The History Of The Gay Pride/Rainbow Flag

May 23, 2009

We decided to do a short story and share with you the history of how the Gay Pride/Rainbow Flag came to be. Not everyone in the LGBT Community knows the story of our our Gay Pride/Rainbow Flag so we wanted to share the story with you so you may share it with others.

It all began with the Eight Striped Version.

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. Baker dyed and sewed the material for the first flag himself — in the true spirit of Betsy Ross.
The design may have been influenced by flags with multicolored stripes used by various left-wing causes and organizations in the San Francisco area in the 1960s. The Rainbow Flag originally had eight stripes (from top to bottom: hot pink for sex, red for life, orange for healing, yellow for sun, green for serenity with nature, turquoise for art, indigo for harmony, and violet for spirit). Handmade versions of this flag were flown in the 1978 Gay Freedom Day Parade.
Use of the rainbow flag by the gay community began in 1978 when it first appeared in the San Francisco Gay and Lesbian Freedom Day Parade. Borrowing symbolism from the hippie movement and black civil rights groups, San Francisco artist Gilbert Baker designed the rainbow flag in response to a need for a symbol that could be used year after year. Baker and thirty volunteers hand-stitched and hand-dyed two huge prototype flags for the parade. The flags had eight stripes, each color representing a component of the community.

The Seven Striped Version.

After the November 1978 assassination of San Francisco Mayor George Moscone and openly gay Supervisor Harvey Milk and the subsequent lenient sentence given to their killer, former Supervisor Dan White, the Rainbow Flag began to be used in San Francisco as a general symbol of the gay community. San Francisco-based Paramount Flag Co. began selling seven-striped (top to bottom: red, orange, yellow, green, blue, indigo, and violet) flags from its Polk Street retail store, which was located in a large gay neighborhood. These flags were surplus stock which had originally been made for the the International Order of Rainbow for Girls, a Masonic organization for young women. When Baker approached Paramount to make flags for the 1979 Gay Freedom Day Parade, Paramount informed Baker that fabric for hot pink was not available for mass production, and Baker dropped the hot pink stripe.
The reality was that the gay community at this time (1978-1979) used almost any flag with a rainbow of stripes, including the Cooperativist flags, Buddhist flags, Sufi flags, Tibetan flags… in short anything even vertically striped flags.
During the early days of the use of the rainbow as a symbol of gay pride (as opposed to gay liberation, which used the pink triangle on various colored fields) customers bought almost anything striped. At the Paramount Flag Co, the need for striped flags became acute and until the design was standardized we sold a wide variety of flags.

The Current Version.

Baker also asked Paramount to make vertical banners that would be split and displayed from the angular double bars of the old-style lamp posts on Market Street. Baker and Paramount's vice president Ken Hughes agreed to drop the hot pink and turquoise stripes and replace the indigo stripe with royal blue — resulting in three stripes on one side of the lamp post and three on the other.

Soon the six colors were incorporated into a six-striped version that became popularized internationally.