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In 1978, Gilbert Baker of San Francisco designed and made a flag
with six stripes representing the six colors of the rainbow as a symbol of gay and lesbian
community pride. Slowly the flag took hold, 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 is still in San Francisco, and still making more
flags.
The Rainbow Flag by Steven W. Anderson appeared in GAZE Magazine (Minneapolis), #191, on
28 May 1993, p. 25:
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.
In San Francisco, the Rainbow Flag is everywhere: it can be seen hanging from apartment
windows throughout the city (most notably in the Castro district), local bars frequently
display the flag, and Rainbow Flag banners are hung from lampposts on Market Street (San
Francisco's main avenue) throughout Pride Month. Visiting the city, one can not help but
feel a tremendous sense of pride at seeing this powerful symbol displayed so prominently.
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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