Dear Gilbert

Gilbert Baker, the creator of the rainbow flag, died on March 31st, 2017.

Published in

Queer History For the People

16 min readJun 29, 2017

I owe you an apology. For a long time I thought the rainbow, your rainbow, was garish and silly. Ridiculous, even. In high school, I had a visceral reaction to a friend’s rainbow Pride necklace: a black leather cord strung with tiny metal loops in each color of the rainbow. I thought it was pointless, and didn’t understand why I was supposed to embrace this symbol, or what it had to do with me.

I felt this way for most of my life — until I learned your story.

“San Francisco (Be Sure to Wear Flowers in Your Hair)”

Before Gilbert Baker was drafted into the Army during the Vietnam War and fell in love with gay San Francisco, Castro Street was a conservative Irish working-class district. That changed during World War II as working-class whites fled the city and the neighborhood became increasingly diverse. The seeds of this change were sown much earlier, with the Gold Rush of 1849, that transformed San Francisco from a shanty town to a viable city as miners arrived in search of gold. As part of the dramatic growth in population of single men, a red-light district, referred to as the Barbary Coast, emerged in the late nineteenth century. The Barbary, named after an area of North Africa’s coast associated with piracy and plunder, featured a host of entertainments including saloons, dance halls, music clubs, brothels, and “female impersonation” acts. Associated with vice in general, the Barbary was also a space notorious for gender and sexual transgression, setting the stage for the rise of a gay community and culture.

During World War II, San Francisco was a major port in the Pacific Theater: the front of the war involving military conflict between Japan, the United States, and U.S. allies. The changes wrought by wars often have unintended consequences, and World War II brought about major shifts in gender and sexual norms. The social and cultural upheaval of the war allowed those who enlisted or who were drafted into the armed services to cultivate a new sense of self, to come out as gay or lesbian and find others who shared their differences. It is ironic that the military, a space hostile to those who were sexually different, would, in some ways, allow gay identity to flourish. This did not mean gays and lesbians were accepted in the military, however. Screening procedures existed to weed homosexuals out of enlistment and from the military ranks. Those caught engaging in homosexual behavior or who exhibited “homosexual tendencies” could be court-martialed and charged with sodomy, though this practice was relaxed during the height of the war, giving way to the phenomenon of issuing blue discharges, also known as blue tickets. Not an honorable discharge, though not quite a dishonorable discharge either, a blue ticket was an administrative discharge that was highly stigmatized, issued disproportionately to Blacks and homosexuals. When gays and lesbians stationed in the Pacific Theater were expelled from the ranks, many of them chose to remain in San Francisco, contributing to the existing gay community.

The city, particularly the Haight-Ashbury District, became further associated with sexual permissiveness and social rebellion when, during the so-called “Summer of Love” of 1967, around 100,000 young people, many of them self-described hippies and flower children, converged upon San Francisco. They danced to folk music, experimented with LSD, and recited the poetry of Allen Ginsberg and his mantra of “flower power.” Ginsberg, a beat poet and counter-cultural icon, whose poem “Howl” was the subject of an obscenity trial in 1957 for its graphic depictions of sexuality, advocated non-violence and urged hippies to use “masses of flowers” to create a more positive, affirmational style of protest in contrast to conventional displays of military power.

Jon Phillips of the band The Mamas and the Papas wrote a song entitled “San Francisco (Be Sure to Wear Flowers in Your Hair), released in June of 1967 and sung by Scott McKenzie, that became the unofficial anthem of the hippies, flower children, and anti-Vietnam War activists that gathered in the psychedelic heat of the Haight-Ashbury that summer.

San Francisco was home to the first lesbian organization in the United States, the Daughters of Bilitis, founded in 1955 by Phyllis Lyon and Del Martin. By 1969, there was a reported 50 gay organizations in the city, including the Society for Individual Rights (SIR), a pre-Stonewall homophile organization that worked to end police entrapment of homosexuals in bars and other public facilities under laws that prohibited vagrancy and “lewd and lascivious” behavior.

