Awareness
In modern times, the Gender, Sexual, and Relationship Diverse (GSRD) community has countless beloved symbols and flags, each with a distinct history and meaning, but it’s hard to argue any symbol is more distinctive than the rainbow flag. Flown across the world and instantly recognizable, it’s used in ways varying from an emblem of Pride to a way to show that a space is safe for those in the GSRD community. The rainbow flag has a long and fascinating history encompassing decades, all stretching back to the original 8-stripe design.
In 1978 San Francisco, Drag Queen and Activist Gilbert Baker began work on multiple designs for a flag that could serve as a symbol of the GSRD community, at the encouragement of multiple friends and a city supervisor named Harvey Milk. He chose to base his flag around a rainbow, a symbol of diversity and hope and eventually landed on an eight-stripe design.
Each colour on the eight-stripe flag has a specific meaning, something that’s continued through every evolution in the years since. Pink represents sex, red for life, orange for healing, yellow for sunlight, green for nature, turquoise for art and magic, indigo for serenity, and finally, purple, meaning spirit.
The original flags were sewed and hand-dyed by Baker and around 30 volunteers and were flown for the very first time at the San Francisco Gay Freedom Day Parade on June 25th, 1978.
After Harvey Milk was assassinated only a few months later, on November 27th, demand for the rainbow flag skyrocketed. The Paramount Flag Company thus began selling a seven-stripe variation, a decision that was made due to the lack of hot pink fabric readily available. The next year, as he was planning to decorate the streets in anticipation of the Parade, Baker simplified the flag further, from seven stripes to six, combining turquoise and indigo into blue. He made this decision so that he could evenly split the stripes, making it possible to flank streetlights on both sides of the Parade route with half of the colours each.
Since then, the rainbow flag has exploded across the GSRD community globally. As the fight for GSRD rights progresses, the rainbow flag has been flown above government buildings, hung in shop windows, and found hanging from streetlights. It’s also still a staple of any Pride celebration. Apple released a rainbow flag emoji in 2016, a year after the White House was projected with rainbow light in celebration of the nationwide legalization of same-sex marriage.
As for the original flags flown in 1978, a portion was donated to San Francisco’s GLBT Historical Society Museum and Archives in 2021. It’s the only known surviving fragment of the world’s first rainbow flags.
In the last decade specifically, the rainbow flag has undergone even more evolution. It began in 2017, in Philadelphia, when Amber Hikes, a queer Black American activist, added black and brown stripes to recognize the unique struggles that queer people of colour face. The next year, artist Daniel Quasar redesigned the pride flag with a chevron in stripes of white, pale pink, pale blue, brown and black. This new design included the iconic colours of the trans flag, the representation of queer POC from Amber Hikes’ flag, and a black stripe to honour GSRD people who were lost to violence, illness, or AIDS. The chevron points to the right, a declaration of how far we still have to go in the fight for equal rights. Most recently, in 2021, Valentino Vecchietti added a purple circle on a yellow background to the centre of the chevron to represent those in the intersex community, taking inspiration from the Intersex flag designed by Morgan Carpenter.
The rainbow flag has inspired an array of other Pride Flags that have been created in years since for more specific identities, with the rainbow flag seen as encompassing the community as a whole. The flag has served as a representation of community and safety for decades and will continue to do so for decades in future. Every update only furthers this mission, and perhaps we will see even more changes in future to represent even more of the beautiful diversity in the GSRD community.
