A gorgeous array of rainbow…everything…is everywhere you look during the month of July. This blast of so many colours is wonderful, but why is everything rainbow? Let’s put on our best Pride gear and dive in!
In 1978 San Francisco, California, one of the first openly gay elected officials, Harvey Milk, enlisted artist Gilbert Baker to create the first rainbow flag for the city’s Gay Freedom Day Parade. At that point in history, the most common symbol of LGBTQ+ representation was the pink triangle, which the Nazis had used to signal people’s sexuality. Milk wanted Baker to reinvent the narrative with an all-new visual association for the LGBTQ+ community.
Baker is credited with not only creating the first rainbow flag, but also for making sure that the flag could remain free for public use. This meant that he received no direct financial gain from one of the most common universal flags in the world.
The original flag was dyed and sewed by hand, and also featured hot pink at the top, as well as two shades of blue instead of one. Baker also designed and created an American flag with rainbow stripes instead of the usual red, white and blue, and both flew over the 1978 parade.
The colours all meant something: hot pink was for sexuality, red for life, orange for healing, yellow for sunlight, green for nature, blue for art, indigo for harmony or serenity, and violet for the human spirit.
However, certain changes were made to the flag. The hot pink was quickly dropped due lack of material for mass production. The flag also dropped the indigo and turquoise stripes after the assassination of Harvey Milk, replacing it with one stripe of royal blue, so that each side of the parade route protesting Milk’s murder could have an even number of stripes on each side. Philadelphia also added black and brown stripes to represent diversity and inclusion in 2017.
All in all, the rainbow flag represents far more than just pretty colours: it symbolises the struggle of the LGBTQ+ community and how they keep coming back, stronger than ever. It is important to recognize their struggles, in order to better respect the importance of the rainbow during Pride.