The Twin Peaks Tavern, opened in 1972 by lesbians Mary Ellen Cunha and Peggy Forster and located on the corner of Market and Castro, became the first gay bar in the country to feature full-length glass windows facing the street, offering patrons a panoramic view of the district and the public a view of the bar’s interior. While other gay bars in the country couched themselves in secrecy, Twin Peaks, in a move that anticipated the concept of “gay pride” that would solidify during the 1980s, unabashedly put queerness on full display.

By the 1970s, the Castro District had completed its transformation from conservative white working-class neighborhood to “Gay Mecca.”

I grew up in the rainbow 1980s, home to the birth of MTV, the synthesized pop music of Madonna, acid-washed jeans, and prismatic cartoons such as Rainbow Brite, Care Bears, and Jem and the Holograms. As a child, I liked “feminine” things, all the while being made to feel ashamed for what I gravitated toward naturally. At Toys R’ Us, I begged my mother to buy me a My Little Pony. The one I most coveted was aqua with a rainbow mane and tail, glittery gold clouds stamped on its hind hips. She relented, saying this had to be the “very last time.” In my bedroom, while playing, I liked to run my thumb over the velvety matte plastic.

At some point, I lost interest and the pony was thrown away. More accurately, I learned that things that were rainbow or glittery were “bad” or “not normal” for little boys to play with.

For a long time I rejected the rainbow because anything bright or colorful was associated with girls and femininity. I instinctively knew that being seen as feminine would make me stand out, and not in a good way. This correlation only amplifies the power of the rainbow as a liberating symbol. It relates to all the parts of ourselves we are told are bad or weird, encouraging us to instead live our truth in full color — no matter what color that may be. I see there is power in the rainbow as a symbol now, where once I saw a badge of shame, a sign of weakness; and I see femininity as an equal and valid form of expression to masculinity.

Embracing the rainbow has been a process of reconciliation, of healing, of claiming power in authenticity. We should never be ashamed to express the person we know ourselves to be. Shame exists only when we internalize the belief that we are wrong, allowing others to muddy our colors, our most tender and possible selves.

“Geeky Kid From Kansas”

Gilbert was born on June 2nd, 1951 in Chanute, Kansas. His grandmother owned a women’s clothing store and as a self-proclaimed “geeky kid,” he grew up fascinated with colors and fabrics and wanted to learn to sew. But in conservative 1950s Kansas, no one was particularly keen on equipping a boy with domestic skills. He was a confident child, but was artistic and sensitive, admonished for his feminine tendencies. Realizing he was gay, he inwardly felt like an outcast, suffering bouts of depression and thoughts of suicide. Coming out at age nineteen in 1970 was the hardest thing he would ever do. His parents didn’t speak to him for ten years after, but he used that time to become the artist he knew himself to be.

In 1970, the tornado of the Vietnam War plucked Gilbert from Kansas and deposited him somewhere over the rainbow in the magical land of Oz, otherwise known as San Francisco. He was drafted into the Army just as the Gay Rights Movement was flowering. He worked as a medic, treating soldiers who had been injured in Vietnam. When Gilbert was honorably discharged in 1972, he remained in San Francisco and integrated himself into the gay scene. The first thing he did was buy himself a sewing machine and teach himself to sew. He wanted to look fabulous like his glam-rock icons Mick Jagger and David Bowie, decked out in brightly-colored taffeta jumpsuits. He ran with an artistic crew, and his talent began to bloom as he made his own drag costumes and emulated high-fashion clothing from the pages of Vogue magazine. But there were bigger things in store for Gilbert than becoming a fashion designer. He was in the wrong town for fashion, but the right one for gay rights.

When I was a graduate student completing my PhD, I was not encouraged to study LGBTQ history, despite my research focus in gender and sexuality. My department did not even offer an LGBTQ history course. This was shameful considering the first course in the United States on lesbian identity — entitled “Lesbianism 101” and taught by the pioneering gay rights scholar and activist Madeline Davis — was offered at my university in 1972.

