ISSUES
: Sexuality and Gender
Chapter 1: Understanding sexuality
13
How the rainbow became the symbol
of gay pride
Where did that rainbow flag come from, and how did it come
to symbolise gay pride and rights?
By Ana Swanson
M
any people signed on to the
Internet on 26 June to find
their Twitter and Facebook
feeds exploding with rainbows. The
Supreme Court’s landmark decision
to make same-sex marriage a
Constitutional right across the country
sparked a huge volume of rainbow
coloured cartoons, gifs and photos.
Where did that rainbow flag come
from, and how did it come to
symbolise gay pride and rights? The
story is a touching one, involving a
drag queen who would come to be
known as ‘Busty Ross’, huge trash
bins full of dye, clandestine trips
to the laundromat, and the famous
gay politician Harvey Milk. Gilbert
Baker, an artist and drag queen, first
created the Rainbow Flag in 1978.
The rainbow had the added benefit
of being a natural and universal
symbol that works in any language.
The rainbow flag also had some
connections with Judy Garland,
a favourite figure of the gay
community who sang ‘Somewhere
Over the Rainbow’ in
The Wizard
of Oz
.
The Advocate
had called
Garland “an Elvis for homosexuals”.
Before that, the symbol of the gay
movement was a pink triangle,
which had originally been used by
the Nazis in concentration camps to
denote gay people and other ‘sexual
deviants’. The gay movement had
reclaimed the pink triangle during
the 1970s, but some felt the symbol
still had disturbing connotations.
In part because of the pink triangle,
bright colours always played a
strong role in gay identification,
especially purple and lavender. As
Forrest Wickman of
Slate
writes,
gay people historically used bright
colours to signal their sexuality –
including bright yellow socks, and
the green carnation that Oscar
Wilde famously wore on his lapel.
Baker’s grandmother owned a
woman’s clothing store, and he
was fascinated with clothing and
fabrics from a young age. However,
he grew up in a small, conservative
town in Kansas and never learned to
sew. He left home to join the army,
and then headed to San Francisco
when he left the army in 1972, just
as the city’s gay community was
flowering.
“Once I was finally liberated frommy
Kansas background, the first thing I
did was get a sewing machine,” he
told the web site Refinery 29 in an
interview. “Because it’s 1972 and I
have to look like Mick Jagger and
David Bowie every single second,”
he says. “Taffeta jumpsuits.”
Because of his sewing talents,
Baker started taking over the task
of making banners for the protest
marches. The rainbow flag first rose
to prominence when Harvey Milk,
a member of the San Francisco
Board of Supervisors and the first
openly gay politician in a major US
city, asked Baker to make a flag
for a march he was organising –
just a few months before Milk was
assassinated.
Baker recalled making the first
rainbow flags with about 30 volunteers
in the top-floor attic gallery of the
Gay Community Center at 330 Grove
Street in San Francisco. They had
huge trashcans filled with water and
dye, and dyed thousands of yards of
cotton, ending up covered in coloured
dye. To rinse out the dye, they needed
to use a laundromat. They knew they
weren’t supposed to put dye in public
washing machines, lest the next
person ended upwith pink underwear.
So they waited until late at night to visit,
and put Clorox in the machines after
they left. The group raised two flags in
the United Nations Plaza in downtown
San Francisco on 25 June 1978. One
was the rainbow flag, while another
was an American flag with rainbow
stripes instead of red, white and blue.
30 June 2015
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The above information is
reprinted with kind permission
from
The Independent
. Please
visit
for further information.
© independent.co.uk 2016
