Eight Stripes: The Rainbow Flag · The South Coast LGBTQ+ Museum

Chapter 0

A flag for a birthday

On June 25, 1978, two enormous hand-dyed flags rose over United Nations Plaza in San Francisco. One of them had eight colored stripes, and almost no one watching knew they were looking at the future. Today that flag is recognized on six continents, hangs in the Museum of Modern Art, and is the subject of this exhibit, opened for its forty-eighth birthday.

We want to be clear at the door about three things, because they shape the whole exhibit.

The flag was made by a community, not a lone genius. Gilbert Baker is the figure most often credited, and he did extraordinary work, but the first flags were dyed, sewn, and dreamed up by a team, including people who were left out of the story for decades. We name them.

No one ever owned it. Baker refused to patent or trademark the design. He wanted it to belong to everyone, and because it did, the community was free to keep adding to it. That is why there is not one rainbow flag today but a whole family of them.

It changed almost immediately. The famous six-stripe flag is not the original. The first one had eight stripes, and the story of how it lost two of them runs straight through one of the darkest weeks in San Francisco's history.

A gentle note

This is a celebration, and it is mostly a joyful one. It does touch the 1978 assassination of Harvey Milk and the 2017 death of the flag's best-known maker, and it mentions the AIDS epidemic that one later flag honors. Nothing here is graphic. Take it at your own pace.

Chapter I

A symbol of our own

By the middle of the 1970s, the most common symbol for gay people was one they had not chosen. The pink triangle had been a Nazi concentration-camp badge, pinned on prisoners marked for being homosexual, and although activists had begun to reclaim it, it carried the memory of the camps with it. A movement that was learning to celebrate itself wanted something that did not begin in a death camp.

In San Francisco, that wish had a particular voice. Harvey Milk had been elected to the city's Board of Supervisors in 1977, one of the first openly gay elected officials in the country, and he understood better than almost anyone that a movement needs to be seen. Milk and other activists urged a young artist and drag performer named Gilbert Baker, an Army veteran who had taught himself to sew, to help create a positive new emblem for the coming Gay Freedom Day.

"We needed something beautiful, something from us. The rainbow is so perfect because it really fits our diversity in terms of race, gender, ages, all of those things."

Those are Baker's own words, looking back on the idea. A rainbow was a natural flag of difference: many colors, one band of light, no color ranked above another. It was also, plainly, beautiful. Verified Milk's 1977 election and his push for visibility. Corroborated that Milk and fellow activists encouraged Baker to create a new symbol for the 1978 parade.

Sources: U.S. National Park Service (Gilbert Baker); the GLBT Historical Society; HISTORY. The pink-triangle history is drawn from standard Holocaust and movement scholarship. Full citations are held in the museum's research record.

Chapter II

The attic on Grove Street

The first rainbow flags were not manufactured. They were dyed by hand in trash cans, on a rooftop, by a crew of volunteers who had no idea they were making history.

The work happened in the top-floor attic of the Gay Community Center at 330 Grove Street in San Francisco, in the spring of 1978. The decorating committee set aside about one thousand dollars. Roughly five hundred went to a thousand yards of cotton muslin; three hundred bought ten pounds of dye in the eight colors, along with a hundred pounds of salt and soda ash to set them. The rest went to other supplies.

Volunteers, more than thirty of them, hauled the muslin to the roof and dyed it in batches in metal trash cans, stirring the fabric with broomsticks, then rinsed it at a laundromat, ironed it, and sewed the strips together. The result was two flags, each about thirty feet tall and sixty feet wide, big enough to read from across a plaza. One was the eight-stripe rainbow. The other was a riff on the American flag, with stars in the corner, designed by one of the makers as a companion piece.

Who made it

For decades, the popular story credited Gilbert Baker alone. The fuller record, which institutions including the Smithsonian and the GLBT Historical Society now tell, is that the first flags were a collaboration. We lay the credit out the way the careful sources do, and we keep the parts that are still debated marked as debated.

Gilbert Baker 1951 to 2017

The most widely credited figure. He carried the project, sewed, promoted the flag, and assigned the meaning to each color. He later arranged its mass production and spent the rest of his life as its public champion.

Lynn Segerblom "Faerie Argyle Rainbow"

A tie-dye artist who developed and directed the dyeing of the original flags. In primary oral histories she is also credited with proposing the rainbow itself. For years her name was left out of the story entirely.

James McNamara d. 1990s

Trained at the Fashion Institute of Technology, he did much of the expert sewing and photographed the work. He died of an AIDS-related illness having received almost no public recognition.

More than thirty volunteers

The hands that hauled, dyed, rinsed, ironed, and stitched. A flag about a community was, fittingly, made by one.

We do not flatten this into a feud. It is better understood as a record being corrected: a famous solo story widening to hold the people who were always there. Who first thought of the rainbow, and who chose the colors, is the point that genuinely differs between Baker-centered accounts and the oral histories of the people in that attic. We tell you that it differs, and we credit them all. Verified the 330 Grove Street workshop, the two thirty-by-sixty-foot flags, and the roughly thirty volunteers. Corroborated the roles of Segerblom and McNamara, now named by the Smithsonian and the GLBT Historical Society. Contested who originated the rainbow concept and chose the colors.

