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A gay pride

It’s Gay Pride time — next weekend in San Francisco, with the big parade on Sunday — so here’s a pride salute:

(Posted on the Wipe Out Homophobia page on Facebook on 6/5/12 and then passed through several hands to me.)

An assortment of lgbt symbols and allusions, including one that might not be clear to all readers: the t-shirt reading:

FRANKIE SAYS RELAX

This is a reference to Frankie Goes to Hollywood and its song “Relax”. From Wikipedia:

Frankie Goes to Hollywood (FGTH) were a British dance-pop band popular in the mid-1980s. The group was fronted by Holly Johnson (vocals), with Paul Rutherford (vocals, keyboards), Peter Gill (drums, percussion), Mark O’Toole (bass guitar), and Brian Nash (guitar).

The group’s debut single “Relax” was banned by the BBC in 1984 while at number six in the charts and subsequently topped the UK singles chart for five consecutive weeks, going on to enjoy prolonged chart success throughout that year and ultimately becoming the seventh best-selling UK single of all time (as of May 2006).

The song begins:

Relax don’t do it
When you want to go to it
Relax don’t do it
When you want to come

The banned video version:

This entry was posted on June 16, 2012 at 9:29 am and is filed under Gender and sexuality, Music. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.

2 Responses to “A gay pride”

  1. Axel Mueller Says:
    June 16, 2012 at 10:07 am | Reply

    At the time, some of my friends took the acronym also as a sarcastic/aggressive suggestion of “F*#$%rs, go to hell”, in subversion of the homophobic F-word. But that may be very local.

    • arnold zwicky Says:
      June 16, 2012 at 3:39 pm | Reply

      Cute story. Wikipedia sez:

      On the B-side to the group’s first single, Johnson explained that the group’s name derived from a page from The New Yorker magazine, featuring the headline “Frankie Goes to Hollywood” and a picture of Frank Sinatra, although the magazine page Johnson referred to was actually a pop art poster by Guy Peellaert. Allegedly the original group named “Frankie Goes to Hollywood” dates from 1980.

      (though this is scarcely definitive).

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