As the revolutionary activist Assata Shakur once said:

“No one is going to give you the education you need to overthrow them. Nobody is going to teach you your true history, teach you your true heroes, if they know that that knowledge will help set you free.”

No, they will not. So I have taken that history for myself. I have found my own true, though imperfect, heroes. And I am greedy. I am still taking. We cannot act to create meaningful change unless we possess the blueprint of who we are and where we’ve been. And we do not yet have enough knowledge to set ourselves free.

“Torn From the Soul of the People”

“A true flag cannot be designed — it has to be torn from the soul of the people.”
— Unknown

Gilbert began using his talents to create pro-gay and anti-war protest banners, so community leaders went to him because he was the guy who could sew. His passion was finally seen as an asset, not as something that marked him as an oddball, as it did during his youth in Kansas and later in the military. It was 1977, and Anita Bryant, a former beauty queen turned Florida Orange Juice spokeswoman, was using her celebrity and influence to launch an anti-gay crusade called “Save Our Children.” While in her television commercials she proclaimed that: “A day without orange juice is a day without sunshine,” at her anti-gay rallies she portrayed gays, gay men in particular, as child molesters, claiming that “gays can’t reproduce, so they must recruit.” Bryant’s campaign had been successful in repealing legislation that protected gays and lesbians from discrimination in Dade County, Florida, and she was building momentum, her sights set on the rest of the nation. Harvey Milk, who had come to San Francisco in 1972 amid a migration of gay men to the Castro, was successfully elected to the city Board of Supervisors, becoming the first openly gay man elected to public office.

At the urging of Milk, who had become friends with Gilbert because of his reputation as the “banner guy,” gay leaders asked him to create a symbol of pride and hope to unite the community. Just as a rainbow appears when light hits water droplets in the perfect way to produce a spectrum of color, Gilbert was in the right place at the right time to make a difference. He decided to create a flag because flags represent sovereignty and power. A flag would proclaim that gays were a people, a family, a tribe. And flags meant visibility. While some gay organizations had attempted to reclaim the pink triangle, a symbol used to mark gay men in concentration camps in Nazi Germany, Gilbert felt the community needed a symbol to represent its beauty, diversity, and love — its soul — as opposed to a former mark of oppression. He wanted something cheerful and celebratory. Gays had long used bright colors as proclamations of sexuality, such as the green carnation worn by Oscar Wilde in his buttonhole as a way to covertly flaunt his love of men. “We need something beautiful, something from us,” he told his friends. “The rainbow is so perfect because it really fits our diversity in terms of race, gender, ages, all of those things. Plus, it’s a natural flag — it’s from the sky!”

In 1978, colored fabrics were not commercially available, so Gilbert and about thirty of his friends took over a thousand yards of cotton and bottles of dye, purchased with the thousand dollars donated by the Gay Freedom Day Committee, and assembled in the attic of the gay community center on 330 Grove Street in San Francisco. He wanted the flag to have a birthplace connected to the community. The group used trashcans filled with water, salt, and hot pink, red, orange, yellow, green, turquoise, indigo, and violet dyes to create what would become the stripes of the flag. Fairy Argyle, a hippie girl known as “the queen of tie-dye,” helped Gilbert tie-dye stars on some of the indigo cotton in an approximation of the American flag.

Covered head to toe in color, Gilbert and his friend Cleve Jones, a Harvey Milk protegee who was soon to become a known activist in his own right, dragged the fabric onto the roof to dry before taking it to a local laundromat to rinse out the dye. Dyes were prohibited in public washing machines, but they had no choice. Fearing they would turn someone’s underwear pink, they poured Clorox bleach into the machines and then split. Gilbert sewed two flags that day: an eight-stripe rainbow flag and a version of the American flag with fifty stars but rainbow, instead of red and white, stripes. It was fitting that a symbol meant to represent a community was created communally.

