![]() I didn’t have a flag shop like I have now. We ironed a thousand yards of fabric, it was a mess. I sewed it in the Gay Community Center in this little gallery up there, and many, many people were involved. “We hand-dyed the fabric, so it was very organic. ![]() Volunteers helped create the first two flags for the parade. As the ’78 parade came around I was very involved in making and designing stuff, and I thought, ‘I’ll make a flag’ – and once I decided that a flag was something that would be useful and something that I would make, I knew right away to make a rainbow flag.” This was a way for us to come out en masse, symbolically if you will. Reflecting on the inspiration for the rainbow flag, Baker described the scene: “Through knowing Harvey, this would be really useful for visibility. Harvey Milk in the Gay and Lesbian Freedom Day Parade in San Francisco, 1978. My particular skill, sewing, was very handy because we had protest marches, we needed banners, we needed a way to take our message and make it really visible and in your face.” It was a movement, everybody pitching in to do what we could. 27, 1978) Baker made banners for gay and anti-war protest marches. Friends with Harvey Milk (a civil rights activist and the first openly gay elected official, assassinated Nov. We needed something joyful, we needed something with soul, something that was living, something positive.”Īfter being honorably discharged from the Army in 1972, Baker landed in San Francisco at the start of the gay liberation movement and taught himself to sew. The pink triangle is not a flag – it’s a stigma put on us by Hitler. “The reason I made the rainbow flag is because we didn’t have a flag. “They’re two separate symbols.” Baker replied when asked about the difference between the two icons. I spoke with Gilbert Baker for the Syracuse New Times about the rainbow flag, it’s meaning and history. Reclaimed as symbols of pride and solidarity for the LGBTQ community (lesbian, gay, bisexual, transgender, questioning), the dark history of the triangle patches made way for a global icon born in 1978 and debuted that same year during the San Francisco Gay and Lesbian Freedom Day Parade: The rainbow flagĬreated by vexillographer and artist Gilbert Baker, oftentimes referred to as the “Gay Betsy Ross” and originally from Kansas (just like Dorothy Gale), the rainbow flag has become the most recognizable representation of the LGBTQ community. Homosexuals remained imprisoned for 24 years following the demise of Hitler’s regime, until 1969 when the law was finally repealed. When the Allies defeated the Nazi regime the political and remaining Jewish prisoners were released from the camps – but due to Paragraph 175 – a law imposed by the Nazi’s forbidding “unnatural sex acts committed between persons of male sex” – the homosexual prisoners watched helplessly as their fellow inmates were released. The pink triangle was given to gay men, the black triangle to lesbians.
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