The original gay flag
The result - the rainbow flag - was an impossible-to-ignore declaration of love, a tangible object around which people could unite, make themselves visible and seek their own liberation.
He wanted to create “something positive, something that celebrated our love,” he wrote in his memoirs. Political races, economic centers and even entire neighborhoods, such as the Castro, were sexual identity in order to stake a claim in The City and combat ongoing persecution and legal oppression. “So it’s really significant we found the first one.”īaker created the flag at a moment in San Francisco when the gay rights movement was dovetailing with other social and civil rights efforts. “It’s become ubiquitously understood across the world to represent an idea,” Beskin said. The Rainbow Flag captures and advances much of that political power, itself a direct protest against the pink triangle that represented the LGBTQ movement in the 70s, but activists say was borne of Nazi-era stigmatization as a way to identify those who identified as gay. “It still happens right in our neighborhoods, it’s just invisible.” “That has an effect on a person and not everybody is able to survive it,” he said. Now, it’s a place where people can express their sexualities and gender identities as well as celebrate the community’s political power in the battles to overcome AIDS, civil rights abuses and other significant issues, and wield its influence to continue demanding change.Īs Beswick points out, just because we don’t see the oppression in the same way we did in the 70s, when Harvey Milk became a city supervisor and was later assassinated, it’s still ever-present in more subtle forms of bullying that leads to higher rates of depression, anxiety and suicide, even in San Francisco. It changed its name signal broadened diversity, enduring financial woes, all the while attempting to balance competing beliefs about the vision of the gay rights movement. Over the following decades, the festival evolved. It started with humble roots in 1970: A march down Polk Street followed by a “gay-in” at Golden Gate Park. With a $3.5 million budget and an annual attendance of around one million people, it’s considered to be the largest gathering of LBGTQ people and allies in the country. San Francisco Pride won’t be holding its annual march this month, the second straight year the parade has been impacted by the pandemic. But many say the flag is imbued with an even more powerful purpose: to serve as a beacon of safety and of hope. The original eight stripes were deliberately designed to represent pride and power of the expansive community.
It’s also one of the most iconic flags flown globally. It flies at the corner of Castro and Market streets, a sign of The City’s storied history as a bedrock of LGBTQ life. San Francisco’s Rainbow Flag holds a prominent spot in San Francisco’s collective identity.
He did not trademark the design, hoping instead it would be replicated and easy to spread around the country and the world as a symbol of collective action. Gilbert Baker, a San Francisco activist, artist and LGBTQ+ advocate, stitched the original flag for the 1978 Pride Parade in United Nations Plaza. Thought to be lost due to water damage while in storage nearly 40 years ago, a piece of the original Rainbow Flag, which helped define the LGBTQ civil rights movement, was discovered in 2019. An important part of San Francisco history is finally coming home.