The Rainbow Flag
Color has long played an important role in our community's expression
of pride. In Victorian England, for example, the color green was
associated with homosexuality. The color purple (or, more accurately,
lavender) became popularized as a symbol for pride in the late 1960s
- a frequent post-Stonewall catchword for the gay community was
"Purple Power". And, of course, there's the pink triangle. Although
it was first used in Nazi Germany to identify gay males in
concentration camps, the pink triangle only received widespread use as
a gay pop icon in the early 1980s. But the most colorful of our
symbols is the Rainbow Flag, and its rainbow of colors - red, orange,
yellow, green, blue, and purple - represents the diversity of our
community.
The first Rainbow Flag was designed in 1978 by Gilbert Baker, a San
Francisco artist, who created the flag in response to a local
activist's call for the need of a community symbol. (This was before
the pink triangle was popularly used as a symbol of pride.) Using the
five-striped "Flag of the Race" as his inspiration, Baker designed a
flag with eight stripes: pink, red, orange, yellow, green, blue,
indigo, and violet. According to Baker, those colors represented,
respectively: sexuality, life, healing, sun, nature, art, harmony,
and spirit. Baker dyed and sewed the material for the first flag
himself - in the true spirit of Betsy Ross.
Baker soon approached San Francisco's Paramount Flag Company about
mass producing and selling his "gay flag". Unfortunately, Baker had
hand-dyed all the colors, and since the color "hot pink" was not
commercially available, mass production of his eight-striped version
became impossible. The flag was thus reduced to seven stripes.
In November 1978, San Francisco's gay community was stunned when the
city's first openly gay supervisor, Harvey Milk, was assassinated,
Wishing to demonstrate the gay community's strength and solidarity
in the aftermath of this tragedy, the 1979 Pride Parade Committee
decided to use Baker's flag. The committee eliminated the indigo
stripe so they could divide the colors evenly along the parade route
- three colors on one side of the street and three on the other.
Soon the six colors were incorporated into a six-striped version
that became popularized and that, today, is recognized by the
International Congress of Flag Makers.
Sources used for this article were found at Quatrefoil Library in
St. Paul, and include: "Vexed by Rainbows", by Paul Zomcheck, in "Bay
Area Reporter" (June 26, 1986); "Rainbow Flag" in "The Alyson Almanac"
(1989); and "The Rainbow Flag", in "Parade 90: San Francisco
Gay/Lesbian Freedom Day Parade and Celebration" (June 24, 1990)