‘Blue’s Clues & You!’ Celebrates LGBT Pride with New Alphabet Song

by Jeff Johnston | February 15, 2021 | Sexuality

Blue’s Clues & You! released a song on its YouTube channel, “ABC Song with Blue.” The song invites the preschool and elementary crowd to “get ready for an alphabetic ride” that includes an introduction to a variety of LGBT pride flags.

Blue, the animated dog who stars in the Nick Jr. show, sings “A is amazing, B is so brave, C is so comforting …” and so on. But when she hits the letter P, we learn that letter “is full of pride.” In the video, Blue sits next to a large P filled in with all the colors of the LGBT rainbow flag – more on those colors in the letter P, in just a bit.

Surrounding Blue and the P-full-of-pride, there are eight different flags representing different sexuality and gender identity groups. According to Out magazine, the flags represent, starting at the top left and going around the circle clockwise:

Asexual pride
Transgender pride
Lesbian pride
Bisexual pride
Nonbinary pride
Genderfluid or gender flexible pride
Intersex pride
Pansexual pride

Woke parents may want to stop the video at the letter P and explain all the different flags and sexualities to their 4-year-old.

The stripes in the letter P are more complicated, as they aren’t the colors from your standard LGBT pride flag. Instead, the letter is filled in with an upside down “LGBTQ+ Philadelphia People of Color-Inclusive Flag,” which consists of the six-colored pride flag, with a brown strip and a black stripe added to include “queer people of color.” No word from Nick Jr. about why it’s upside down. At the bottom of the letter P are three stripes from the transgender flag.

According to Marie Claire magazine, the six-colored LGBT flag is just not inclusive enough, which may be why all the other flags are needed for the 2 to 7-year-old crowd that Nick Jr. targets. In an article explaining 24 different pride flags, Marie Claire reports, “The rainbow flag can operate as a general flag for the LGBTQ+ community, but it’s not necessarily all-inclusive. Many of the following flags (intersex, asexual, non-binary, etc.) embody different identities that exist within Q (queer) and/or outside this acronym.”

The magazine emphatically states, “Inclusivity matters.”

Blue’s Clues began in 1996, and was originally hosted by Steve Burns, until 2002. Burns was replaced that year with Donovan Patton, who went by the name, “Joe” on the program. The program was designed for early-childhood education, with goals to “empower, challenge and build the self-esteem of preschoolers.” Donovan hosted the show until 2006.

The show was rebooted in 2019 as Blue’s Clues & You! with Joshua Dela Cruz as the new host in Blue’s animated world. Major characters include Mailbox, Mr. Salt and Mrs. Pepper, Tickety Tock, and Magenta, another dog who is Blue’s friend from school.

“The ABC Song with Blue” has not aired on the animated series, but is available on YouTube, where it’s had more than 250,000 views to date.