The Wells Fargo branch ATMs in the Castro are rainbow-hued year-round the Castro Muni station escalators are emblazoned with rainbow lights, and the crosswalks are painted in the same scheme. Sections were then sent to Pride celebrations around the world, furthering its symbolic reach.Īs the Castro district and other enclaves such as West Hollywood, Chicago’s Boystown and New York’s West Village have become destinations with LGBT-significant sites for tourists, the rainbow has become a part of the marketing of the neighborhoods’ gay identities. For the 25th anniversary of New York’s Stonewall riots in 1994, Baker created a mile-long flag that was carried during the city’s Pride parade. In the 1990s, the flag became more widely used to denote gay-friendly spaces, like bars and nightclubs. It took a few years for the flag to take off, Jones said, but as gay rights continued to be a politically charged issue, it took on greater activist significance. “Younger people have no knowledge of this, but we didn’t have a unifying symbol for the whole community.” The timing was fortuitous, coinciding with “a conversation about the need for a new symbol,” Jones said.
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“Gilbert was given a tiny budget for decoration, he assembled a crew, and they figured out how to make those flags, which Gilbert decided would be rainbows.” “That morning, we raised those flags without any prior announcement - they were absolutely stunning and huge,” Jones said. (since demolished) as part of the decorations for Gay Freedom Day, specifically to be flown on the two flagpoles at United Nations Plaza in Civic Center, said Cleve Jones, the activist and author who was one of the organizers of the 1978 event. 40 Isis Street PHOTO BY JERRY TELFER Jerry Telfer / The Chronicle 1999īaker conceived and created the flag at the Gay Community Center at 330 Grove St. Baker is the original creator of the rainbow flag. PRIDE/C/10JUN98/EZ/JLT "Seam-master" Gilbert Baker in his studio amid some of the 500 rainbow flags which will festoon the City for the annual Gay Pride Parade. Beswick said Baker was proud to see the flag “popularized in so many ways” in his later years, something that may have seemed unimaginable in 1978. But has the saturation of rainbow merchandise, from socks to sex toys, diluted the original meaning?īaker, who died in 2017 at the age of 65, chose not to trademark the flag, which was key to its dissemination to gay communities in other cities and, eventually, around the world.
The flag’s intended messages of acceptance and community were radical ideas for a population both legally and socially marginalized in 1978. “I would guess that billions of people know that this flag stands for gay pride.” “The rainbow flag is an almost universally recognized symbol of gay liberation and all things LGBTQ around the world,” said Terry Beswick, the executive director of the GLBT Historical Society in San Francisco, which acquired Baker’s archives upon his death. Simultaneously (and seemingly unrelated), rainbow beauty trends have been popular on visual discovery apps such as Pinterest as part of the recent wave of fantasy aesthetics that include homages to unicorns and mermaids. Major corporations have adopted the rainbow in everything from special fashion collections to logos on their Pride floats.
But it’s not just San Francisco that tastes the rainbow every June: Cities from New York to Los Angeles embrace the motif for Pride, and the flag now flies at gay bars and is carried in parades around the world.