Omary Baajun

Through poetry and personal reflection, Omary Baajun explores what it means to carry the rainbow flag in a place where visibility can come at great personal cost. His story honors courage, community, and the enduring power of hope.Omary Baajun’s poem was inspired by a deeply personal moment: raising the Rainbow Flag publicly for the first time during the UNMUTE Arts Festival in Tanzania in June 2025. What might appear to be a simple act of raising a piece of fabric becomes, in his telling, an act of visibility and connection for people who are unable to stand in the open themselves.

“Raise it,” the voices tell him. “So we can see you from where we are hiding.” 

The voices are not a crowd gathered in one place. They are scattered people searching for one another—people living behind silence, fear, prisons, hidden spaces, and the noise of forces that would rather they remain unseen.

The flag becomes a signal. As Omary raises it higher, its colors can break through years of silence. The fabric becomes a bridge, allowing people who may never be able to gather openly to recognize that they are not alone. For the first time, he imagines people learning the shape of hope by following a flag in the air.

But holding the flag comes at a cost. 

Omary describes the forces around him trying to break his grip—to cut his hands, bruise his limbs, and break his shoulders so that the flag will fall. The physical imagery makes the danger tangible, but the hand holding the flag is never really just one hand. Behind it are many unseen hands.

Those unseen hands represent people who are learning how to exist in a society that does not always make space for them. Omary describes a homeland where queer people are pressured to shrink themselves, disappear, and remain silent in order to make society comfortable. Yet hiding does not necessarily make them safe. He writes of people being hunted, killed, and denied even the ability to mourn.

And still, community survives.

It gathers in small rooms where trust is carefully shared. It exists in poetry that can express what cannot safely be spoken aloud, in a glance that says I know you too, and in art that refuses to remain silent. These are the quiet forms of resistance that allow people to recognize one another and continue.

Omary’s community is built from fragments—fragments of fear and hope, stories that were never meant to be told, and lives that insist on continuing. The poem does not pretend that the struggle is over. It ends by acknowledging that the community still struggles, still endures, and still needs global support.

For Steps to Liberation, I think Omary’s poem offers a beautiful and haunting interpretation of what it means to bear the Rainbow Flag. The person holding it may appear to stand alone, but they never truly do. Every hand reaching toward the flag from a hidden room, every person finding courage through art, every whispered recognition, and every life refusing to disappear becomes part of the strength behind it.

The flag is not only something we raise. It is something we hold together.