Rowan Delaney

I write the Belonging Blog for Pride Belongs.

The first pride flag I ever saw flying hung in a second-floor window on a street I walked to work every day. Six stripes, and the side facing the afternoon sun had gone soft and pale. I had no idea then that the original design carried eight, or that two of them fell away because the dye was a nightmare to source in 1978. I wanted the story behind the window. I have been chasing versions of that story ever since.

That is really the whole job. Somebody hangs a flag and means something specific by it. Somebody else walks past and reads it differently, or does not read it at all. The distance between those two things is where this blog lives.

What this blog covers

Flag histories, mostly. Who drew the thing, what year, what the stripes were meant to say and whether that meaning held. Identity-flag guides go deeper on one design at a time, because a flag that gets three sentences in a roundup usually deserves a page of its own.

Then the practical end of it. How to display a flag indoors without wrecking the wall, what a season of direct sun does to polyester, whether a grommet or a sleeve suits your setup, and how to wash something you would rather not shrink.

What you will not find here

Gatekeeping. Nobody here decides who counts, what you are supposed to call yourself, or how out you have to be to fly anything. Those are yours to answer and I am not in the room for it.

No medical or mental health advice either. I am not qualified to give it and I am not going to fake it. If you are looking for that kind of support, the LGBTQ+ Resources page points to organizations that do the work properly.

How I work

Most posts start as a question someone sent in. People ask about sizing, about what a stripe means, about whether it is odd to buy a flag for a room only they will see. It is not, for the record.

Flag origin stories drift. A designer's own account gets paraphrased, the paraphrase gets quoted, and ten years later a detail nobody said out loud is treated as settled fact. So I check dates and attributions against more than one source, and where the accounts disagree, the post says they disagree instead of picking whichever version reads cleanest.

Product mentions get checked against the catalogue before a post goes up.

I use AI tools along the way, mostly for organizing research notes and cleaning up early drafts. They are useful and wrong often enough that nothing goes out under my name without me reading it line by line first.