Pride Special: The Birth of the Pride Flag

in 1977, Harvey Milk asked his friend Gilbert Baker, a drag queen and artist, to make a symbol for the gay rights movement - and the pride flag was born. 

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Transcript

On June 25, 1978, the first ever rainbow pride flag was flown in the San Francisco Gay Freedom Day parade. Well, the first and second, since there were two flags. Both were designed by Gilbert Baker, a gay artist and drag queen living in San Francisco, at the request of San Francisco City Supervisor, and first openly gay elected official in the history of California, Harvey Milk. 

There had been murmurs for years amongst the queer community about the need for a broad, recognizable symbol for the queer movement. Previous symbols were either used for too many other things, like the Greek letter Lambda, or had a dark history not everyone wanted to identify with, like the pink triangle, which was used by Nazis to label gay prisoners in concentration camps. Milk wanted something that could unite the “gay community,” as it was called at the time, and he wanted it to be made in time for the Gay Freedom Day Parade, which he planned to march in. 

Gilbert Baker had gotten similar requests from other members of the community, like  activist Artie Bressan, and, understanding the potential for this new symbol, called on a friend of his to collaborate on the project. Lynn Segerblom, also known as Faerie Argyle Rainbow, worked for months alongside Baker designing the 8 stripe rainbow flag, dyeing the fabrics, and sewing the two flags for the Parade. The sewing was no small task, either - one of the flags measured 30 feet by 60 feet, which, if you’re doing the math, means 1,800 square feet of fabric. Friends of Baker and Segerblom also helped with the construction of the flags, with Segerblom instructing them on the precise process of dyeing the fabric and Baker overseeing the sewing efforts. 

The rainbow might feel intuitive to those of us who grew up with the association between it and the queer community, but in 1977, when Baker started the project, the idea of LGBTQ+ people being represented by the rainbow was novel. The inspiration behind the original 8 stripe rainbow for Baker was multi-faceted. The rainbow was already associated with the hippie movement, which included queer people. Some have speculated that Baker might have also been inspired by the “Brotherhood Flag,” which had five stripes with colors meant to represent the five ”races” of the world, which had been popular with the hippie and world peace movements in the 1960s. Baker also liked the rainbow due to its long history, stretching, in his words, “all the way back to Ancient Egypt.” 

Each color in the flag had a meaning: hot pink for sex, red for life, orange for healing, yellow for sunlight, green for nature, turquoise for magic and art, indigo for serenity, and, finally, violet for the spirit of LGBTQ+ people. While a close friend of Baker, Cleve Jones, says that Baker didn’t come up with the meanings for the different colors until a couple years after the flag was created, the stated meanings nevertheless paint a picture of what Baker saw as the most important aspects of the queer community. It’s also not hard to see the hippie influences stitched in there.

If you’re better at counting than me, you might notice that that was eight colors. So, how did we get to the current six color flag that’s now ubiquitous in queer spaces? Well, the first color to get dropped was, sadly, the hot pink. Nothing to do with it representing sex - it was actually a logistics issue. Baker wanted the rainbow flag to spread as far as possible, especially after the assassination of Milk. He struck up a deal with local business, Paramount Flag Company, to start producing the flags at scale for Pride parades and queer spaces, and sadly, Paramount Flag couldn’t source the pink fabric needed for the flags. So, the flag began mass production with 7 colors. The next year, the flag got another update when Baker was designing lamppost banners with the rainbow flag. In order to have the rainbow evenly split with the two banners on the lampposts, he dropped the turquoise and swapped the indigo for ultramarine blue, making the six color flag we now know and love. 

The flag hasn’t stopped evolving, however. In 2017, the Philadelphia Pride Flag was unveiled at the city’s pride event, adding black and brown stripes to the flag to symbolize communities of color. This was to provide visibility to queer people of color and honor their contributions to the queer rights movement. Just the next year, in 2018, a new version of the pride flag was created by Daniel Quaser, dubbed the Progress Pride Flag. Quasar took the black and brown stripes from the Philadelphia Pride Flag and added a white, pink, and light blue stripe to represent the trans community, arranged the stripes in a chevron on the left side of the flag, reminiscent of the demisexual flag. The most recent update to be widely adopted by the community is the Intersex-Inclusive Progress Pride Flag, which adds the purple circle on a yellow background of the intersex pride flag to the Progress Pride Flag. The flag was created in 2021 by Valentino Vecchietti of Intersex Equality Rights UK. These aren’t the only new flags, either - in the last two decades, entire online communities have sprung up around created flags to represent queer identities. Just as Harvey Milk alluded to in the 70s, the ability of queer people to create meaningful symbols and art to represent themselves is a core aspect of the movement.

Baker never lost his love for the original Pride flag design, though. In 2017, he designed a new version of the flag, including a lavender stripe at the top, above the hot pink stripe. Lavender, a color traditionally associated with queer people, was a natural choice for Baker, who explained that the new stripe represented diversity in the queer community. Sadly, it would be his last contribution, as he passed away a few weeks later. His memory lives on in his most famous creation, now a symbol of love, unity, and queer resilience across the globe. 

Thank you for tuning in to this special Pride episode of This Month in Queer History. We will be taking a brief break for July, but we’ll be back in August [pending decision].