i’m sure you know the rainbow flag, but you might not know who made it.
his name was gilbert baker, and he called himself the gay betsy ross. his drag name was busty ross. he was from kansas. conservative, flat, the kind of place where a kid who wanted to sew and draw and exist loudly in color wasn’t going to find much mercy. his parents didn’t speak to him for ten years after he came out. the army drafted him anyway, sent him to san francisco in 1970, and he got there, got discharged, and simply stayed. he learned to sew from a fellow activist. he started making banners for protests, getting good at the grammar of flags, what they say when they move.
then he met harvey milk.
milk’s whole campaign ran on the word hope, and he needed something to put in the air. he came to baker. baker said he didn’t even think twice. the rainbow. obviously the rainbow. it was already up there.
the original design had eight stripes, not six.
hot pink, red, orange, yellow, green, turquoise, indigo, violet, each with their own meanings:
- pink for sex
- red for life
- orange for healing
- yellow for sunlight
- green for nature
- turquoise for art
- blue for harmony and peace
- violet for spirit
during milk’s campaign, demand for flags got so high that sourcing hot pink fabric became untenable, and that stripe was cut.
then the turquoise stripe disappeared because when the flags hung vertically from the lamp posts on market street, the center stripe vanished behind the pole. utility kept amputating meaning, quietly, one color at a time. the flag that survived to become iconic was already a survivor of compromise.
baker never trademarked the flag. he called it his gift to the world.
though baker’s sharing of his design was benevolent, corporations have been trying to put pride back in a box every june for decades, and it keeps not fitting.
baker died in march 2017, just before what would have been the flag’s 39th anniversary. he had been sewing 39 copies of a new nine-stripe version, lavender added at the top for diversity, in direct response to the US election results from november 2016. sadly, he didn’t make it to june.
the original 1978 flag was found in his belongings after his death. everyone had assumed it was lost, but he had kept it the whole time. the only surviving piece of the thing he’d made in an attic with trash cans and a sewing machine and some friends had been resting, quietly, in his closet.