… You’d go through your whole life assuming you were the only gay person on earth, and then all of a sudden, you’re around a couple hundred thousand lesbians and gay men and drag queens.”
“When we would go to parades, young boys like me, we had never seen so many gay people. “It was a whole city of freedom,” Langlotz said.
In January of that year, Harvey Milk, one of the first openly gay elected officials in the United States, was inaugurated as a member of the San Francisco Board of Supervisors, and there was an electric energy among the city’s growing gay community. Organizers for the 1978 Gay Freedom Day Parade knew that “the world would be watching San Francisco,” said Glenne McElhinney, a historian making an upcoming documentary about the rainbow flag that includes the stories of Segerblom, McNamara and other artists. Other activists encouraged Baker to come up with something more positive, and the rainbow was “a conscious choice” that represented the diversity of the LGBTQ community and was one of the oldest symbols of hope, dating back to the biblical book of Genesis, where it represents a covenant between God and all living creatures, Beal said. Among the most common signs at the time was the pink triangle, which had been reappropriated from its use by the Nazis, who forced gay concentration camp prisoners to wear it. He spent his life spreading this symbol.”īut after all these years, he said, he is glad to see Segerblom publicly telling her story and called her and McNamara “heroes” who “helped create a universal symbol.”īefore 1978, there was no agreed-upon symbol for LGBTQ rights.
… To say Gilbert took somebody’s idea and marketed it and promoted it is an insult to him as an artist and an insult to his legacy. “He never claimed to have made them himself. Without Segerblom and the seamster James McNamara, who died of AIDS in 1999, the flags probably wouldn’t have happened, he said.Ĭharley Beal, manager of creative projects for the Gilbert Baker Estate, said that Baker did come up with the idea for the rainbow symbol but that he was always “effusive with credit” for those who helped create it, especially in a soon-to-be-published memoir. “We want our LGBT history to be as honest as possible,” Langlotz said. “It would be nice to get credit,” said Lynn Segerblom, a tie-dye artist who concocted the dyeing process for the giant flags and who was then known as Faerie Argyle Rainbow.
Now, 40 years later, one of the women instrumental in the flag’s creation says history has largely forgotten some of the artists who made it happen. Unbeknownst to them, their colorful project, the rainbow flag, would become the international symbol for LGBTQ rights, seen practically everywhere - from atop City Hall in liberal West Hollywood, to countries like Uganda, where homosexuality is illegal, to the Target clothing aisle during LGBTQ Pride Month. They had been tasked with making two enormous flags to fly above the city’s Gay Freedom Day Parade, and they wanted something bright. It was the summer of 1978, and the Gay Community Center in San Francisco swarmed with dozens of young hippies flitting between ironing boards, sewing machines and trash cans filled with colorful dye.