Salute to GILBERT BAKER - The creator of the Gay Pride Rainbow Flag

Re-posted from Best Gay News Magazine

I came out in 1979. 
The year of DISCO! 
And besides disco balls, 
all we had for a gay  symbol was The Pink Triangle.

The pink triangle was easily one of the more popular and widely-recognized symbols for the gay community. The pink triangle is rooted in World War II times, and reminds us of thetragedies of that era. Although homosexuals were only one of the many groups targeted for extermination by the Nazi regime, it is unfortunately the group that history often excludes. The pink triangle challenges that notion, and defies anyone to deny history.

Little did I know a man in San Francisco, had a better idea! 

The Rainbow Flag
The first Rainbow Flag was designed in 1978 byGilbert Baker,  (an unsung hero of our movement!)  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.

Slowly the flag took hold everywhere, offering a colorful and optimistic alternative to the more common pink triangle symbol.  Today it is recognized by the International Congress of Flag Makers, and is flown in lesbian and gay pride marches worldwide.

In 1989, the rainbow flag received nationwide attention after John Stout successfully sued his landlords in West Hollywood, when they prohibited him from displaying the flag from his apartment balcony. Meanwhile, Baker was still in San Francisco, and still making more flags.

In 1994 Baker moved to New York City and continued his creative work and activism. That year he created the world's largest flag (at that time) in celebration of the 25th anniversary of the Stonewall Riots, that took place in 1969.

In 2003, to commemorate the Rainbow Flag’s 25th anniversary, Baker created a Rainbow Flag that stretched from the Gulf of Mexico to the Atlantic Ocean in Key West. After the commemoration, he sent sections of this flag to more than 100 cities around the world. -  I am lucky to own a piece of that flag!


Although the Rainbow Flag was initially used as a symbol of pride only in San Francisco, it has received increased visibility in recent years. Today, it is a frequent sight in a number of other cities as well – New York, West Hollywood, and Amsterdam, among them. Even in the Twin Cities, the flag seems to be gaining in popularity. Indeed, the Rainbow Flag reminds us that ours is a diverse community – composed of people with a variety of individual tastes of which we should all be proud.

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