June has long been recognized as LGBTQ Pride Month, in honor of the Stonewall riots, which took place in New York City in June 1969. During Pride Month, it is not uncommon to see the rainbow flag being proudly displayed as a symbol for the LGBTQ rights movement. But how did that flag become a symbol of pride?

It goes back to 1978, when the artist Gilbert Baker, an openly gay man and a drag queen, designed the first rainbow flag. Baker later revealed that he was urged by Harvey Milk, one of the first openly gay elected officials in the U.S., to create a symbol of pride for the gay community. Baker decided to make that symbol a flag because he saw flags as the most powerful symbol of pride. As he later said in an interview, “Our job as gay people was to come out, to be visible, to live in the truth, as I say, to get out of the lie. A flag really fit that mission, because that’s a way of proclaiming your visibility or saying, ‘This is who I am!’” Baker saw the rainbow as a natural flag from the sky, so he adopted eight colors for the stripes, each color with its own meaning (hot pink for sex, red for life, orange for healing, yellow for sunlight, green for nature, turquoise for art, indigo for harmony, and violet for spirit).

The first versions of the rainbow flag were flown on June 25, 1978, for the San Francisco Gay Freedom Day parade. Baker and a team of volunteers had made them by hand, and now he wanted to mass-produce the flag for consumption by all. However, because of production issues, the pink and turquoise stripes were removed and indigo was replaced by basic blue, which resulted in the contemporary six-striped flag (red, orange, yellow, green, blue, and violet). Today this is the most common variant of the rainbow flag, with the red stripe on top, as in a natural rainbow. The various colors came to reflect both the immense diversity and the unity of the LGBTQ community.

It was not until 1994 that the rainbow flag was truly established as the symbol for LGBTQ pride. That year Baker made a mile-long version for the 25th anniversary of the Stonewall riots. Now the rainbow flag is an international symbol for LGBTQ pride and can be seen flying proudly, during both the promising times and the difficult ones, all around the world.
Pride is also a time to shine a spotlight on LGBTIQ issues and uplift and amplify the lives and contributions of LGBTIQ people.
Our support during Pride month matters, because the queer and trans community is one of the most marginalized globally and faces persecution, discrimination and violence around the world. However, the global LGBTIQ movement has made tremendous progress in the last few decades and there are organizations fighting for LGBTIQ rights in the majority of the countries on the planet.
We have a tremendous opportunity to radically accelerate social and legal change for LGBTIQ people right now and to ensure that our progress is not lost. #PrideWithAPurpose means celebrating and fighting for safety, freedom, dignity and justice for the community everywhere.