Alessandro (Alex) Storer

Alex Storer grew up in a small village in Italy where narrow streets, stone walls, terracotta roofs, and the sound of church bells created a beautiful but tightly bounded world. He was a happy and sociable child, but also sensitive and observant. He noticed the casual homophobia around him and understood that something inside him was different. He knew he was gay before he was ready to say it, but he feared that acknowledging it would cost him everyone he loved.

The early internet offered only fragments of another world—images, news stories, chat rooms, and glimpses of people living lives Alex could barely imagine. And then he saw the Rainbow Flag.

He didn’t yet know who had created it or what its individual colors meant. He didn’t know its history or the struggles it had already endured. He knew only what it made him feel: somewhere in the world, people like him existed—and they weren’t hiding.

The flag became his private north star. In his bedroom, beneath a crucifix and looking out toward the church, Alex made himself a secret promise: one day he would find his way to wherever that flag was flying.

Eventually, he did. His journey took him first to Jerusalem, then Brussels, and finally London, where he built a life and became deeply involved in the Pride movement.

Traveling taught Alex to read cities through the signals they offered. A rainbow lanyard, a Pride poster, or a Rainbow Flag could immediately tell him something about the place he had entered. He remembers arriving in cities around the world and feeling his shoulders relax when he spotted the flag. 

It wasn’t decoration. It was a message: You are not alone here.
You are seen here.
You can breathe here.

Some of the most powerful examples were not the giant flags at major Pride celebrations, but the small and courageous ones: a Pride flag tucked into a bookshop window in Poland, a faded sticker on a lamppost in Tunis, or a single flag displayed between apartment buildings where doing so required genuine courage.

In those places, Alex realized, the flag was an act of defiance—a refusal to disappear.

His understanding of the flag changed again when he encountered newer versions incorporating black and brown stripes and the trans colors in the forward-pointing chevron. 

When someone nearby complained that the flag was “changing,” Alex thought instead about the boy he had once been, desperately searching for evidence that someone like him belonged in the world.

Then he thought about people whose experiences were different from his own—people of different racial backgrounds, trans people, and people whose gender did not fit neatly into a binary. 

They, too, were searching for a symbol that could tell them: You exist. You are not alone.

Alex recognizes that the original flag already spoke powerfully to his own experience as a gay man. But he also acknowledges the privilege of having been represented by it. He asks what the original flag meant to Black trans women who had been at the forefront of Stonewall, to trans people still fighting to be recognized as fully human, and to intersex people whose experiences of medical harm and institutional silence have too often been overlooked.

When the flag expanded, Alex didn’t see something being taken away.  He saw more people being brought inside.

The flag, he realized, was doing what it had always been meant to do: moving forward. The chevron points forward. The symbol itself grows to hold more people.

That realization eventually led Alex to Pride in London. About a decade ago, he joined as a volunteer and never really left. What had once been a private source of courage became a role through which he could turn everything he had experienced and carried into something useful.

Over the years, he witnessed the difficult conversations within Pride itself: celebration versus politics, commercial interests versus radicalism, and questions about who is centered and who gets pushed toward the margins. Alex doesn’t see those debates as evidence of failure. He sees them as necessary.

A Pride that never questions itself, he argues, risks becoming merely a party. And while a party can be glorious, it doesn’t change laws or save lives.

His involvement with InterPride expanded his understanding again. Through the global network of Pride organizers, Alex encountered people organizing Pride in places where homosexuality is criminalized, where authorities may shut down events, and where participation can carry the risk of arrest or worse.

Yet these organizers continue.

They continue to gather.
They continue to organize.
They continue to carry the flag.

Alex came to understand that the small rainbow sticker he once saw in Tunis belonged to this same tradition of courage. 

InterPride’s United Nations Consultative Status also provides a way to bring these experiences into international human-rights spaces and remind decision-makers that the people affected by their policies are not abstractions.

That realization gives Alex a deeper understanding of his own freedom. He had mobility. He eventually found a city that could hold him. Millions of LGBTQ+ people do not have those advantages. Some cannot march, cannot fly a flag, and sometimes cannot even safely name their identity.

The work of Pride, therefore, cannot be only for those who already have relative freedom. It must also reach the person still waiting for a signal that there is somewhere in this world for them.

Alex has changed since the boy who once stared at a Rainbow Flag on a computer screen. He is louder, more confident, and sometimes more combative. But he says he is also still that boy.

He remembers the longing, fear, and desperate hope of the person he once was.

And that memory is what keeps him doing the work.

Not the meetings.
Not the strategy documents.
Not the grant applications.

The work is ultimately about knowing that somewhere, right now, there is someone who needs to see that flag and know they are not alone.

Alex recognizes that the Rainbow Flag has been sewn, carried, painted, projected, burned, banned, commercialized, contested, and expanded. It isn’t perfect. No symbol is.

But the question, as he sees it, isn’t whether the flag is worth carrying. The question is whether we are worthy of carrying it together.

That means ensuring every stripe speaks to someone. It means treating the black and brown stripes as central rather than peripheral, refusing to ask trans people to wait, making intersex people visible, and making sure queer people in places where Pride is banned know that the global movement sees them.

The movement is strongest when all of us are reflected in the flag.

Alex’s journey has taken him from a small village in Italy to London and then into the global Pride movement. The flag found him, changed his life, and led him toward communities and experiences he would never trade.

Now he carries it forward for everyone who is still waiting to be found.