It’s perhaps understandable that there are a lot of symbols that are used to indicate gay pride. The whole concept of being closeted seems to indicate a need for a code, a covert way of indicating we’re-here-and-we’re-queer, whether or not that symbol will register in wider society. But if there’s a gay pride symbol that everyone in the western world knows, regardless of their own orientation, it’s the rainbow flag. Seen hanging out of pubs, clubs, bars and bookshops, it’s an unashamed proclamation – this is a place where queer people are welcome.
With that in mind, it’s probably unsurprising that the first time a rainbow flag was used as an unambiguous symbol of gay pride was in San Francisco.
In 1978, local artist Gilbert Baker designed the first version of what would become the rainbow flag. The initial version had eight stripes, hand-dyed, with hot pink and turquoise in addition to the commonly-seen six colours. Later in the year, the city responded to the murder of its first openly gay supervisor, Harvey Milk, by draping that year’s Pride Parade with a modified version of Baker’s flag. This new version, a symbol of the city’s defiance, was modified to enhance its symmetry, and the subsequent six-striped flag became the one most often seen today. As for why rainbow stripes were used at all – history seems a little reticent on that point. But it seems clear that the bright colours have taken root in queer cultural consciousness since.
So much so that the self-proclaimed “queer nation”, the Gay and Lesbian Kingdom of the Coral Sea Islands – which claims to be a country in its own right, having seceded from Australia, complete with its own mail service, currency and national anthem – has, perhaps inevitably, claimed the six-striped rainbow as its official flag. There are other pride symbols – notably, the pink triangle, originally used by the Nazis as a symbol to be worn by homosexuals in concentration camps, and reclaimed as a queer symbol afterwards, and the black triangle, used for lesbians specifically. There are other flags, too, denoting bisexual pride, transgender pride, family pride, even leather pride – but the rainbow flag did it first. There is no permanent settlement on the Gay and Lesbian Islands, so no embassies or ships fly it, but do they need to? It’s bright, it’s eye-catching, and it’s already flying in hundreds of places all over the world.
By Iona Sharma