Sources: GLBT Historical Society (the itemized budget and workshop); Smithsonian Magazine (naming Baker, Segerblom, and McNamara, and the second stars-and-stripes flag); the LGBTQ History Project oral-history roundtable; San Diego Pride; CBS News. Accounts of authorship genuinely differ and are flagged above. Full citations are held in the museum's research record.

Chapter III · The centerpiece

Eight stripes, eight meanings

On June 25, 1978, the flags first flew at the San Francisco Gay Freedom Day Parade. Gilbert Baker gave every one of the eight stripes a meaning. Select a stripe to read what it stood for.

Stripe 1 of 8

Hot pink

Sex

Desire, and pleasure.

Select any stripe, or use Tab and Enter.

The colors run from the body to the spirit: from sex and life at the top, through healing and sunlight and nature, to the art, serenity, and spirit at the bottom. It is a small theology of a whole person, written in dye. A note on those meanings: the wording has drifted a little over the years. The turquoise stripe is recorded as "magic" in some accounts and "art" in others, and indigo as "serenity" or "harmony." We use the wording the Gilbert Baker Foundation uses, and flag the variations.

An honest detail

The colors you see here are approximate. The 1978 flags were dyed by hand in trash cans, so no two stripes were ever exactly alike, and there is no single "true" hex code for the original. The hand of the maker is part of the object.

Verified the June 25, 1978 debut and the eight stripes, top to bottom: hot pink, red, orange, yellow, green, turquoise, indigo, violet. Corroborated the assigned meanings, with the noted wording variations for turquoise and indigo.

Sources: Gilbert Baker Foundation (color meanings); GLBT Historical Society; Britannica and HISTORY (where wording differs). Full citations are held in the museum's research record.

Chapter IV

Down to six

The flag we know today has six stripes, not eight. It lost two of them within a year, and the second loss is tangled up with the assassination of Harvey Milk. Step through the change.

Eight stripes · 1978

The original, hand-dyed for the 1978 parade. Hot pink at the top, violet at the bottom.

The first stripe to go was hot pink, and the reason was mundane: when Gilbert Baker took the design to the Paramount Flag Company to be mass-produced, hot pink fabric was not commercially available. Practicality, not politics, dropped the brightest color.

The second change came out of grief. On November 27, 1978, Harvey Milk and Mayor George Moscone were assassinated at City Hall. Demand for the flag surged as the community rallied, and by the 1979 parade the organizers wanted to line both sides of Market Street with it. To hang in two even halves of three stripes, the flag needed an even number. Turquoise was dropped and indigo was settled into a standard royal blue, leaving the six stripes, red, orange, yellow, green, blue, and violet, that became the worldwide standard.

Where we keep a hedge

This is the part of the story most often simplified. Milk's death drove the surge in demand that pushed the flag into mass production, but careful historians do not credit the six-stripe redesign itself to his assassination; that change is tied to the practical task of lining the parade route in 1979. Sources also differ on the small mechanics, whether turquoise was dropped or merged with indigo, and whether Baker or the parade committee made the call. The outcome, six stripes, is not in doubt.

Verified the assassination of Harvey Milk on November 27, 1978, and the six-stripe flag of 1979 (red, orange, yellow, green, blue, violet). Corroborated the dropping of hot pink for lack of fabric at the Paramount Flag Company. Contested the exact mechanics of the seven-to-six change, and any direct causal line from Milk's death to the redesign.

Sources: Wikipedia (rainbow flag); Britannica; Gizmodo; the GLBT Historical Society; Making Queer History (which explicitly declines to tie the 1979 redesign to Milk's death). Full citations are held in the museum's research record.

Chapter V

Never signed, never owned

The single most consequential decision Gilbert Baker made was not a color. It was a refusal.

Baker never patented, copyrighted, or trademarked the rainbow flag. He could have become wealthy from a design that now sells on flags, pins, and storefronts the world over. Instead he treated it as a gift, something that belonged to the people who flew it. "A true flag," he said, "belongs to the people." Because no one owned the design, anyone was free to make it, fly it, and, crucially, to add to it.

The art world eventually agreed about its importance. In 2015, the Museum of Modern Art in New York acquired the rainbow flag into its design collection, placing it alongside other symbols it treats as landmark design objects, like the @ symbol and the recycling mark. MoMA's senior design curator, Paola Antonelli, called it "bright, simple, luminous, positive despite everything," and "the epitome of grace under pressure, a design feat." MoMA put it on view on June 26, 2015, the day the Supreme Court ruled that same-sex couples have the right to marry nationwide.

Baker kept making flags his whole life. In 1994, for the twenty-fifth anniversary of the Stonewall uprising, he and the activist Cleve Jones created a mile-long rainbow flag carried through Manhattan. In 2003, for the flag's own twenty-fifth anniversary, he restored the original eight stripes in a flag that stretched across Key West from the Gulf of Mexico to the Atlantic. Weeks before his death he designed a nine-stripe version, adding lavender for diversity.

