The original Rainbow Pride Flag featured eight colors from top to bottom: pink, red, orange, yellow, green, turquoise, indigo, and violet. According to The Advocate, it flew for the first time on June 25, 1978, at the San Francisco Gay Freedom Day parade. The first iteration of the Rainbow Pride Flag premiered in 1978 when Harvey Milk, the first openly gay elected official in California and a civil and human rights activist, asked Baker to sew a new symbol for the gay community.
According to Gilber Baker’s memoir Rainbow Warrior: My Life In Color, a pink triangle (tied to Adolf Hitler’s Nazi Germany) had been the symbol for the gay rights movement prior to his creation of the rainbow flag. The Rainbow Pride Flag is widely accepted as the most recognizable Pride Flag or Pride symbol internationally. Related: Funny Pride Memes What does the Rainbow Pride Flag stand for? “There are many pride flags that get overlayed with national and religious flags, it is common to see Mexican flags, Canadian flags, Rainbow crescents, and rainbow Stars of David (I even sell these in my shop), and these are always beautiful,” Simpson says. There are also other iterations of Pride Flags that vary from country to country, too. Just like states like Maryland and Arizona or Chicago have iconic flags that you see almost everywhere, some of the flag designs are more attractive and engaging than others.” “Like the state flags, many of these flags were designed by their various creators with certain intentionalities and symbolisms in mind, though the general framework of three to nine evenly distributed stripes has become a framework many follow. But obviously, the more specific you get, the less known and less agreed-upon the flags become,” Simpson adds.
“Each city within each state likely has a flag too, or perhaps more than one that has been proposed, reflecting the diversity of our community. Simpson also co-authored the proposition to get Unicode to include the transgender flag in the recent emoji update. “When I describe the diverse Pride flags, I like to explain that if you were to consider the rainbow as the ‘United States of Pride Flag,’ then just as each state in our union has a flag, so does each state of being,” explains Hannah Simpson, a transgender activist who runs the LGBTQIA+ enamel pin Etsy shop, Changed Me. Throughout the years, some flags have also undergone different variations as well. There are at least 21 official LGBTQ+ flags that represent varying identities within the queer community. How many different LGBTQ+ flags are there? Of course, this list isn’t exhaustive because flags are always being devised to reflect different sub-cultures, but hopefully this will useful for the next time you see one of these gorgeous symbols being flown at the next Pride event.Let’s take a look at LGBTQIA+ flags and gay flags-including all pride flags -and the meaning behind each of them. We’ve collected a list of the Pride flags that have become synonymous with various identities in our vibrant community. The existence of this flag doesn’t take away from anybody else’s identity. “That is literally the purpose of any flag we have – to stand as a symbol for an identity, whether it’s a country, a municipality, a company, it stands as a symbol to recognise and highlight the experiences of this entity. Instead it is a way to symbolise, to highlight, and to stand in solidarity with these other identities,” she told GAY TIMES. “This eight-stripe flag is not a replacement, in the same way that that those other flags didn’t replace the original. When we spoke to Amber Hikes, developer of the eight-stripe More Colour More Pride flag, she explained the importance of individual symbols for LGBTQ+ sub-cultures – and she did it beautifully. NEWSFLASH PEOPLE: one flag would be a snooze-fest! There has been pushback, however, from members of the community who argue that the original Pride flag encompasses and celebrates all identities. Since artist and gay rights activist Gilbert Baker created the original flag in 1978, various designers and advocates have made different (or updated) variations of the flag to better represent individual communities. Each year, the rainbow flag is flown at Pride events all around a world to reflect the beauty and diversity of the LGBTQ+ community.