gay by design · no. 1
The original rainbow Pride flag had eight stripes. Pink stood for sex. That seems worth remembering whenever the rainbow gets treated as a particularly cheerful corporate filing system.
The GLBT Historical Society’s exhibition on Gilbert Baker preserves the practical history behind the symbol. The flags made for San Francisco’s 1978 Gay Freedom Day celebrations were handmade, collective undertakings. The archive credits collaborators as well as Baker, including Lynn Segerblom’s distinctive hybrid of rainbow and American-flag designs. This was not a logo that arrived fully formed in a conference room.
The eight-stripe design assigned meanings across the spectrum: sex, life, healing, sunlight, nature, art and magic, serenity, and spirit. Pink and turquoise subsequently disappeared amid production and display considerations. The familiar six-stripe version is therefore also a story about making and using an object, not simply refining a mood board.
That is what makes the flag a satisfying piece of design. It has to survive outside the drawing. Fabric must be sourced, dyed, cut, sewn, carried and seen at a distance. It must remain legible when the wind folds half of it away. The physical demands are not an unfortunate interruption of the concept. They are where the concept becomes public.
The horizontal bands give it unusual flexibility. There is no face to reproduce badly, no small lettering to disappear across a street, no elaborate emblem demanding a specialist printer. A child’s drawing and an enormous sewn banner can remain recognizably related without being identical objects. The design can move between scales and materials without losing its central gesture.
Its usefulness also comes from what it does not insist on specifying. A flag can announce presence before it explains a position. That is different from a policy document, and it is not a defect. In a crowd, on a balcony or in a shop window, the first message is often simply that someone is here and willing to be seen.
The original pink stripe keeps the history from becoming too antiseptic. Queer identity is not only a suitable sentiment for an annual brand calendar. Desire belongs in the picture. Remembering that does not require pretending one stripe could capture everybody’s relationship to sex. It means refusing to tidy the actual design history into something more comfortable for a sponsor.
Baker’s own account connects the flag to community, liberation and the possibilities of a shared symbol. The object has since acquired many uses its makers could not control. That is the strange success of public design: people take it somewhere else.
Looking back at the eight-color version is not a demand to choose one flag forever. It is a reminder that these objects have makers, materials and arguments inside them. The rainbow did not begin as a decorative background. People had to sew it, raise it and stand underneath it.
Pink was not there by accident.
sources
GLBT Historical Society: Gilbert Baker online exhibition.
Gilbert Baker Foundation: Rainbow Flag origin story.
National Archives: Gilbert Baker and the Rainbow Flag.
Image credits: Photograph: Ludovic Bertron, Rainbow flag and blue skies, CC BY 2.0. Eight-stripe flag: Gilbert Baker design, vector by Fibonacci, public domain. Six-stripe flag: Guanaco and subsequent Wikimedia Commons editors, unrestricted reuse. Designs shown as distinct historical versions, not archival photographs.
