But in an interview that Baker gave last year to the Museum of Modern Art, after the flag’s prototype was acquired for its permanent collection, he suggested that the rationale for selecting the rainbow was more elementary than these theories assume: “It’s a natural flag”, he insists. Other writers have noted that strong bright colours (such as the green carnation Oscar Wilde wore to signify his sexual orientation) have for centuries served as shorthand for homosexuality. A frequently cited hypothesis links the rainbow to the resplendent aura of the actress Judy Garland, long considered a gay icon (her role in the film The Wizard of Oz has yielded the colloquial slang-phrase “friend of Dorothy” as a term for a gay man), and to her famous performance of the song Over the Rainbow. Journalists and historians have expended a great deal of energy speculating how, exactly, the rainbow eventually suggested itself to Baker in 1978 as an appropriate phenomenon for conversion into the dimensions of a flag.
“We needed something beautiful,” Baker concluded, “something from us.” The gay community, he believed, deserved a fabulous emblem entirely of its own fashioning. But however heroic that reclamation of meaning may have been, in Baker’s mind the symbol was still haunted by the ghosts of Hitler and the Holocaust. In the decades following the end of World War Two, gay communities around the world stripped the pink badge of its intended humiliation and defiantly re-inflected it with pride. In Nazi concentration camps, men imprisoned because of their homosexuality were marked out by a pink triangle affixed to their clothing. In contemplating how, precisely, he should reinvent that pattern, Baker was aware that any design he produced would compete in popular imagination with a painful, if resilient, logo by which the gay community had long been identified. Key to the summoning of such spirit was the restorative display across the country of the Stars and Stripes, whose simple geometry masked the intensity of the psychological, political, and social turmoil seething underneath. Still reeling from the twin traumas of withdrawal from the Vietnam War in 1973 and the first ever resignation of a US President in 1974, following the Watergate scandal, America strove to conjure from national malaise a feeling of patriotism.
But as we watch its jubilant stripes bind together communities around the globe, it is worth pausing to reflect on the origin of a cultural symbol that was propelled into iconic status nearly 40 years ago by heartbreaking tragedy.Īccording to the US gay activist Gilbert Baker, who is credited with creating the emblem in the late 1970s, the idea behind the flag’s bold design emerged in 1976 – the year the United States celebrated the bicentenary of its independence as a republic. At first glance, the rainbow flag’s joyous refraction of colour may seem a strangely sunny response to the dark savagery of the deadliest mass shooting in US history. Suddenly, they are everywhere: stretched across balconies, flapping from car antennas, and pinned to coat lapels the world over in a moving display of solidarity with the community that was brutally terrorised on Sunday after a bigoted assault at a gay nightclub in Orlando, Florida.