The Redesigned Rainbow Flag, Monstrously Ugly

Douglas Murray, a New York Post columnist, described the rainbow flag in his column (January 24, 2025) as "a perfectly pleasant symbol of gay liberation" that "has gotten more monstrously ugly with each year." Amen!

The flag designer Gilbert Baker's simple six-color horizontally striped flag can be put in the If-it-ain't- broke, don't-fix-it category. Redesigning the flag by adding, to quote Mr. Murray, "a triangle and a little circle" to make it more inclusive with regard to race, ethnicity, and gender makes no sense to me. The flag's colors have nothing to do with any of that because they stand for much broader meanings.

It's obvious Mr. Murray has no knowledge of those meanings when he says, "[I]f the colors of the flag were meant to represent different races, then who were the orange and red stripes meant to represent[?]. Was it gays with too much fake tan on? Or white lesbians who had been left out in the sun too long?"

He concludes this part of the column by saying, "Even thinking that the flag was about race was a demonstration of Olympic-level stupidity."  But then he fails to explain what each color symbolizes. That would have helped his readers to see the flag's universality.

 Since he doesn't seem to know about each color's meaning, I would suggest Mr. Murray get a copy of Out in All Directions: The Almanac of Gay and Lesbian America, published in 1995.

The brief entry on the flag, by Steve Vezeris, points out that the flag originally "had eight horizontal stripes, from top to bottom: hot pink for sex, red for life, orange for healing, yellow for sun, green for serenity with nature, turquoise for art, indigo for harmony, and violet for spirit."

Indigo was later replaced by royal blue. And, according to the 2006 documentary Rainbow Pride, the colors hot pink and turquoise were dropped. The reason: those colors were not on the palette of flag makers.

The Rainbow Flag's Colors

In Steve Vezeris's brief entry in Out in All Directions: The Almanac of Gay and Lesbian America (Warner Books, 1995), he pointed out that "[t]he first rainbow [flag] design had eight horizontal stripes, from top to bottom: hot pink for sex, red for life, orange for healing, yellow for sun, green for serenity with nature, turquoise for art, indigo for harmony, and violet for spirit." He continued: "For  the 1979 [San Francisco Gay Freedom Day] parade, due to production constraints, hot pink and turquoise stripes were dropped and royal blue replaced the indigo stripe." According to Rainbow Pride, the documentary about the rainbow flag and its creator Gilbert Baker, hot pink and turquoise was dropped because those colors were not on the palette of flag makers.

Proud Colors

Rainbow Pride (Marie-Josee Ferron: documentary; color; 60 mins.;2006)

San Francisco brings to mind many images, both pleasant and not so pleasant--cable cars, steep hills, the Golden Gate Bridge, Harvey Milk's assassination, the occasional earthquake. Add one more image to the mix--this one for the pleasant column--the rainbow flag, a symbol of gay pride and empowerment. It was created by Gilbert Baker, a self-described "drag queen from way back."
Baker's flag and its impact on gay culture is the subject of an hour-long documentary, Rainbow Pride, that was filmed mostly in San Francisco and Key West, Florida, and first aired on public television three years ago.
In 1977, when Baker was commissioned to design a flag to be hung from lampposts during that year's pride parade, no one could have imagined that one day its colors would become such an international symbol for the GLBT community (thanks to New York's "Stonewall 25" celebration that featured a mile-long version of the flag).
The hand-made flag originally had eight colors (each signifying a different theme). Two of them (hot pink and turquoise) were later dropped because, as one interviewee pointed out, those colors were not on the palette of flag makers.
Baker, who knew the late openly gay politician Harvey Milk, gives him credit for inspiring the flag. "Harvey's whole message, his whole life was all about gay people should be visible and that we should come out of the closet. So the flag really fit with that in terms of it being a visibility tool."
That visibility, however, can be a double-edged sword. For gays and lesbians, it becomes, as one man in the film pointed out, a "universal Red Cross" sign, a marker that says here is a safe haven when trouble arises. Homophobes also know what the colors symbolize; for them it becomes a red flag, a signal that here is a potential target for gay bashing.
Rainbow Pride, beautifully shot and edited, with an excellent musical soundtrack, tells the story of the flag's creation without voice-over narration. It relies solely on images (some of it archival) and the voices of those on-camera. The Stonewall Riots, Anita Bryant, Harvey Milk are seamlessly interwoven in the overall "narrative." These moments add significance to the rainbow flag because they are milestones in the evolution of gay pride and although the colors have been used in tacky ways--such as on key chains and license plates--their popularity arises from a need for an oppressed people to feel good about themselves and each other. Or as Ann Northrop, a longtime activist, says in the film, "It's still a brilliant signifier and connector and identifier of us as a special tribe of people."