Milk was assassinated that same year, which shot the original Rainbow Pride Flag into the 1978 version of going viral. “Asserting our own and ensuring others’ freedom of expression is the greatest expression of freedom there is.” “As for what it means to me, I love that when shown proudly and with intentionality, it is a reminder that we are united amid all our diversities of experience, in part because we are stronger together in a world that remains overwhelmingly cisgender and straight and allosexual and far too often strives to beat those identities out of us or into us,” Simpson says. Each color represented a facet of Pride pink symbolized sex, red symbolized life, orange symbolized healing, yellow symbolized sunlight, green symbolized nature, turquoise symbolized magic and art, indigo symbolized serenity, and violet symbolized spirit. 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. 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?
Let’s take a look at LGBTQIA+ flags and gay flags-including all pride flags -and the Pride Flags meaning behind each of them.