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The inspired, grassroots origins of the Rainbow Flag

 Rainbow flag creator Gilbert Bakor
Rainbow flag creator Gilbert Bakor

On Friday, the U.S. Supreme Court legalized same-sex marriage in all 50 states. This weekend, Toronto will host a Pride festival that has become arguably the highlight of the city’s social calendar. Above it all flies an iconic symbol of hope and progress that has represented the LGBT community for almost 40 years.

The origin of the Rainbow Flag was more deliberate than one might think. Gilbert Baker, the creator of the flag, said he was inspired by the ubiquitousness of the United States flag during the American Bicentennial.

“To a degree it started hitting me in 1976,” Baker told told Michelle Millar Fisher of the Museum of Modern Art, which recently acquired the original rainbow flag.

All of a sudden I’m looking at the American flag everywhere — from Jasper Johns paintings to trashy jeans in the GAP and all kinds of tchotchkes. And I [realized] a flag is something that’s really different than any other form of art — it’s not a painting, it’s not just cloth, it is not a logo. It functions in so many ways, it’s interpreted in so many different ways.”

Rather than devalue the American flag, Baker noticed its incorporation into everyday items gave those products a greater power. He decided that power was something the LGBT community needed as well.

“And I thought that’s the kind of symbol that we needed as a people — something that everyone instantly understands. I decided that we should have a flag, that a flag fit us as a symbol, that we’re a people — a tribe, if you will — and flags are about proclaiming power, so it’s very appropriate that we have that kind of symbol.”

Baker meticulously designed the Rainbow Flag with full intention that it would become a symbol of the people. Rather than sew it at home, he set up shop at the Gay Community Center at 330 Grove Street, then the epicenter of the LGBT community in San Francisco, so the flag would have a true community pedigree. He used natural dye and water to keep the flag true to its roots.

I wanted it to be an organic process, because this was the birth of the flag; it needed to have that further connection to nature,” Baker said.

Why the rainbow? In part, Baker said, it was a reaction to the pink triangle, which had been used by the Nazis in concentration camps to identify homosexuals as well asc sexual offenders including rapists, paedophiles and zoophiles. While the LGBT community had reclaimed the pink triangle as a symbol of power by the 1970s, Baker didn’t like its association with Nazis, and the atrocities of war.

“We needed something beautiful — something from us, and the rainbow is so perfect because it really fits our diversity in the sense of our race, our gender, all of those things, our ages… plus, it’s a natural flag — it’s from the sky.”

The first Rainbow Flag was raised at the United Nations Plaza on June 25, 1978. The original flag had eight colours; turquoise and pink were later dropped for design purposes. The original also had a circle of stars on it, for no other reason to clarify that it was, indeded, a flag, Baker said.