Beacon Press
When I was a girl, my mama and I would frequently travel to Ohio from our home in Ann Arbor, Michigan, to visit her family. While I loved spending time with my grandparents in their tiny town of Middleton, I would often beg to visit my aunt and uncle in Cincinnati under the pretense of playing in their large and lavish house. Truthfully, I just wanted to see their art. All of the Black art. They had busts, sculptures, and paintings on almost every wall, and I would gaze for hours at every item. There was a particular piece that captivated me each time I laid my eyes on it. The painting, which I found out later was a poster, had a melancholy-faced Black woman sitting in what looked to be a bathroom or subway terminal because of the white-tiled walls behind her. There was a phrase written next to the woman’s despondent face, etched in exquisite rainbow lettering. It read: “for colored girls who considered suicide when the rainbow is enuf.” It wrecked me every time I read it. I would wonder, Why was this beautiful Black woman contemplating suicide? And why was she referring to herself as colored when it was 1988 and most Black people I knew called themselves Black American or African American? In fact, the only time I ever heard the term “colored” used was when my paternal grandmother explained to me to never let anyone, especially white people, call me “colored” or “Negro.” She said racial terminology for Black people had changed over time and those terms weren’t acceptable anymore. Prior to seeing the poster, I had never heard of suicide in reference to Black women before. The only knowledge I had of suicide was when it was uttered during a Lifetime movie my mama made me watch during one of our weekend movie marathons. Even then, there weren’t any Black women in that film, or in any Lifetime movie in the 1980s that we watched. Even though I had all of these silent contemplations about my aunt and uncle’s magnificent poster, I never posed these questions to them or my mama. Instead, I would just stare at it in awe anytime I visited.
I wasn’t introduced to Ntozake Shange’s work and didn’t learn about the political and cultural significance of for colored girls who have considered suicide/when the rainbow is enuf until I was a graduate student and had the opportunity to read her 1975 choreopoem. for colored girls is a Black girl’s song, an ancient yet contemporary tune that allows a Black girl like me to begin to know herself, see herself. It allows Black girls to become familiar with their own voices, souls, and genders. Shange’s work enlightened me to the complexities of living within the intersection of gender and race, and how those complexities related to the life chances and choices for me as a Black lesbian woman. Although I had been living within this identity all of my life, I had not yet thought about my existence theoretically: how my reality was interconnected with those who came before me and with those that would come after me. Shange’s work showed me how my sociopolitical embodiment directly affected my ability to even dream about something as universal as love. Like Shange’s characters, I would have to navigate a racist, homophobic, and sexist world that chose not to recognize my humanity, nor my fragility as a sentient being in ways it did for others. Through its words I realized that I wasn’t the only Black girl, now woman, grappling with these realities.
I asked my aunt Gail if I could have her poster the next time I visited. She promptly said no. For my aunt, the poster represented more than art, as it did for me. It represented her own song and the discovery of her voice. The reasons I wanted it for myself were the same reasons she didn’t want to give it to me. Luckily for me, though, after some negotiation my aunt gave it to me, and it has remained with me ever since. This is part of the reason why I chose The Rainbow Ain’t Never Been Enuf as the title for this book. Shange’s work, love, and now ancestral light for Black girls has remained a great influence on my work. Her metaphorical use of the rainbow as a symbol of the multifaceted and complex lived experiences of Black women struggling with and surviving racial and gendered oppression, within and outside of Black communities, is a brilliant illustration of the difficulty of unearthing and unraveling the complex and intricate nature of a people who represent multiple axes of difference. As a Black lesbian feminist and femme-identified academic specializing in Black queer and Black feminist studies, I thought that it was only fitting to borrow and honor this metaphor of the rainbow to explore the white supremacist and dominant representations of LGBTQ+ people’s lived experiences and identities, which have become ubiquitous throughout popular media.
The rainbow is a long-standing image for queer and trans communities. In fact, it was a tiny rainbow in the corner of a shop located in Ann Arbor, Michigan’s gayborhood that drew me in. I was still a gayby at the time and the rainbow represented a pathway into a new queer world. The shop turned out to be an LGBTQ+ bookstore that housed documentaries, films, and books about LGBTQ+ history, politics, and life. I would spend hours after school devouring the anthologies dedicated to coming-out stories, watching what happened at Stonewall, and flipping through the photography books that showed our community members in beautiful and resilient ways. It was also in this bookstore that I learned that in 1978, artist and peace and AIDS activist Gilbert Baker was commissioned by the openly gay politician Harvey Milk to create the rainbow flag to represent the multidimensional nature and pride of LGBTQ+ people. Each color of the rainbow was intended to represent the diversity and solidarity of our communities, visually capturing our nuances, our differences and sameness, and our complex identities. The flag was created as a symbol to not only spread love and inclusivity but also to counter sexual and gendered regulation within mainstream society. Leaders, community change makers, and inclusive businesses display the flag in stores, offices, and schools as a symbol of solidarity with LGBTQ+ folks and to express their support and welcome of people belonging to such communities. However, throughout time, some of the most vulnerable yet resilient people within our communities have not found the rainbow marker to symbolize diversity, inclusion, or solidarity. For many, it has symbolized terror—racialized and gendered terror to be specific—causing many to disidentify from the flag’s symbolism, use, and consumption.
For example, in 1973, when Sylvia Rivera took the stage at one of the first gay Pride parades and celebrations in New York, she was booed, told to “shut up,” misgendered, and subjected to objects being thrown at her by the mostly white, mostly cis, and strikingly racist audience. She repeatedly stated “Y’all better quiet down.” As an activist, Rivera, along with Marsha P. Johnson, founded the Street Transvestite Action Revolutionaries (STAR) shortly after the Stonewall rebellion in 1969, and both she and Johnson worked tirelessly to protect transgender and street youth whose needs and identities weren’t being recognized by early gay groups. Desiring to untether the Mafia’s control over LGBTQ+ bars and night life, Johnson and Rivera created the first LGBTQ+ shelter in the United States, the first sex worker labor organization, and the first trans women of color organization. They expanded their mission and goals to other cities until the organization’s collapse in the mid-1970s. Marsha “Pay It No Mind” Johnson stood at the helm of LGBTQ+ rights for nearly twenty-five years, serving as a central figure and activist, not only for queer and trans rights but also as an advocate on behalf of sex workers, prisoners, and victims of police brutality. She became a resounding voice for those living with HIV/AIDS, and for those Black and Latinx LGBTQ+ folks who had to navigate and suffer through gay racism. As a political agitator who lived at the intersections of racism, homophobia, and transphobia, Johnson, along with Rivera, helped to transform public consciousness when it came to queer liberation. Yet, in 1992, Johnson’s body was found floating in the Hudson River, and the circumstances surrounding her death remain a mystery to this day. Rivera died in a homeless shelter of liver cancer in 2002. Thus, even before Baker’s creation of the Pride flag, many Black and Latinx queer and trans folks dealt with antagonism, violence, ridicule, disregard, and neglect by members of their own communities, despite the mainstream perception of unity.
Excerpted from The Rainbow Ain’t Never Been Enuf: On the Myth of LGBTQ+ Solidarity by Kaila Adia Story. Copyright © 2025. Excerpted with permission by Beacon Press.