Flag History
Serving from 1970 to 1972, Gilbert Baker was stationed as a medic in the San Francisco area. After he left the US Army, he found purpose in sewing protest banners for anti-war protests and creating his own clothes for drag. Until this point, the main symbol used by gay people was a pink triangle, the symbol used to separate gay men in Nazi concentration camps. Many gay rights activists around the time, including newly elected city supervisor Harvey Milk, saw the need for a new symbol to rally around; one not associated with such a dark period for the community. They would need someone to lead the effort in creating this new symbol, and with his knowledge of working with fabric, this task fell to Gilbert Baker.
Seeing how the American flag had become a symbol of the country, Gilbert Baker saw that he could create a flag to show the same kind of unity and pride that the nation's flag saw. Two large flags were produced. The first one had stripes in the order pink, red, orange, yellow, green, blue, indigo, and violet. The second flag had that order reversed, but added stars on a blue field in the top left to call back to the American flag. Due to the size of the flag, it took two people to move the fabric through the sewing machine, and 10 people to iron it. On June 25th 1978, the new rainbow flags flew in the San Francisco Gay Freedom Day Parade.
Later that year, Harvey Milk (one of the people to challenge Baker to create the flag), was assassinated in a politically motivated attack on the San Francisco town hall.
Variants
After the assassination of Harvey Milk, demand for the flag grew. This led the local Paramount Flag Company to produce the flag using regular 7-stripe rainbow fabric. Due to this, and a lack of readily available pink fabric, Gilbert Baker stopped adding the pink stripe to the flags he was producing. Baker would later work at the Paramount Flag Company producing flags.
The design would again change in 1979, where the street lamps along the parade
route would be adorned with the flag. The decision was made to split the design
into two banners of three stripes, so that one side of the street would be red,
orange, and yellow, while the other would be green, blue, and purple. This led
to the familiar 6-stripe