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. Other variations of the Pride flag include Genderfluid, Genderflexible and Genderqueer Pride flags for the Leather, Bear, and BDSM communities a Polysexual Pride flag Agender and Aromantic Pride flags and even a rarely-seen Straight Ally Pride Flag with a large rainbow triangle amidst black and white stripes.The longest rainbow pride flag ever, in Key West in 2003.Īndy Newman/Florida Keys News Bureau/Getty Images The Asexual Pride flag, created in 2010, has four stripes: Black to represent asexuality, grey for demisexuality, white for allies, and purple for community. A variation on the Poly flag turns the black stripe into a triangle and replaces the Pi symbol with a yellow stripe. The Pansexual Pride flag is comprised of pink (representing attraction to femmes), yellow (attraction to nonbinary people), and blue (attraction to masc people) stripes.Ī less widely adopted Polyamory Pride flag has a blue (represention openness), red (passion), and black (solidarity) stripe with a gold (emotional attachment) Pi symbol in the middle. As designed, the pink represents same-sex attraction, the blue represents other-sex attraction, and the thin purple stripe stands for the breadth of the gender spectrum. It has a pink block at the top, a thinner purple stripe, and then a blue block at the bottom. The Bisexual Pride flag has also seen common use for many years. Lesbian, bisexual, transgender, and even leather groups created symbols for their communities, and over time came into more widespread use. But over the years, groups within the queer community felt the need to assert their presence as well.
Over the years, the rainbow-striped Pride flag came to be thought of as the sole icon of Pride.
“Gay” as a catch-all term for anything gender-nonconforming is a fast-vanishing vestige of patriarchy. Today, Pride is much more inclusive of lesbians, bisexual people, and people who are trans or poly or asexual or queer. Though it was often called the “Gay Pride Flag” at first, it’s now come to represent a much broader community than just gay men. Baker and a friend named Lynn Segerblom, also known as Faerie Argyle Rainbow, developed a rainbow version that had eight colors, with a hot pink stripe later removed because it was difficult to dye. There, he befriended Milk, who challenged him to create a symbol for what was then more commonly called the gay community. Baker had served in the Army, and moved to San Francisco following his honorable discharge. The history of the Pride flag can be traced back to Harvey Milk, the famous San Francisco city Supervisor, and his friend Gilbert Baker in the 1970s. None of those symbols was particularly widespread in modern times, however.