The birth of the rainbow flag

On 25 June 1978, Gilbert Baker raised a flag for the first time in United Nations Plaza in San Francisco that would change the world of the queer movement forever: the rainbow flag. It had been made at the request of Harvey Milk, San Francisco's first openly gay city supervisor, who wanted a new, positive symbol for the LGBTQ community for the Gay Freedom Day Parade. Until then the most widespread sign had been the pink triangle, which the Nazis had once used to mark homosexual men in the concentration camps. Milk wanted something that radiated joy, not persecution.

Baker, a drag queen, artist and army veteran, designed an eight-striped flag in which each colour had a meaning: pink for sexuality, red for life, orange for healing, yellow for sunlight, green for nature, turquoise for art, indigo for harmony and violet for spirit. Together with around 30 volunteers, he dyed the fabric in metal buckets and sewed the two huge flags, each 9 by 18 metres, overnight in the attic of the Gay Community Center. The parade committee had given him 1,000 dollars for the job.

When the flags flew over United Nations Plaza on that 25 June, the crowd immediately recognised what they meant. The activist Cleve Jones was there: "We watched and saw the flags, and their faces lit up. No explanation was needed. People knew immediately that it was their flag." Just five months later, Harvey Milk was murdered. Demand for the rainbow flag exploded as a sign of mourning and defiance. Baker had it mass-produced, dropping the pink and turquoise stripes for practical reasons. Since then it is the six-striped version that has gone round the world. Baker himself deliberately refused to patent it: the flag belonged to everyone.