People in mourning sewed it onto squares of the AIDS Memorial Quilt. 1980s: Out of the Closets and Onto the StreetsĪs the LGBTQ+ community fought to address (and survive) the HIV/AIDS epidemic, Baker’s idea of the rainbow flag as a symbol of hope took on deeper meaning. “It’s in remarkably good condition for its age,” Shaffer says. The society now houses a remnant of one of those original flags. “We have chosen to strip away the parts of ourselves and our communities that are hardest to conform,” he adds. The removal of sex and magic, “inadvertently mirrors what has happened as some LGBTQ+ causes have been embraced by mainstream audiences,” says Andrew Shaffer, interim coexecutive director of the GLBT Historical Society. During the manufacturing process for the many flags, enough hot pink fabric couldn’t be found, and turquoise was also dropped to create an even number of six stripes. In 1979, the city’s Pride Parade Committee decided to display the striped Rainbow flag along the entirety of the parade route.

Both were flown at San Francisco’s United Nations Plaza as a global statement of gay solidarity.Īs the story goes, Harvey Milk and San Francisco mayor George Moscone were assassinated a few months later.

A second version featured an area filled with tie-dyed stars, in a queer take on the American flag. His flag would feature eight stripes, arranged in spectral order with each color assigned 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 violet for spirit. While gay activists had reclaimed the pink triangle used by Nazis to target homosexuals, Baker and his compatriots wanted a new, optimistic icon. In Andy Campbell’s essential book Queer x Design, the historian writes that the Vietnam vet and marijuana activist Gilbert Baker “was asked by San Francisco city supervisor Harvey Milk to design a new flag for the upcoming Gay Freedom Day celebrations,” in 1978.

In celebration of Pride Month, we spoke with three experts in visual culture to take a look back at the origins and evolution of the queer community’s unmistakable signifier, and what it means to raise the flag today, tomorrow, and for all eternity. They planted a seed that blooms, to this day, in flag varieties well into the thousands, engaging with the mainstream and embodying complexity just like the LGBTQ+ community it proudly signifies. Its mutability is by design: Originally eight stripes (with optional circles of stars), the creation was offered by artist Gilbert Baker and his collaborators without trademark or copyright. Whether wrapping an ad campaign or flapping from a pole, hoisted at a protest or hated on by bigots, the rainbow flag is one of the most potent symbols of the last 50 years.

Pride flag colors