I of course don't really believe in divine signs or portents, or in a divinity capable of dispensing them, but I cannot deny that my heart was lifted on some pre-rational level, when I saw this rainbow set above a liberal church, on a late June day, in a city known as "Providence." It did indeed feel as if some deity were smiling down upon the liberal faith.
In a society where the culture wars have once again put LGBTQ rights in the crosshairs, it seemed moreover to have a special meaning that the symbol took the form of a rainbow, and that it appeared above a congregation whose wayside pulpit supplies a constant stream of gender- and sexuality-affirming messaging. Moreover, the photo was taken—as I mention—last June; that is—in the midst of Pride Month.
Obviously the rainbow itself has been adopted as symbol of the modern gay rights movement. Rarely have I seen this aspect of its meaning combined so fortuitously, however, with its older covenantal signification. In Genesis, of course, it serves as a reminder of God's pledge not to destroy humanity a second time over. And however much that might seem like the kind of thing that shouldn't need saying, it evidently did, and so the rainbow has come ever since in our culture to represent peace, reconciliation, and the voluntary renunciation of violence and retribution. To find another such combination of the rainbow's dual meanings, one may have to look back all the way to that icon of queer modernist poetry, the eminent and tragic figure, Hart Crane.
Crane, of course, was writing long before the modern gay rights movement and its now-familiar iconography of the rainbow pride flag. He couldn't have known what role the rainbow would come to play in the movement for queer liberation, and it is by no means clear what attitude he would have taken toward it. Like many historical figures who had same-sex relationships prior to the dawn of modern gay identity, Crane thought of his sexuality in different terms—and internalized the reigning homophobia of his day. At least one of his friends and contemporaries interviewed in the 1966 TV documentary, In Search of Hart Crane, insists that he "had no time for 'inverts'" and was capable of derogating his sexually diverse peers, even while engaging in a long string of homosexual affairs himself.
But Crane's sense of identification with queer forebears—of his belonging to some larger fellowship of men who have sex with men—is no less evident from his masterwork, The Bridge. Not only have modern annotators like Lawrence Kramer identified subtle references in the text to Crane's time spent cruising the city's nether reaches for male sexual partners; the work as a whole is a tribute to Walt Whitman—another great queer American poet, the first bard to sing the praises (as Crane notes in the poem) of the Brooklyn Bridge, and—more important than both those things—a writer who shared Crane's symbolic vision of homosexual love as representing fraternal reconciliation and the attainment of a final peace and brotherhood among men.
Here is where the rainbow appears in its dual signification—as both symbol of gay love and pride, as well as reminder of covenantal pledge. For Crane adopts the rainbow as a central image of his poem not only because of its resonance with the form of the bridge of the poem's title; he also sets it in the heavens, in one scene, overlooking the image he summons of Walt Whitman tending the wounded soldiers of the Civil War. The war itself Crane sees as the quintessence of "fraternal massacre"—a "ghoul-mound of man's perversity," which he likens as well to the butchery of the First World War, which occurred in Crane's own lifespan. And he pictures Whitman standing among the soldiers, "pallid there as chalk," tending the fallen and healing their wounds.
The "rainbow's arch" that "shimmeringly stands" above this scene, therefore—in the penultimate stanza of the "Cape Hatteras" section—represents the union of Whitman's gay sexuality with his ministering mission and his effort to seed reconciliation amidst the wreckage of war. Long before it appeared as a Pride flag, therefore, the rainbow is here already a symbol of the redemptive power of same-sex love; and long after the rainbow had first appeared as a symbol of God's reconciliation with humankind and his renunciation of violent punishment and destruction, it here shows up again promising peace, the binding up of a nation's wounds, and the ultimate cessation of hatred and strife.
Spend time enough amidst Crane's great poem, and one begins to find symbols everywhere. At thirty-two-years-old, I tell myself, I am now as old as Hart Crane ever became—for he, child of the century, ended his life off the back of a boat in the thirty-second year of both his life and the twentieth century's life. Walking through a mid-western scene on the way to class each morning, I cross a bridge and river rife with Hartian significations.
But the moment that seized my heart the most remains when I saw the divine rainbow in the heavens during Pride Month, seeming to carry a message specially for the church and flock below it. Is not our own contemporary culture war a kind of "fraternal massacre"? Is it not a display in its most odious form of "man's perversity"? And do we cry out any less than Whitman did, or Crane, for peace, peace, peace, and reconciliation at last?
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