With this mix of colours in a harmonious and natural form, it also signifies the togetherness of the LGBT community.
Green represents nature, turquoise art, blue harmony, and violet means spirit. Red means life, orange means healing, yellow means sunlight. Originally it was eight colours strong – pink and turquoise were dropped to make mass production easier – and each colour means something. Baker went beyond Milk’s challenge, describing his method with the words, ‘A true flag cannot be designed – it has to be torn from the souls of the people.’ When Milk said ‘It’s not about personal gain, it’s not about ego, it’s not about power, it’s about giving those young people out there hope,’ he led the way for every LGBT movement since. The Rainbow Flag has been part of the LGBT movement since 1978, when, at the request of Harvey Milk (the first openly gay man to be elected to public office in the United States), activist and artist Gilbert Baker (1951–2017) designed it in his studio in San Francisco. Designed for one parade in 1978, it's now one of the most recognized symbols in the world.The Rainbow Flag waving in the wind at San Francisco’s Castro District. The LGBT pride version of the flag designed by Gilbert Baker has become the most famous of the rainbow flags. And in Peru and Bolivia, the rainbow "Flag of Cusco" is a symbol of the indigenous Inca people.
The Jewish Autonomous Oblast based in Birobidzhan, a sort of satellite government of Russia located on the Chinese border in Birobidzhan, uses a rainbow flag as its own symbol. In Italy, it's used as a symbol of peace, often with the word "PACE" written in white across the flag's stripes. In 2001, one version added a black stripe for AIDs awareness.Īside from LGBT pride, rainbow flags have other historic and political meanings that persist today. One version unfurled in Philadelphia this year added black and brown, for racial inclusivity. The flag has been modified in different places at different times. The White House illuminated in rainbow colors after 2015's Supreme Court ruling legalizing gay marriage.
Judy Garland, the star of "The Wizard of Oz," has a large following as a gay symbol, and is famous for singing "Somewhere Over the Rainbow" in the movie. The rainbow also has some pop culture significance for the LGBT community. The rainbow is so perfect because it really fits our diversity in terms of race, gender, ages, all of those things." We needed something beautiful, something from us. It came from such a horrible place of murder and holocaust and Hitler. "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. The rainbow flag was a way of taking these various colors and turning them into a coherent symbol, reclaimed by the LGBT community. During the Holocaust, Nazis forced gay men to wear pink triangles as a symbol of sexual deviance. Oscar Wilde wore a green carnation, and yellow served the same purpose in Australia, and purple provided that function in some communities in the United States. I realized I would have to make some compromises in order for this to really function as a symbol."Ĭloseted gay people have also historically used bright colors to signal their homosexuality to each other, as Forrest Wickman wrote in Slate. "Even to do four-color printing for photographs like this was complicated. " One of the reasons I had to adapt the eight-color version to the six-color version of the flag - the one we use today - is because in 1978 eight colors was expensive," Baker told the Museum of Modern Art. The longest rainbow pride flag ever, in Key West in 2003.Īndy Newman/Florida Keys News Bureau/Getty Images