Keywords: rainbow flag | baker (gilbert) | stripes: 6 | stripes: 7 | stripes: 8 | gay pride | “The flags were made out of love,” McEihnney remembers, “We knew it was special, we just didn’t know how special.This page is part of © FOTW Flags Of The World website Gay Pride / Rainbow Flag Sexual Orientation Flags Once dried, they were sewn into flags – an undertaking that took three people working almost around the clock to complete in time. The three originators of the idea along with several other volunteers spent weeks hand dyeing strips of cloth, rinsing them on their apartment rooftop and lugging them to a local laundromat to dry. The details of its creation may be in dispute, but one thing everyone agrees on is that the flags were completely a community project. She simply corrects the record – that it was a shared idea – and moves on.
Still, in interviews Segerblom doesn’t speak poorly of Baker. He was also quick to credit both Segerblom and McNamara when discussing the creative process.Īll that begs the question as to how much it matters who gets the credit – but that’s an easy thing to say when you’re not the one being cut from history. It certainly gave him credence as an artist when it was adopted by the larger gay community, but that didn’t happen for several years after he revealed the design. He never even patented the design and so he wasn’t rolling in royalties. To be fair to Baker, he never attempted to copyright or restrict the use of the iconic design. “Gilbert had always been a friend of mine. She also remembers it being a group idea. Glenne McElhinney was a fellow member of the 1978 parade committee that worked on the flags. When Langlotz appeared in a panel alongside Segerblom, he openly referred to her as “the woman who came up with the idea of the rainbow flag.” Paul Langlotz is a fellow activist and was a friend of James McNamara. “I loved rainbows,” she said, “Back in those days, I changed my name to Fairie Argyle Rainbow.” She says the rainbow idea was hers due, in part, to her obsession at the time with rainbows.
Lynn Segerblom remembers it a bit differently. That’s the moment when I knew exactly what kind of flag I would make.”
“We were all in a swirl of color and light,” he writes in his book. Later that week, he was out dancing with Cleve Jones and was struck by the diversity in the club. 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 revolution.
I thought of the American flag with its thirteen stripes and thirteen stars, the colonies breaking away from England to form the United States. “As Artie implored, I looked at the flags flying on the various government buildings around the Civic Center. “Artie began to press me to come up with a new symbol for what he had called ‘the dawn of a new gay consciousness and freedom.’ Both he and Harvey had brought this up to me before.” In Baker’s memoirs, he recounts the birth of the flag this way: “It was a three-person idea” she says simply, stating credit belongs to Baker, herself and fellow activist James McNamara. Originally, I thought starting off the with well-known Rainbow Flag in my original article would be the easy part, but the truth is that it’s a bit more complicated.ĭuring the celebration of the 40th anniversary of the flag’s creation, Lynn Segerblom began speaking out about what she claimed was the real story behind the flag. From the original Rainbow Flag there has grown this incredible movement of designers, artists, tailors, seamstresses and advocates to create flags for other communities. So many people from every corner of the LGBTQIA+ community have embraced flags as a way to show their pride. Recently, we decided to put together a Field Guide for Pride Flags since so many parades now reflect an increasingly diverse crowd.