Gilbert Baker died in his sleep in New York City on March 31, 2017, at the age of sixty-five. He never owned the most recognized symbol he made, and that was precisely the point.

Verified MoMA's 2015 acquisition and June 26, 2015 display; Baker's death on March 31, 2017, age 65; the 1994 mile-long flag with Cleve Jones and the 2003 Key West flag. Corroborated that Baker deliberately never trademarked the design, by his own statements. Attributed the quoted lines to Paola Antonelli and to Baker, as recorded by MoMA and the National Park Service.

Sources: MoMA and Dezeen (the 2015 acquisition and Antonelli's words); the U.S. National Park Service (Baker's "belongs to the people"); CNN and Wikipedia (his death and later flags). Full citations are held in the museum's research record.

Chapter VI · A gallery

The flag keeps growing

Because no one owned the rainbow flag, the community was free to keep sewing. Each of these is a real, widely flown flag, and each was an argument about who the word "we" includes. Every addition has a named designer, and we credit each one carefully.

The original 1978 Eight stripes, hand-dyed in San Francisco. The flag this whole exhibit is named for.

The six-stripe standard 1979 The version most people picture. Mass-produced from 1979 and flown around the world.

More Color More Pride 2017 Black and brown stripes added to center Black and brown LGBTQ+ people. Launched by the City of Philadelphia with the agency Tierney; debated at the time, and influential since.

The Progress Pride flag 2018 Daniel Quasar added an arrow of white, pink, and light blue (the trans colors, first set by Monica Helms in 2000) plus black and brown. It points right, for the progress still to come.

Intersex-Inclusive Progress 2021 Valentino Vecchietti added a purple circle on a yellow triangle, the intersex symbol (created by Morgan Carpenter in 2013). In 2023 the Smithsonian raised this flag over its Castle.

Not everyone welcomes every version, and the debates are real: some people treasure the simplicity of the six stripes, others see the additions as the whole point of a flag that was always about widening the circle. We show them together not to settle that argument but to show what Baker's refusal to own the flag made possible. A symbol you cannot copyright is a symbol the community can keep answering. Verified the designers, years, and elements of each flag shown. Corroborated that the trans-stripe colors originate with Monica Helms (2000) and the intersex symbol with Morgan Carpenter (2013), not with the later designers who incorporated them.

Sources: Philadelphia Magazine and Tierney (More Color More Pride); Dezeen and The Trevor Project (Daniel Quasar, Progress); Cooper Hewitt, Smithsonian Design Museum (Valentino Vecchietti, the intersex-inclusive flag, and the 2023 flag-raising). Full citations are held in the museum's research record.

Chapter VII

Why it still flies

A flag is a promise made in public. This one is forty-eight years old today, and it still does the simplest, most radical thing a symbol can do: it tells someone they are not alone.

Think about what the rainbow flag actually is. It is not a logo a company designed to sell something. It is not the emblem of a government. It was made by hand, by a community, for a community, and then deliberately given away so that no one could ever lock it up. When it flies over a city hall, a school, a church, or a small office on the South Coast of Massachusetts, it is doing what those volunteers on a San Francisco rooftop intended: it is being seen, so that the people who need it can see it too.

Here at home, the flag is not a museum piece. It hangs in our windows, marches in our parades, and marks the doors where you are welcome exactly as you are. The South Coast LGBTQ+ Network flies it for the same reason Harvey Milk wanted it in 1978: because visibility is care, and because a young person who sees those colors learns, sometimes for the first time, that there is a place for them.

Hand-dyed by a community in 1978, owned by no one, and still being sewn.

Happy birthday to the rainbow flag. May it keep growing.

Chapter VIII · Reference

Words we use, and where to read more

A museum is responsible for its language and its sources. Here is how we use a few key terms, and where to read further. Where the record is contested, we say so.

Words we use, and how we use them

Rainbow flag

The flag first flown June 25, 1978, in San Francisco, and the family of flags descended from it. How we use it: we mean Gilbert Baker's design and its lineage specifically, and we distinguish the original eight-stripe flag from the standard six-stripe version and the later inclusive redesigns. [Verified]

Pink triangle

A badge the Nazi regime forced on prisoners marked as homosexual, later reclaimed by activists as a memorial and protest symbol. How we use it: we name its origin in the camps and treat the rainbow flag as the movement's deliberate turn toward a symbol of celebration rather than martyrdom. [Verified]

Progress Pride flag

Daniel Quasar's 2018 redesign, adding a forward-pointing chevron of trans colors plus black and brown. How we use it: we credit Quasar for the arrangement while crediting Monica Helms (2000) for the trans-stripe colors it incorporates. [Verified]

Intersex

An umbrella term for people born with sex characteristics that do not fit typical definitions of male or female. How we use it: we name the intersex symbol's creator, Morgan Carpenter (2013), separately from Valentino Vecchietti, who placed it on the Progress flag in 2021. [Verified]

Public domain

Creative work free for anyone to use, owned by no one. How we use it: we describe the rainbow flag as effectively a gift to the public because Gilbert Baker chose never to patent or trademark it, which is what allowed the community to keep adapting it. [Verified]