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Gay pride rainbow flags series#
The day we meet, he’s accompanied by a photographer from Lab Series (a men's line from Estée Lauder) who’s taking shots of him for the brand's Pride initiative. Baker sees himself as an artist first and foremost, but he’s not averse to the commercial.
Gay pride rainbow flags windows#
Yet, it’s also been a commercial juggernaut - it’s public domain, so actual sales are difficult to estimate - but it’s a fixture in bar windows and souvenir shops worldwide. “For the past almost 40 years, the rainbow flag has stood as a politically powerful, meaningful, and also aesthetically effective symbol." "One of MoMA's goals is to acquire the art of our time," Paola Antonelli, senior curator of Architecture and Design, told us. His flag has always been recognized for its artistic significance, perhaps culminating this month, when it was acquired by the Museum of Modern Art in New York. There, the flag lost two of its original eight colors (turquoise and pink, it turns out, aren’t common flag colors, and made it too difficult to manufacture) - and gained official recognition as the official flag for gay pride, as the result of Baker’s work.
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Baker got a job at the now-defunct Paramount Flag Company in San Francisco, where he’d work for the better part of a decade. He’d been an activist for years, but after that 1978 rally, his contribution to the cause crystallized. “I ran with a pretty amazing crowd then.We’d be hanging out looking at Vogue magazine, and thinking like, ‘Ah, wouldn’t it be great to look like this?’” (Years later, his drag persona would take the name Busty Ross, a nod to another famous flag-making seamstress.) Baker was starting perform as a drag queen, and admittedly broke, the easiest way to find great costumes was to make them himself, so he learned to sew. The first step of that dream was looking fabulous. At that moment, the rainbow became the symbol of the community.” Gilbert started tugging on the rope, the wind caught it and it was just stunning.” Jones tells me over the phone from his home in S.F.,“The parade arrived, and as people started marching under it, you could see them looking up and smiling. Plaza for a pride parade on June 25, 1978. They made two flags that day - the rainbow flag and an American flag with rainbow stripes instead of red, white and blue - and hung them in San Francisco’s U.N.
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We did it all by hand with big garbage barrels of dye to color the fabric and then we dragged it out onto the roof to dry.” “There was a gay community center at 330 Grove Street, now long gone. “He came up with the idea of flag,” says Cleve Jones, a longtime gay rights activist and Baker’s roommate at the time. We needed something that expressed our beauty, our soul, our love - that came from us and wasn’t put on us.” “The triangle came from a very negative, terrible place. “Until we had a flag, the symbol for our movement was the pink triangle, which was put on us by Hitler and the Nazis,” Baker says. “That’s really how I ended up making the first flag - I was the guy who could sew it.”īaker says the rainbow was an obvious choice for him. “Because I loved to sew, my role in the movement became to make banners,” Baker says. It was Milk, the first openly gay man elected to public office in the states, who invited Baker to make a flag for a gay rights march he was organizing - just months before his assassination that fall. “Harvey hadn’t been murdered yet and gay artistic empowerment - you had gay chorus, gay band, gay theater, gay film, all of this stuff - was just flowering.” Baker was living in San Francisco, which had become a haven the gay community fleeing less tolerant locales. Anita Bryant, the beauty queen turned conservative activist had just finished her nationwide anti-gay rights crusade. I'm there to meet its creator, Gilbert Baker, a gay rights icon who created the pride flag nearly forty years ago, and is the force behind its adoption as the now ubiquitous symbol of the LGBT rights movement.Īs we walk inside, he points above our heads - “That’s one of mine” - and then leads us up to a classroom (he’s an active volunteer at the center and greets several people on the stairs) to tell me how the pride flag came about. It’s a rarity, hand-sewn and oversize, with eight colored stripes. A big rainbow flag flaps lazily outside the gay community center in Manhattan's West Village.