My partner and I wanted our first home to be a community house, a place of welcoming and inclusion. A home where we created social justice and practiced positive change. We wanted our home to be the centre of our beloved community, where we lived our homemade activism. One of our first actions was mounting a rainbow peace flag on our front porch.
Someone stole that flag shortly after I found our rainbow flag bumper sticker in pieces and scattered around our car.
Less than a week later our second rainbow peace flag went missing and the pole was destroyed.
Three incidents in three weeks. This wasn’t pranks or drunk kids, this was a targeted attack on a particular identity. This was queer bashing.
We called the police to report a hate crime. We called CBC and were (briefly) on the radio. I wrote an article for Rabble (http://rabble.ca/multimedia/2010/12/bashing-rainbow-flag). But most importantly we ordered 100 rainbow peace flags and mounted 2 of them on the second story of our home.
The Peace Flag House was born.
Friends asked us for flags to put up in their offices, their classrooms, their windows, on their balconies and their flag poles. We strapped them to our bikes during G20 protests. We waved them at SlutWalk.
Neighbours stopped to thank us for putting the flags back up. We had sidewalk conversations about safe space, particularly because our home faces a high school. We talked about the It Gets Better Project and what we can do as allies to make sure the world does get better for queer youth.
Flying the rainbow peace flags has become one way we engage in homemade activism. Our flags represent safe space, acceptance, community and inclusion. It is our hope that any kid (or adult) at that school, on the street, or in their car can look at our home and see their identity affirmed in our flags.
Welcome to The Peace Flag House.
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