So here is the deal. Being the owner of a company gives me the platform from which to share my thoughts from time to time. I usually don’t have earthshaking material to write about (at least that isn’t escape room related), so I don’t share too much that often. This week though, I do have a little to share, and I feel like we need a little ray of sunshine in our days right now.
Today is Kingston’s Pride Parade! Unfortunately, things have been moved virtual as a result of COVID, but I am so glad that they managed to pivot the experience in a way that is hopefully seen and enjoyed by many people. I know that I will!
Pride has the chance to be something inspiring, something unifying, and quite the happy time. The history and purpose behind Pride also carries many emotionally charged matters and has the potential to become heated. While the messaging is important, this post is not intended to be that in the slightest. Instead I would like to take the time to celebrate all of my employees past and present. There have been straight, bisexual, queer, and transgendered employees, however all I really saw was employees. I was blessed with the results of some fantastic work from everyone (along with a couple instances of less than stellar work… but let us not talk about that right now).
Instead, considering how celebratory and informative a day this can be, I would like to share some of my experience from these past weeks with respect to Pride. Just a couple bullet points of stuff I learned, interesting points I already knew, or comical blips I had while on a “simple quest” to change our windows at 298 Bagot Street into a Pride flag.
- When I was saying that I might create the flag/some sort of game with a few puzzles attached to it, one of my employees thought a little bit of education/history/famous people in history who were queer could be cool. His example being that Alan Turing (the man who cracked the Enigma Code) was homosexual. Considering how relevant codebreaking is to my business I figured it was a great piece of trivia/knowledge to pick up.
- Canada’s first gay rights protest was held August 28th 1971 with roughly 100 people showing up at Parliament Hill while a simultaneous group of roughly 20 assembled at Robson Square in Vancouver.
- The pride flag is not your classic rainbow! Having managed to miss this crucial fact was humbling as I created a flag with 7 colours. Your classic rainbow has red, orange, yellow, green, blue, indigo, and violet. The pride flag is only 6 colours and indigo is not included. Let me tell you how foolish I felt after already cutting 7 sheets of posterboard and taping them to the first window only to have my wonderful wife question why I was doing 7 colours!
- The original Pride flag was 8 colours with each representing something. Hot pink = sexuality, red = life, orange = healing, yellow = sunlight, green = nature, turquoise = magic and art, indigo = serenity and harmony, and violet = spirit. Pink wasn’t easily available for reproduction due to fabric unavailability, and was dropped first, then turquoise and indigo were combined into royal blue.
Just a few little bits of knowledge and hopefully a smile to your face as well.
But the question is if colour is important to the blog post… would you deem this post a FLAG or a RAINBOW?
Enter your answer here:
