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.īaker 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. 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.ĭuring 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. 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. These flags were surplus stock which had originally been made for the International Order of Rainbow for Girls, a Masonic organization for young women.
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. The flags had eight stripes, each color representing a component of the community.Īfter 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. Baker and thirty volunteers hand-stitched and hand-dyed two huge prototype flags for the 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. 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. Handmade versions of this flag were flown in the 1978 Gay Freedom Day Parade. The Rainbow Flag originally had eight stripes (from top to bottom): 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.
Baker dyed and sewed the material for the first flag himself - in the true spirit of Betsy Ross. (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. 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. The “International Congress of Flag Makers”?.Links: FOTW homepage | search | disclaimer and copyright | write us | mirrors
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