing “the true cause of the Chernobyl Power Plant nuclear disaster.”
Even though the hospitals were riddled with radiation, Soviet government officials played dumb about the skin peeling, discoloration and blistering conditions that came to those exposed to radiation. They insisted that nobody was suffering physically as a result of radiation poisoning and blamed the symptoms on a concocted psychological disorder: radiophobia.
“The Soviet government couldn’t admit the scale of the catastrophe,” said Jones. “They denied radiation was having a serious effect on the health of local residents and people involved in the clean-up despite mountains of evidence. They invented radiophobia to explain medical symptoms [and] implied that the causes weren’t in fact radiation but just a fear of radiation. They were effectively gaslighting an entire population by telling them it was all in their head.”
Lyumila Ihnatenko, whose firefighter husband helped extinguish the Chernobyl blaze and died from an incredible intake of radiation, was newly pregnant at the time and is lucky to be alive today. As for the couple’s child? She died five hours after birth. “All that radiation I inhaled,” Ihnatenko says in the doc, “she absorbed it.”
In the movie, a hospital nurse speaks grimly about defective babies. “Women are giving birth to so-called ‘sirens,’ ” she says. “The lower part of the body turns into, like, a fishtail.”
As for today, the fallout was so intense that it has yet to dissipate. In a kangaroo-court trial, six workers at the plant were saddled with full responsibility for the catastrophe and given prison sentences. Bitter and behind bars, Anatoly Diyatlov, former deputy chief of Chernobyl, stares into a camera lens and says, “I didn’t make any risky decisions about the reactor. Mistakes made by personnel are a lie. A lie of the Soviet Union.”