The History of the LGBTQ Rainbow Flag

The rainbow flag has become one of the most widely used and recognized symbols of the gay pride movement.  The concept of the rainbow is hardly a new one.  Rainbows have been used since ancient times in all kinds of cultures, including Greek, African, Native American, and Celtic, to name only a few.  Even Jesse Jackson’s Rainbow Coalition has made use of the rainbow as a freedom symbol.
The rainbow flag as we know it today was developed by San Francisco artist Gilbert Baker in 1978.

At the time, there was need for a gay symbol which could be used year after year for the San Francisco Gay and Lesbian Pride Parade.  Baker took inspiration from many sources, the hippies movement to the black civil rights movement, and came up with a flag using eight stripes.  Color has always played an important role in the gay rights movement – Victorian England symbolized homosexuality with the color green, lavender became popular in the 1960’s, and pink used inside the triangle has caught on as well.  The colors of the gay flag were no different.  Baker explained that his colors each stood for a different aspect of gay and lesbian life:


HOT PINK for sexuality

RED for life

ORANGE for healing

YELLOW for the sun

GREEN for nature

BLUE for art

INDIGO for harmony

VIOLET for spirit


Baker and thirty other volunteers hand-stitched and hand-dyed two large prototype flags for the 1978 parade.  It was an immediate hit.  However, when Baker took his design to the San Francisco Flag Co. to have it mass-produced for the 1979 parade, he had to remove the hot pink stripe.  Baker had hand-dyed the color, and unfortunately pink was not commercially available.

Later that year, when the city’s first openly gay supervisor, Harvey Milk, was assassinated, the 1979 Pride Parade Committee found in Baker’s flag, the perfect symbol for the entire gay community to unite in protest of this tragedy.  The committee got rid of the indigo stripe to make the colors evenly divisible along the parade route; red, orange, and yellow on one side of the street; green, blue, and purple on the other.  (This version also conforms to traditional color theory – the three primary colors and three secondary colors in art – rather than the spectrum of light colors of ROYGBIV.)  Thus, today’s six color flag was born!

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