The acceptance of homosexuals in the US in the 1950s-1960s was extremely low.
Anti-gay legal systems were in place and homosexuals were considered a security risk, as it was believed that they “lack[ed] the emotional stability of normal persons.”
Thousands were fired from jobs and actions were taken to “rid neighbourhoods, parks, bars, and beaches of gay people”.
So, gay bars became places for them to socialise & one such bar was the Stonewall Inn in New YorkThe New York law allowed the arrest of anyone who was not wearing “at least three articles of gender-appropriate clothing”, which the police raided in 1969, and arrested many.
The patrons decided to put up a fight and the protest eventually turned into riots that got dubbed as Stonewall Riots.
Now, the last years of the 1960s were already socially & politically volatile – there was the civil rights movement (to end racial discrimination), anti-Vietnam war protests, counterculture movement (to demonstrate unrest with the establishment).
The timing and the first-time resistance by a group that had suffered discrimination for decades made it into a movement.
Around the same time, an artist Gilbert Baker was conscriptedFrom 1940 until 1973, during both peacetime and periods of conflict, men were compulsorily made to fill vacancies in the United States Armed Forces that could not be filled through voluntary means. Active conscription came to an end in 1973 when the United States Armed Forces moved to an all-volunteer military. Source: Wikipedia. to military services and he served in San Francisco in 1970-1972.
He was an openly gay man and after the end of his military services, used his skills to create banners for gay rights and anti-war protests.
It was during this time (1974) that he met Harvey Milk, who became one of the first openly gay elected officials in the U.S. three years later.
The symbol of gay pride at the time was the pink triangle, which was once imposed by Nazis to identify and persecute homosexuals.
Harvey Milk challenged Gilbert Baker to come up with an alternative to the pink triangle, which had become a bold symbol of remembrance but was still considered dark and painful by many.
Baker decided on the rainbow to represent togetherness since LGBTQ people come from all races, ages and genders.
Today different cultures have different variants, but the original flag had 8 colours and each colour had its own meaning (hot pink – sexuality, red -life, orange – healing, yellow – sunlight, green – nature, turquoise – art, indigo – harmony, and violet – spirit).
Pink & turquoise were dropped later as it was difficult to mass-produce a version featuring those two colours, reducing the most commonly used variant to 6 colours.
It was in 1994, when Baker made a mile-long version for the 25th anniversary of the Stonewall riots, that the ‘rainbow flag’ got truly established as the symbol of pride.
