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The first step of that dream was looking fabulous. At that moment, the rainbow became the symbol of the community.” Gilbert started tugging on the rope, the wind caught it and it was just stunning.” Jones tells me over the phone from his home in S.F.,“The parade arrived, and as people started marching under it, you could see them looking up and smiling. Plaza for a pride parade on June 25, 1978. They made two flags that day - the rainbow flag and an American flag with rainbow stripes instead of red, white and blue - and hung them in San Francisco’s U.N. We did it all by hand with big garbage barrels of dye to color the fabric and then we dragged it out onto the roof to dry.” “There was a gay community center at 330 Grove Street, now long gone.
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“He came up with the idea of flag,” says Cleve Jones, a longtime gay rights activist and Baker’s roommate at the time. We needed something that expressed our beauty, our soul, our love - that came from us and wasn’t put on us.” “The triangle came from a very negative, terrible place. “Until we had a flag, the symbol for our movement was the pink triangle, which was put on us by Hitler and the Nazis,” Baker says. “That’s really how I ended up making the first flag - I was the guy who could sew it.”īaker says the rainbow was an obvious choice for him. “Because I loved to sew, my role in the movement became to make banners,” Baker says. It was Milk, the first openly gay man elected to public office in the states, who invited Baker to make a flag for a gay rights march he was organizing - just months before his assassination that fall. “Harvey hadn’t been murdered yet and gay artistic empowerment - you had gay chorus, gay band, gay theater, gay film, all of this stuff - was just flowering.” Baker was living in San Francisco, which had become a haven the gay community fleeing less tolerant locales. Anita Bryant, the beauty queen turned conservative activist had just finished her nationwide anti-gay rights crusade. I'm there to meet its creator, Gilbert Baker, a gay rights icon who created the pride flag nearly forty years ago, and is the force behind its adoption as the now ubiquitous symbol of the LGBT rights movement.Īs we walk inside, he points above our heads - “That’s one of mine” - and then leads us up to a classroom (he’s an active volunteer at the center and greets several people on the stairs) to tell me how the pride flag came about. It’s a rarity, hand-sewn and oversize, with eight colored stripes. A big rainbow flag flaps lazily outside the gay community center in Manhattan's West Village.