The Trans Athlete Pride Flag

Trans athlete Sally Matthews has reimagined the Transgender Pride Flag. Matthews says her experience getting cut from her JV high-school baseball team and then — after she began to identify as a woman — going on to hit .420 and pitch two perfect games for the school’s varsity softball team was transformative for her. She was inspired to make the new flag after seeing viral video of a trans woman spiking a volleyball in the face of a high-school girls volleyball player who was injured in the incident. “For me, that just showed how cis girls can’t compete,” Matthews said. “They want to shut us out because we run faster, jump higher, spike harder, lift more, and hit for a higher average.” She, of course, hopes that all cis athletes recover quickly from any injuries sustained while playing against trans competitors, and in her experience they do; she cited the time she broke the ankle of a cis middle infielder while sliding hard into second base. “It healed for her in five to six weeks and after some minor surgery,” according to Matthews. The new flag adds to the Transgender Pride Flag the image of a cis woman sunk in defeat and despair. Matthews says she’s hoping that, to introduce the public to the flag, a trans woman who can deadlift 300 pounds will hoist the banner after her inevitable victory at a weight-lifting competition this coming weekend in Rhode Island.

The Bud Light Pride Flag

LGBTQ+ activist Trixie Genderqueer, who identities on most days as gender-fluid, has come up with an entire new conception of a pride flag devoted to a specific product. “I was so inspired by the incredible sacrifice made by Bud Light,” they said, “I felt I should honor Anheuser-Busch in a very special way.” The Bud Light Pride Flag combines the iconic navy blue and white of Bud Light products with the silhouette of 16-ounce aluminum bottles in the colors of the transgender flag. Genderqueer said, “I wanted to combine the spirit of a backyard barbecue and of a gender transition, all to make the point that Bud Light exists — and so do transgender people.” They are working on a Target pride flag next and have contacted Anheuser-Busch about the possibility of flying the flag at half-staff over its headquarters in St. Louis, Mo. “We need to acknowledge the harm caused to the LGBTQIA2S+ community by the Dylan Mulvaney controversy,” Genderqueer said. They have yet to hear back from the embattled brewer.

The Drag Pride Flag, Kids Edition

Drag queen Cagayan de Oro has updated and modified the Drag Pride Flag. “I have nothing against the old flag,” said de Oro of the banner dating back to the 2016 Austin International Drag Festival. Indeed, she has kept everything from the old flag, including the colors and distinctive crown, while adding an image of small children. “We need to recognize and hold up our brothers and sisters who have an uncontrollable urge to twerk in front of little kids,” said De Oro, who performs once a month at New York City elementary schools on a rotating basis. She said she began feeling an impulse several years ago to read Dr. Seuss to first-graders while wearing pink vinyl pants, a strapless bustier, and eight-inch heeled lace-up closed-toe platform ankle boots. She takes particular pride in how her act brings One Fish, Two Fish, Red Fish, Blue Fish, as she puts it, “truly alive, with the passion, kink, and sex appeal that it deserves.”

The Abstract Expressionist Pride Flag

Asexual artist George O’Keefe has created a bold new banner for Pride month, after ze began action-painting in the colors of the Progress Pride Flag. The resulting banner is a random smattering of paint in the style of Jackson Pollock. O’Keefe says that the regime of stripes and chevrons characterizing most pride flags had to be transcended “just like the gender binary.” Ze technically calls the flag “Number 50, April, 2023,” but it is popularly known as the Abstract Expressionist Pride Flag. O’Keefe hopes to follow up zirs success with Dada, Cubist, and Surrealist pride flags. Ze also plans a public art exhibit in London to paint the Tower Bridge black, grey, and white, and to dye the River Thames purple in an homage to the Asexual Pride Flag. O’Keefe hopes the exhibition “will make London, even if for one day, the most asexual major city in the world.”

The Anti-Florida Pride Flag

Heather Richards and her girlfriend Lucy Simms had an emergency escape plan ready if they ever felt the state of Florida had become too hostile toward LGBTQIA2S+ people for them to stay. That day arrived a few weeks ago when news broke that the local elementary school had removed a book from the school library with an explicit description of an act of fellatio. “We didn’t want to live out the plot of Fahrenheit 451,” Richards said. “And we knew they’d come for us next.” Richards and Simms are now living in an undisclosed location in another state, but the disruption of the move hasn’t stopped the couple from creating a new pride flag. The innovative banner works from the state flag of Florida but replaces the state seal in the center with an image of a drag queen and replaces the motto “In God We Trust” with the injunction, “Say Gay, Bitches!” Richards and Simms say they hope the flag will become a symbol of queer resistance to “the genocidal DeSantis regime.”

The All-Gender Pride Flag

The embattled abrosexual designer Sally David says she is devastated by the criticism of her new All-Gender Pride Flag. The banner draws from all of the most prominent pride flags in a kaleidoscopic pattern of stripes and shapes that David says was supposed to capture the “sheer, chaotic joy” of the LGBTQIA2S+ community, but instead has caused only “turmoil and pain.” As soon as David posted a prototype, there was an outcry over the exclusion of the Leather Pride Flag, Demisexual Pride Flag, and Queer People of Color Flag. A “Coalition of the Excluded” identities and orientations then formed that harassed David online, called her home at all hours, and even picketed the offices of her design business, chanting “No Flags, No Peace” from bullhorns and trying to block cars from entering and exiting the office park. David has complained that the abrosexual community hasn’t had her back, as prominent abrosexual activists signed an open letter siding with the “Coalition of the Excluded.” In her darker moments, David says the furor has caused her to question her abrosexual identity and wonder if it’d be easier to re-embrace the gender binary. “These people are crazy,” she said, fighting back tears.

The Test Pattern Pride Flag

The transgender activist Tracy Honey, formerly the professional bowler named Daryl Owens, has designed what she considers a groundbreaking pride flag. She takes colors from the Non-Binary Pride Flag, the Asexual Pride Flag, and the Gay Men’s Pride Flag, among others, and makes the stripes vertical instead of horizontal to show how LGBTQIA2S+ people “can climb to unparalleled heights.” She includes small blocks of color near the bottom to symbolize how phobias limit LGBTQIA2S+ people, and black blocks at the bottom to signify trans “erasure.” Informed by a reporter that the flag is beautiful but looks a lot like a TV test pattern, indeed is a TV test pattern, Honey’s voice suddenly became gravely and low, “You’re shing me?” Told by the reporter that, no, it really is a test pattern, Honey growled, “Don’t ever fing call me again!” And the line went dead.

The American Pride Flag

Inclusivity is the theme of gay activist Daisy Pixie’s new flag. The gay man says he conceived of his flag as so all-encompassing — for all LGBTQIA2S+ people in the country — that he’s calling it simply the American Pride Flag. The banner takes the red stripes from the Gilbert Baker Pride Flag, the 1978 Pride Flag, and the Philadelphia Pride Flag and the white stripes from the Asexual Pride Flag, the Genderqueer Pride Flag, and Aromatic Pride Flag and alternates them in what Pixie calls “a pulsating pattern of queerdom and asexuality.” Then, in a radical move, Pixie borrows the blue from the Bisexual Pride Flag and makes it into a rectangular field in the canton, whereas most pride flags are limited to stripes and chevrons. To represent how, according to Pixie, “people of all identities and orientations are true stars,” he has added as “many stars as possible” to the blue field. Pixie says he understands his design is outlandish and unlike any pride flag. He doesn’t know how people will react in his West Village neighborhood where such a flag has never been seen flying before, and also is worried that his order of the new flag won’t arrive in time for June, and instead will be ready for display only in early July. “But, hey,” he said, “shouldn’t we think of every month as Pride Month?”