Today is Flag Day. It commemorates the adoption of the flag of the United States on June 14, 1777, by resolution of the Second Continental Congress. The Flag Resolution, passed on June 14, 1777, stated: “Resolved, That the flag of the thirteen United States be thirteen stripes, alternate red and white; that the union be thirteen stars, white in a blue field, representing a new constellation.” But June is also Pride Month, so I thought I’d do a post about the Pride Flag. Flags are symbols of community membership, unity, and visibility. A country’s flag shows a sense of citizenship and national pride. Likewise, the Pride Flag was created as a symbol of community membership, unity, and visibility.

In the late 1970s, Harvey Milk, a member of the San Francisco Board of Supervisors and the first openly gay man elected to public office, asked his friend Gilbert Baker to design a symbol to represent (what was then referred to as) the gay community. Baker collaborated with his friend Lynn Segerblom (also known as Faerie Argyle Rainbow) to design the rainbow-striped flag with eight colors: 

• Hot pink: sex_________________
• Red: life _____________________
• Orange: healing ______________
• Yellow: sunlight ______________
• Green: nature ________________
• Turquoise: magic and art ______
• Indigo: serenity ______________
• Violet: spirit __________________

Baker and Segerblom’s flag debuted at the Gay Freedom Day Parade in SF in 1978. Each of the original eight colors had their own unique symbolism. With the help of close to 30 volunteers working in the attic of the Gay Community Center in San Francisco, Baker was able to construct the first draft of the now world-renowned rainbow flag. It was first showcased at San Francisco’s Gay Freedom Day Parade on June 25, 1978.

After the design was unveiled, participants of the parade proudly waved the new symbol in solidarity. Baker then took the design to Paramount Flag Company, which sold a version of the flag without hot pink and turquoise, which were replaced with blue for practicality purposes. After the assassination of Harvey Milk on November 27, 1978, demand for the rainbow banner only increased. Popularity spiked again a decade later when a West Hollywood resident sued his landlord over the right to hang his flag outside his residence.

Despite their outsized global impact, the two original flags were thought to be lost for more than four decades. One flag was stolen from a community center and never recovered. But Baker managed to quietly rescue a 10- by 28-foot segment of the second flag, which had been placed in storage after sustaining water damage. Baker took the item with him when he moved to New York City in 1994. After Baker’s death in 2017, the flag and his other belongings were shipped to his sister, who later passed the fragment along to Charley Beal, president of the Gilbert Baker Foundation. Beal did not realize he was in possession of the original 1978 banner until early 2020, when a vexillologist (or flag expert) examined the item firsthand and confirmed its provenance. In June 2021, the GLBT Historical Society Museum unveiled a glass case containing this rare artifact: a segment of the original rainbow gay pride flag, its colors as vibrant as ever. 

The iconic rainbow design has succeeded in part because it conveys a bright, hopeful message. In the years since it debuted, the rainbow flag has only grown in popularity and is now seen around the globe as a positive representation of the LGBTQ+ community. A mile-long version of the flag was created to celebrate the 25th anniversaries of two landmark events; the Stonewall Riots and Baker’s creation of the flag itself.

Baker died on March 31, 2017, at the age of 65, just two years after the legalization of same-sex marriage throughout the U.S. His legacy lives on in the six-colored flag that flies proudly every Gay Pride month, recognizing the lives, and loves, of LGBTQ+ people worldwide.