People showed up in Washington, D.C., by the hundreds of thousands, resulting in the first large-scale public protest on the National Mall in the name of LGBTQ rights. Milk’s killer and former fellow supervisor, Dan White, received an incredibly light sentence for his crime after arguing to the jury he was not in his right mind due to a diet of Coca-Cola and Twinkies, and the public cried out in retaliation and grief. StantonĪfter the assassination of Milk later that year, the demand for the rainbow flag drastically increased people were in desperate need of a symbol of hope. The White House displays rainbow colors in 2015 to commemorate the Supreme Court ruling legalizing marriage equality. He was blown away by the diversity of the crowd and began to see it as a “rainbow of humanity,” and from that, the rainbow flag was born.
He recounted to the Bay Area Reporter in 1987 that he came up with the idea while on LSD at a Patti Smith concert. We needed a flag to fly everywhere.”īaker envisioned the rainbow to be this symbol of power and hope. Gay people were both tribal and individualistic, a global collective that was expressing itself in art and politics. They were primarily nationalistic, territorial, iconic propaganda - all things we questioned in the ’70s. I thought how most flags represented a place. … I thought of the emotional connection they hold. On every level, it functioned as a message. It was everywhere, from pop art to fine art, from tacky souvenirs to trashy advertising. According to Baker, “In 1976, the celebration of the US bicentennial had put the focus on the American flag. I thought a gay nation should have a flag too, to proclaim its own idea of power.” I thought of the vertical red, white and blue tricolor from the French Revolution, and how both flags owed their beginnings to a riot, a rebellion or a revolution. I thought of the original American flag with its 13 stripes and 13 stars, the colonies breaking away from England to form the United States. “I looked at the flags flying on the various government buildings around the Civic Center.
This message is best described by Baker himself: camera icon © David Edelman/Dreamstimeīut the rainbow flag doesn’t just symbolize representation of LGBTQ people - it is also a message of power and rebellion. And this was a conversation that people were having, not just me and my friends, but all around the country, and I think around the world that we lacked that unifying emblem …”Ī small mural of Harvey Milk looks down from the window of his former home on Castro Street directly above the site of his camera shop, a community gathering place for LGBTQ activists in the 1970s. Milk and Baker wanted a symbol that represented everyone.Ĭleve Jones, a personal friend of Milk and Baker who played a prominent role in the gay rights movements of the ’70s and ’80s, said, “There were other symbols - there were the intertwined gender symbols that had their roots in the feminist movement, but we really didn’t have a symbol that united all of us. In his campaigns for the San Francisco Board of Supervisors, Milk advocated that to make progress for gay rights, it was also necessary to advocate for Black rights, Mexican rights, Asian American rights and those of other marginalized groups.
The most popular queer symbol at the time was the pink triangle - previously used to mark gay people during the Holocaust - and was used most frequently by gay cisgender men. Milk asked Baker to create a symbol for LGBTQ people that had a positive meaning behind it. camera icon Gareth Watkins, CC BY 3.0īaker created the flag in 1978, at a time when there were few symbols available to represent LGBTQ communities.