On a breezy night in the summer of 1978, 30 volunteers packed into the attic floor of the San Francisco Gay Community Center. Under the watchful eye of activist Gilbert Baker, people began dunking strips of cotton canvas into barrels filled with dye and salted water. Once they’d finished washing and drying the fabric, the volunteers hit the sewing machines. There was a deadline to meet.
A few days later, the rainbow flag made its debut in the city’s Gay Freedom Day Parade.
Today, 43 years later, the rainbow flag is so ubiquitous that we take its presence as a given. Insofar as a body of citizens as ethnically and socially diverse as the LGBTQ+ community can have a single unifying symbol—its own brand—this one is it. The flag not only signifies the community’s ascendancy to the population at large, but it also serves as a talisman within the queer populace itself.
“There’s just something about the flag [that when] I see it, I feel safer,” said Joshua Javier Guzmán, assistant professor of gender studies at UCLA. “The flag is a symbol of pride, but it can also broadcast a symbol of community and safety for people.”
Indeed, it’s the rainbow flag’s ability to mean so many different and somehow uniquely personal things that helps to explain not just its endurance, but also the need for it. Historian George Chauncey, author of the book Gay New York, explains that, prior to the rainbow flag, the LGBTQ+ community’s symbol was, well, complicated.
“Earlier in the ’70s, the pink triangle was the major symbol that gay political activists adopted,” he said, referring to the badge the Nazis had used to identify gay men in concentration camps. After the 1969 Stonewall riots gave rise to the LGBTQ+ rights movement, “people started wearing it as a memento of the level of anti-gay oppression and what the struggle was about.”
But not everyone was comfortable with the appropriation of genocidal regalia, including San Francisco supervisor Harvey Milk, who told Baker that the community needed a better symbol. “The only thing they have to look forward to is hope,” Milk told his friend. “And you have to give them hope.”
Baker did. And while nobody’s sure of his inspiration (some suggest it was Judy Garland’s “Somewhere Over the Rainbow”), there’s consensus that the flag he created 43 summers ago was powerful. Even Baker seemed mystified by that. The rainbow flag “doesn’t say the word ‘gay,’ [just like] it doesn’t say ‘the United States’ on the American flag,” Baker observed in 2015. “But everyone knows visually what they mean.”
Color my world
The corporate rainbow
Through the month of June, major brands from Apple to Target to Coca-Cola court LGBTQ+ consumers openly—and usually by using the rainbow flag. Acceptance is always nice, of course, but some have suggested that perhaps the flag, which was never trademarked, is a little too easy to use, especially in the case of companies that sell to the community while giving nothing back.
Chauncey shares in the mixed feelings of relief and reservation in seeing the flag used by most every brand. But he’s also quick to point out that it was only a generation ago that most of them wouldn’t dare to court LGBTQ+ consumers at all.
“As dismayed as I may be personally about some of the corporate appropriation of the rainbow flag,” he said, “as a historian, I still have to know that they’re willing to do that, eager to do that, is a sign of how much change has taken place.”
This story first appeared in the June 21, 2021, issue of Adweek magazine. Click here to subscribe.