The flags made their debut in San Francisco’s U.N. Plaza as part of the Gay Freedom Day Parade on June 25th of 1978. A perfect amount of wind was blowing as Gilbert tugged the rope to hoist the rainbows into their rightful place in the sky. “It was just stunning,” Cleve Jones would later reminisce. And as the parade arrived in the plaza, each marcher looked up and smiled. At that moment, the rainbow became not only the symbol of the gay community, but a piece of the global struggle for human rights. Though taken from the sky, the flag was not an entirely spontaneous symbol. Rather, it was birthed from “the soul of the people”: the ethos of 1970s San Francisco melded with Gilbert’s artistic vision.

Gilbert fully embraced his new role as the gay community’s own Betsy Ross, and for the rest of his life he never stopped working on the rainbow flag. He sewed a revolution, stripe by stripe, color by color. “Our sexuality is a human right,” he insisted, “no matter what color that may be.”

Gilbert, I knew the rainbow flag was created in San Francisco during the 1970s, but I did not know you. Your rainbow was in my peripheral vision; it meant something to others, but not much to me. I read your story, for the first time, in your friend Cleve Jones’ memoir. And just as I met you, you left. You died on my birthday — March 31st of 2017 — and that woke me up. Our stories are a part of each other now, sewn together like the stripes of the flag, like the colors that bleed when wet.

In 2011, you suffered a stroke, but kept stitching. You worked till the end, adding a lavender stripe for diversity to your original creation as an act of resistance to Donald Trump and the forces of hate he, and his administration, represent. “We have put our whole lives into changing society, but we are just starting,” you said. “This is an intergenerational process.”

You went on to say that: “There is a lot to do this coming year to talk about diversity. Sharing our struggle with others’ struggles. Women are not valued and Blacks are not welcome. We have to get over that; that is what we have to work on. There is a lot of sexism and racism in the community. We certainly needed women when AIDS came along. Where would we have been without them? Where would we be now? We are one community!”

“Skies Are Blue”

Just five months after the 1978 parade, Gilbert’s friend Harvey Milk was gone. After Milk was elected to office, he immediately received death threats. At Castro Camera, the store he continued to own and operate, Milk went into the back room, a space he often used for political meetings, and tape recorded a will. “All I ask is for the movement to continue, and if a bullet should enter my brain, let that bullet destroy every closet door in America,” he intoned into the recorder as if foreseeing his death at the hands of Dan White, a disgruntled member of the San Francisco Board of Supervisors.

An Irish Catholic conservative on the mostly liberal board, White suffered humiliation when he resigned from the Board of Supervisors, citing that the $9,000 annual salary was not enough to sustain his family, only to turn around and beg Mayor George Moscone for this reinstatement. Moscone turned White down after colleagues, including Milk, persuaded him to appoint someone more in tune with San Francisco’s growing diversity. To White, Milk represented everything that was wrong with the city — its corruption and delinquency. On November 27th, 1978, White loaded his pistol, put ten extra bullets in his pocket, and then entered City Hall through a basement window in order to avoid the metal detectors. White proceeded to enter Moscone’s office and shot the mayor five times: three times in the chest and twice in the head, as he stood straddling Moscone’s prone body. He reloaded, then went down the corridor, nearly the length of a city block, to Milk’s office and repeated the process.

Despite serving only eleven months in office, Milk brought a new visibility to the gay community through his vision of a society in which all people, regardless of sexual orientation or identity, were afforded human rights and allowed to achieve their full potential. “Gay people, we will not win our rights by staying quietly in our closets,” Milk said in one of his speeches. “We are coming out to fight the lies, the myths, the distortions. We are coming out to tell the truths about gays, for I am tired of the conspiracy of silence, so I’m going to talk about it. And I want you to talk about it. You must come out.”

