Here’s Where the Rainbow Flag Came From

There is dancing in the streets today. This morning, America righted a wrong. No longer will anyone be barred from marrying the person they love because that person happens to be their same sex. No longer will loving families be barred from the rights and benefits of marriage. Love is now equal for everyone across all 50 states, so says the Supreme Court, which ruled 5-4 that marriage between same-sex partners is a right bestowed by the constitution.

As Justice Anthony Kennedy wrote in the court's opinion of the couples who brought the case, "Their hope is not to be condemned to live in loneliness, excluded from one of civilization’s oldest institutions. They ask for equal dignity in the eyes of the law. The Constitution grants them that right."

As you go out into cities and neighborhoods during Gay Pride weekend, you will likely see a familiar symbol of love flown at celebrations and parades and from porches and windows: the rainbow flag, long a powerful embodiment of hope and inclusion for the LGBTQ community.

Last week, writer Kyle VanHemert delved into the history of this powerful flag. He was writing about it in the context of tragedy rather than joy. But today, when love is the operative word, the story of the rainbow flag and all the hope it embodies is one of jubilance. Read about it below. We did it. We did it. We did it.

The Rainbow flag, an international symbol of LGBT pride, was acquired by the Museum of Modern Art, in New York, as part of the museum’s design collection last week.

The flag was created in 1978 by San Francisco artist Gilbert Baker. As he told MoMa in an interview, the idea began to take shape in 1976. Baker was a Vietnam War veteran and a drag queen. It was the year of the United States Bicentennial, and the American flag was inescapable.

“I thought, a flag is different than any other form of art. It’s not a painting, it’s not just cloth, it is not just a logo—it functions in so many different ways. I thought that we needed that kind of symbol, that we needed as a people something that everyone instantly understands…that influence really came to me when I decided that we should have a flag, that a flag fit us as a symbol, that we are a people, a tribe if you will.”

Baker thought a flag would help his tribe be seen, something Harvey Milk, the influential gay leader, convinced Baker was critical to the cause. Milk stressed “how important it was to be visible,” Baker explains. “A flag really fit that mission, because that’s a way of proclaiming your visibility, or saying, ‘This is who I am!'”

Baker created the first Rainbow flag in the attic of the Gay Community Center in San Francisco with the help of nearly 30 volunteers. They soaked fabric in trash cans full of dye, fed them through a sewing machine, and laboriously ironed the strips at the other end. The massive banner flew for the first time in United Nations Plaza in downtown San Francisco on June 25, 1978. Following its debut, the Rainbow flag spread widely. “I hoped it would be a great symbol but it has transcended all of that,” Baker told the museum. “It became so much bigger than me, than where I was producing it, much bigger even than the US. Now it’s made all over the world.”

—Kyle VanHemert