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It’s time, however, to restore the original design. The flag was later cut up and sent to over 100 Pride events across the world.Īt the 2004 Key West Pride Festival, Gilbert Baker unveiled a re-creation of his original eightcoloured flag saying, “We lost two of the original colours, pink and turquoise. During the 1994 New York Gay Pride celebrations, over 10,000 people carried a 30-foot-wide by one-mile-long Rainbow Flag through the streets of Manhattan to commemorate the 25th anniversary of the Stonewall Riots.
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Indeed, it is officially recognised by the International Congress of Flag Makers as such. This six-colour version caught on and soon became the worldwide symbol of gay pride and diversity that it is today. The committee also removed the indigo stripe to make the colours symmetrical when they were hung from lamp posts and along the parade route: red, orange and yellow on one side of the street and green, blue and yellow on the other. When Harvey Milk was assassinated later that year the Pride Parade Committee saw the flag as the perfect symbol to unite the community in protest of this tragedy. He was also forced to replace indigo with royal blue. He had hand-died the original flag and then discovered that pink was not a commercially available colour. The following year, when Baker took his design to the San Francisco Flag Company to have it mass produced, he was forced to remove the pink due to production constraints. “It was an incredible moment of joy and we all felt that we were going to change the world.” “I’ll always remember Harvey riding through the streets under the giant Rainbow Flag, waving to the crowds,” said Baker. They were instantly adopted by the gay community and proudly flew on Francisco Freedom Day Parade on 25 June 1978. The flag had eight stripes, each representing an aspect of the community: hot pink for sex, red for life, orange for healing, yellow for sun, green for nature, turquoise for art, indigo for harmony and violet for spirit. A flag really fit that mission, because that’s a way of proclaiming your visibility or saying, ‘This is who I am!’”īorrowing symbolism from the hippy movement, the black civil right groups – and no doubt the Wizard of Oz (ironically Baker was from Kansas) – he designed a Rainbow Flag, using the sewing skills he had honed creating his own outfits as a prominent drag artist, as well as creating banners for protest marches.Īlong with about 30 volunteers, two gigantic prototypes of the flag were hand-stitched and hand-dyed. Baker chose a flag, saying: “Our job as gay people was to come out, to be visible, to live in the truth, as I say, to get out of the lie. Harvey Milk asked his artist friend Gilbert Baker to create something powerful, a highly visual symbol of gay pride. He was looking for a positive symbol to replace the pink triangle and its horrific connections to the Nazi concentration camps.
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Milk, affectionately dubbed The Mayor of Castro Street, was the first openly gay official in the history of California. The gay Rainbow Flag first flew at the San Francisco Gay and Lesbian Freedom Day Parade in 1978, the year that American politician Harvey Milk was elected to office. Plus, it’s a natural flag - it’s from the sky!” Gilbert Baker, creator of the Gay Rainbow Freedom Flag The rainbow is so perfect because it really fits our diversity in terms of race, gender, ages, all of those things.