That night, following Milk’s assassination, a crowd of thousands spontaneously gathered in the Castro and then marched to City Hall in a silent candlelight vigil. The Gay Freedom Day Committee quickly decided that the rainbow flag should be flown on Market Street during the 1979 parade in honor of Harvey Milk. On that day, rainbows hung from every light pole up and down both sides of Market — banners of colorful hope against a bright blue sky.

As Gilbert marched, he thought of the Bible story of Noah’s ark: the rainbow that appeared after the flood as God’s sign the destruction was over.

I am struck by the fact that you struggled to pay your rent, while corporations have profited from the sale of rainbow Pride-themed merchandise. Rainbow flags, the six-stripe versions most commonly seen at parades and flying from buildings and houses, are mass produced in China, often under questionable labor conditions. We have wandered from our radical roots and, in this moment, need to find our way back. Our true history, our true heroes, are needed now if we are to come together to right injustice both inside and outside of the community. Together, we must reinvent our capacity for outrage.

In one of the last interviews you gave, you quoted a Tibetan proverb:

“Better to live one year as a tiger, than a hundred as sheep.”

I am a tiger now. I am outraged. I will teach others your story. I will tell them the rainbow means hope, and resilience, and resistance — that our community has many times been broken and rebuilt by our own labor.

“Dreams That You Dare to Dream”

“When I die I have visions of fags singing ‘Over the Rainbow’ and the flag at Fire Island being flown at half mast.”
— Judy Garland

As Gilbert watched the 1993 March on Washington for Lesbian, Gay, and Bi Equal Rights and Liberation on C-SPAN from his home in San Francisco, he knew the rainbow flag had taken on a life of its own. On his television, he saw hundreds, perhaps even thousands, of marchers carrying and waving flags. His own personal rainbow had become a symbol of pride and visibility for so many.

Rainbow flags are no longer made from hand-dyed cotton. While beautiful, this method is temporal — the colors run when wet. They are now made from nylon, a durable fabric that catches the light, creating an effect similar to a stained glass window. But the original flag, and its creation story, stand as a beautiful moment in time, a testament to the creativity and resilience of a people.

Gilbert never stopped creating. In 1994, he sewed a mile-long rainbow flag for the 25th anniversary of the Stonewall Inn Riots. The Museum of Modern Art (MoMA) in New York City acquired a version of his original eight-stripe flag for its design collection in 2015. He also handmade a rainbow flag for Barack Obama, which was on display in the Obama White House.

Shortly before his death, he created a new nine-stripe version of the flag, adding a lavender stripe to the top of his original 1978 design to represent diversity in all its forms. He hand-sewed 39 copies — to commemorate the flag’s 39th anniversary— to be exhibited in San Francisco during Pride Month.

Though Gilbert couldn’t have known in 1978, the rainbow has come to symbolize the history of the Gay Rights Movement itself. Progress made was met with new struggles and attacks (the assassination of Milk; the HIV/AIDS crisis of the 1980s). The community then gathered its strength, creativity, and resolve and pushed ahead, always finding the rainbow in the sky after the gray uncertainty of the storm. The flag as a material object has also evolved with the consciousness of the community — both the versions made by Gilbert himself and those created by others to represent different subsets of the LGBTQ community, such as the Philadelphia Pride flag, which adds brown and black stripes to give visibility to LGBTQ people of color.

The dreams that Gilbert Baker dared to dream as a boy in Kansas — that art and action could create change — really did come true. “The beginning of being an activist is knowing who you are,” he opined, and his work helped many to know and love themselves as a first step.

Gilbert, you created a symbol of happiness, of joy, of liberation for a community often associated with pain and shame — a lovingly sewn declaration to combat the historical invisibility of the closet. A fabric manifesto. I thought our ideas were in conflict when really they are the same: the reason you chose the rainbow was the reason for my rejection. Now I see only beauty in what once was meaningless.

Dear Gilbert, wherever you are, I hope you are resting in power and in peace — somewhere over the rainbow.