Celebrating Visibility

San Francisco’s Pride movement began in 1970, inspired by the Stonewall Riots in New York City the year before. Organized by the activist group Society for Individual Rights (SIR) and the newly formed San Francisco Gay Liberation Front, the city’s first Pride march—then called Christopher Street Liberation Day—drew a few hundred people who walked from Aquatic Park to Civic Center. The event was a radical act of visibility at a time when being openly LGBTQ+ carried immense risks. In 1972, organizers officially named it the San Francisco Gay Freedom Day Parade, setting the stage for what would become one of the largest Pride celebrations in the world.

In 1977, Harvey Milk asked the American artist, drag queen, and activist Gilbert Baker to create a new symbol for the growing LBGTQ community, and the new era of gay consciousness and freedom. 

At this point, a pink triangle was the most recognizable symbol used by gay activists, but the triangle represented a dark chapter in the history of same-sex rights, having been created by the Nazi party during World War II in order to label and exclude homosexuals in concentration camps. Milk wanted his community to also have a more joyous and optimistic symbol.

Baker had arrived in San Francisco in 1972 during the early years of the Gay Liberation movement. He quickly became known for his sewing skills and flamboyant creations, such as drag costumes and political banners. Inspired by America’s stars and stripes, Baker decided this new symbol should be a flag—a political symbol of belonging. Using color to establish meaning, Baker conceived a flag that would empower his “tribe” using a “rainbow of humanity” motif to represent the queer community’s diversity. He assigned symbolic meaning to each of the flag’s eight colored stripes: pink for sex, red for life, orange for healing, yellow for sunlight, green for nature, turquoise for magic and art, blue for serenity and purple for spirit. 

Along with a group of activists, Gilbert hand dyed and sewed two 30’ x 60’ eight color flags to be flown at San Francisco’s United Nations Plaza for the 1978 Gay Freedom Day Parade. The flag was simplified to six colors a year later to accommodate flag industry standards, so that it could be mass produced to meet the overwhelming demand for this new symbol of hope and liberation.

“I thought of the American flag with its thirteen stripes and thirteen stars, the colonies breaking away from England to form the United States. I thought of the vertical red, white, and blue tricolor from the French Revolution and how both flags owed their beginnings to a riot, a rebellion, or revolution. I thought a gay nation should have a flag too, to proclaim its own idea of power.” —Gilbert Baker

Towards Inclusion

Flags are political symbols, representing what historian Benedict Anderson called “imagined communities”— places where everyone is connected by a shared sense of identity. For the gay community, the rainbow flag is a marker of that identity, an aspirational statement of inclusion.

Yet as we hear in At Home in the Castro?, the queer community is endlessly diverse within itself. While the six-striped rainbow flag is currently the most commonly-seen iteration worldwide, designs have been changed, amended and critiqued over the last few decades. 

Throughout the 1990s, activists including Michael Page, creator of the Bisexual Pride flag, and Monica Helms, creator of the Trans Pride flag, flown for the first time in 2000, began to create new symbols designed to represent more specific demographics. While LGBTQ+ rights and visibility has accelerated in the last few decades, trans activists and queer people of color were often left out of the story. Discussions of inclusivity, awareness and due credit have driven variations of Baker’s original design.

Pride Today

Since the 1970s, Pride in San Francisco has grown from a small march into one of the largest and most iconic LGBTQ+ celebrations in the world. Held every June, the event draws hundreds of thousands of people to the city, filling Market Street with a vibrant mix of activists, community organizations, performers, and allies. It remains both a celebration of queer identity and a platform for political action, reflecting the city's deep history of LGBTQ+ resistance and advocacy. Over the decades, San Francisco Pride has evolved to include a full weekend of events, from the Dyke March and Trans March to the massive parade and festival at Civic Center.

Want to Learn More? 

‘The Pride Flag has a Representation Problem’, The Atlantic

Where Flying the Pride Flag Wasn’t So Simple, New York Times

“Queer Pilgrimage: The San Francisco Homeland and Identity Tourism,” Alyssa Cymene Howe.