The Rainbow Flag - Pride Colors

Color has long played an important role in our community's expression of pride. In Victorian England, for example, the color green was associated with homosexuality. The color purple (or, more accurately, lavender) became popularized as a symbol for pride in the late 1960's. And, of course, there's the pink triangle, first used in Nazi Germany to identify gay males in concentration camps. 

The most colorful of our symbols is the Rainbow Flag, and its rainbow of colors (red, orange, yellow, green, blue and purple) representing the diversity of our community. 

The first Rainbow Flag was designed in 1978 by Gilbert Baker, a San Francisco artist, who created the flag in response to a local activist's call for the need of a community symbol. Using the five-striped "Flag of the Race" as his inspiration, Baker designed a flag with 8 stripes: pink, red, orange, yellow, green, indigo, and violet. According to Baker, those colors represented: 
Hot Pink:RGB   255   105   180
Pink: Sexuality  RGB   255   192   203
* Red: Life 
* Orange: Healing 
* Yellow: Sun 
* Green: Nature 
*  Blue: Art 
Indigo: Harmony  RGB  68 0 136CMYK    0.500  1.000   0.000   0.467
* Violet: Spirit  RGB  160  32  240
* colors the current six colors of the flag as recognized by the International Congress of Flag Makers 

Baker dyed and sewed the material for the first flag himself, in the true spirit of Betsy Ross. Unfortunately, Baker had hand-dyed all the colors, and since the color "hot pink" was not commercially available, mass production of his 8-striped version became impossible. The flag was thus reduced to 7 stripes. 

In November 1978, San Francisco's first openly gay supervisor, Harvey Milk, was assassinated. Wishing to demonstrate the gay community's strength and solidarity in the aftermath of this tragedy, the 1979 Pride Parade Committee decided to use Baker's flag. The committee eliminated the indigo stripe so they could divide the colors evenly along the parade route - three colors on one side of the street and three on the other. Soon the 6 colors were incorporated into a 6-striped version that became popularized and that, today, is recognized by the International Congress of Flag Makers. 

Source: The Rainbow Flag by Steven W. Anderson, appearing in GAZE Magazine (Minneapolis), #191, May 28, 1993, page 25.
Edited by Terry Wayne Schneider of Lambda 76.