Rainbow flag

The six-striped symbol of gay and LGBTQ pride, designed by Gilbert Baker and first flown in San Francisco on June 25, 1978.

The rainbow flag is the symbol of gay and, by now, LGBTQ pride: six horizontal stripes, red, orange, yellow, green, blue and violet, flown at Pride, hung outside bars and painted on crosswalks. Among gay men it is so familiar that a small rainbow sticker on a shop door is still read as a quiet message: you are welcome here.

It is not just decoration. For a long time a rainbow in the window was a way of being visible without saying a word, and in plenty of places it still takes courage to fly one.

Where it comes from

The flag was made in San Francisco in 1978. Harvey Milk, the city supervisor, and other local activists asked the artist Gilbert Baker to create a new symbol for the community, and Baker, who sat on the decorations committee for that year's Gay Freedom Day, hand-stitched and dyed the first flags with a group of friends. Two huge flags, 30 feet high and 60 feet wide, went up at United Nations Plaza on June 25, 1978.

The original had eight stripes, and Baker gave each one a meaning:

• Hot pink: sexuality
• Red: life
• Orange: healing
• Yellow: sun
• Green: nature
• Turquoise: art
• Indigo: harmony
• Violet: human spirit

It lost two of them within a year. In 1979 the hot pink was dropped because flag fabric in that color was not available, and the turquoise went so the stripes could be split evenly on the streetlamps of Market Street, which gave us the six-stripe flag we know. Gilbert Baker died in 2017.

How it is used today

The rainbow now has many cousins. Newer versions add stripes for trans people and people of color, and almost every tribe has a flag of its own, from the bear flag to the leather flag. Older symbols, like the pink triangle and the lavender of earlier decades, live alongside it.

Every June brings the usual debate about brands that turn their logos rainbow for a month and drop them in July. The flag survives the marketing. It was sewn by hand for a protest, and that is still what it means when it is held up in a city where the march is not a party.

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