Did you know that each of the colours of the Gay Pride Rainbow actually has a specific meaning? It's more than just colour!
Red = life
Orange = healing
Yellow = sunshine
Green = nature
Blue = harmony
Purple = spirit
Born in 1978
Created and designed by San Francisco artist Gilbert Baker in 1978, the original flag actually had eight stripes of colour but two of them were removed due to lack of fabric availability. Now with printing process the way they are, some Pride flags showcase addition colours denoting specific groups of the Pride community (ie. pink for the Transgender community). Each of the colours denote a special meaning: red means life, orange means healing, yellow means sunshine, green means nature, blue means harmony, and purple means spirit.
How Did the Rainbow Flag Become a Symbol of LGBT Pride? by Nora Gonzalez
June has long been recognized as LGBT Pride Month, in honor of the Stonewall riots, which took place in New York City in June 1969. During Pride Month, it is not uncommon to see the rainbow flag being proudly displayed as a symbol for the LGBT rights movement. But how did that flag become a symbol of LGBT pride?
It goes back to 1978, when the artist Gilbert Baker, an openly gay man and a drag queen, designed the first rainbow flag. Baker later revealed that he was urged by Harvey Milk, one of the first openly gay elected officials in the U.S., to create a symbol of pride for the gay community. Baker decided to make that symbol a flag because he saw flags as the most powerful symbol of pride. As he later said in an interview, “Our job as gay people was to come out, to be visible, to live in the truth, as I say, to get out of the lie. A flag really fit that mission, because that’s a way of proclaiming your visibility or saying, ‘This is who I am!’” Baker saw the rainbow as a natural flag from the sky, so he adopted eight colors for the stripes, each color with its own meaning (hot pink for sex, red for life, orange for healing, yellow for sunlight, green for nature, turquoise for art, indigo for harmony, and violet for spirit).
The first versions of the rainbow flag were flown on June 25, 1978, for the San Francisco Gay Freedom Day parade. Baker and a team of volunteers had made them by hand, and now he wanted to mass-produce the flag for consumption by all. However, because of production issues, the pink and turquoise stripes were removed and indigo was replaced by basic blue, which resulted in the contemporary six-striped flag (red, orange, yellow, green, blue, and violet). Today this is the most common variant of the rainbow flag, with the red stripe on top, as in a natural rainbow. The various colors came to reflect both the immense diversity and the unity of the LGBT community.
It was not until 1994 that the rainbow flag was truly established as the symbol for LGBT pride. That year Baker made a mile-long version for the 25th anniversary of the Stonewall riots. Now the rainbow flag is an international symbol for LGBT pride and can be seen flying proudly, during both the promising times and the difficult ones, all around the world.