When a flag is more than a flag

If you drove out to Landalt Road on July 11, you may have looked for the rainbow flag we’d raised on the hydro pole at the turnoff — a bright marker to say: this way, you’re almost home. But sometime before the first guest arrived, it disappeared. We don’t know who took it, or why. Maybe it was a prank. Maybe someone simply wanted a flag and couldn’t be bothered to buy their own. We’re not here to accuse anyone of anything.

But the empty pole reminded us of something worth saying out loud.

The rainbow flag is known as the symbol of LGBTQIA+ solidarity, and it is. But it’s also something simpler and bigger: a banner in the sky that we all exist under — newcomers and old friends, neighbours and strangers, whoever passed that pole on their way somewhere else. A flag can be taken off a pole. What it stands for can’t be, because what it stands for is already true.

And on July 11, it was visibly true. Hundreds of people found their way to us anyway. They ate together, celebrated ten years of bringing LGBTQI+ refugees to safety in Nanaimo, and when the rain crashed the hat contest, they laughed and got soaked together under the same sky. That sky is the point. No one can take it down.