"I decided the flag needed a birthplace, so I didn’t make it at home," he told MoMA. iStockīaker chose both where the flag was created and where it flew for the first time very carefully. Parade during San Diego 2016 LGBT Pride in July 2016. Plus, it's a natural flag-it's from the sky!" The rainbow is so perfect because it really fits our diversity in terms of race, gender, ages, all of those things. His reason for choosing a rainbow was simple: "We needed something beautiful, something from us. … It was necessary to have the Rainbow Flag because up until that we had the pink triangle from the Nazis-it was the symbol that they would use. "I thought that we needed that kind of symbol, that we needed as a people something that everyone instantly understands. It’s not a painting, it’s not just cloth, it is not a just logo-it functions in so many different ways," Baker told the Museum of Modern Art (MoMA). "I thought, a flag is different than any other form of art. In 1976, Baker noticed a proliferation of American flags around San Francisco-a celebration of the country’s bicentennial. He became friends with Harvey Milk, the first openly gay person elected to office in California, who urged his friend to create a symbol for gay rights. He occasionally performed as a drag queen and took part the queer liberation movement. I was in love with somebody, and I wanted to scream it from the rooftops."īaker worked as an Army medic in San Francisco in the early 1970s, and when his time in the Army was over, he decided to stay in the city. It wasn't a terrible, horrible, damn thing.
![is the rainbow flag the gay flag is the rainbow flag the gay flag](https://media.npr.org/assets/img/2021/06/05/ap21153548766840-f2bfb180dd91c4522d632bc32e8ae565421df133.jpg)
"I was the only gay person they probably knew, and they struggled with that … I came out because I fell in love. "When I was young, they thought I was from outer space," Baker told CNN in 2015. Born in Kansas in 1951, Baker came out as gay to his parents one Christmas Day after he fell in love. The flag was created by Gilbert Baker in 1978.
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And during the Hippie movement of the 1960s, peaceful protesters brought the rainbow equals peace concept back to the forefront.īut how the rainbow became specifically associated with LGBTQ rights goes back to San Francisco in the late 1970s, and to one artist in particular. Italy and Greece both use rainbow-striped flags to symbolize peace. The International Co-operative Movement designed a colorful banner to show international unity in 1921. There's evidence to suggest that rainbow-colored flags date back at least to the German Peasants' War in the 1500s. Flags with a spectrum of colors have been used for centuries to represent change.