Rachel Cook sings a rainbow.

Up until a few years ago I struggled with the rainbow as a symbol for the GLBTI community.

Maybe it wasn’t tough enough for me. Maybe when life was all about old Holdens and PJ Harvey, that poncey rainbow sticker was saying nothing to me about my life; but then again neither was the labrys, or the black triangle, or entangled women’s symbols.

Most people I know felt the same. These were girls and boys with attitude, or rather a need to present attitude. Maybe if the rainbow had come in basic black they would have emblazoned their vehicles with it, but as it stood, that six-coloured symbol of very gay and very happy was never going to make it on the back of a whole demographic of queers’ cars.

Whenever I saw a rainbow sticker on the back of a Subaru or 4WD, I wondered if underneath the out and proud premise there lay another agenda. Surely it worked as a seriously efficient pick up tool; you could cruise whole suburbs without ever having to get out of your car.

I know that my disdain for the symbol didn’t stop me from having a good look at whoever was in the car flaunting it. This benefit I understood.

However, in the crawl out of my own two-dimensionality, I’ve come to accept the rainbow as our symbol. If I already embrace it as a natural wonder, I reasoned, it doesn’t necessarily follow that I should shun its appropriation and subsequent commercialization. What do I have to gain by doing so?

It’s a powerful symbol with a complex mythology I can give my own meaning to. Can the same be said about Westboro Baptist Church’s symbol for homosexuality? These homo-haters employ a rudimentary design of one stick figure standing behind another stick figure that’s bending forward; it almost resembles a road sign in its simplicity, and try as I might, there’s no room for any arrogation there. However, I think gay clubs could use it to for their male restrooms, and possibly the international sign for cunnilingus (the crude but once again effective tongue between two fingers) for the ladies’.

Of course, it’s not just the gays who display the rainbow.

On my walk to work I pass a car dealer that ornaments their window with a rainbow sticker, kindly letting me know I am welcome there if I want to buy a Lexus. However, I can honestly say when shopping that I’ve never consulted the adhesives on a shop’s front window before deciding whether to spend my pink dollar there or not. Does anyone?

Maybe that sort of diligence will develop in my new relationship with the gay symbol of pride, but not for others, whose rejection of the rainbow is almost a religion.

According to a friend of mine the symbol is just too ‘soft-cock’. She says a rainbow is hardly representative of all those “acrid queens and hardcore diesel dykes”, but what does she propose instead? A lemon with a tiara? A strap-on with a chassis? As much as I like the visuals of both of such suggestions, they don’t really speak for the whole community, do they?

But what does?

Someone just told me a ‘Z’ and an extra ‘I’ have been added to our ever expanding GLBTI initialism, but that’s a whole other story.