Fly Your Flag and Celebrate Intersectionality

Last Thursday, USGA got together to celebrate the many identities that make up the queer community in Provo. Flag night invited the community to create their own flags while learning about other people’s, and making new friends. Each flag created was unique and colorful, some pulling from different aspects of the creator’s life with multiple identities intersecting, while others were purely original work representing the artist’s identity as a whole. Destiny, an attendant of the activity, created a flag with the bisexual colors interrupted by patches of gray and a rocky black border. Destiny explained that the flag represents their newly discovered sexuality, which they’ve struggled to explore while existing in a straight-passing relationship.

Carolyn, the president of USGA, created a collage of her identities, describing her flag as

"a mix of the demisexual flag and the gay flag because those are the two identities I hold"

The gender symbol for woman surrounds her official tribe’s seal, and represents her identity as an Indigenous woman. One pair created a conglomeration of different pride flags, including the transgender, asexual, lesbian, and pansexual flags. They described their collage as a “collection of flags that represent both of our identities” which illustrates how they have learned to

"recognize and respect each other’s identities. . .take, and learn from that.”

Although creating these flags may seem insignificant, (and reminiscent of a bunch of kindergarteners gathering around arts and crafts supplies eating Oreos and fruit snacks), it is important for queer BYU students to have a space to showcase and rejoice in their intersecting identities. We celebrate queer joy by delighting in these different identities and lifting up everyone in our community, and we hope that at least one person felt seen and loved when they held up their flag.