Gilbert Baker created the LGBTQ Pride rainbow flag. Here’s what his creation stood for.

Gilbert Baker created the LGBTQ Pride rainbow flag. Here’s what his creation stood for.

today’s Google Doodle commemorates Baker’s 66th birthday — and the flag that made him famous.

This Friday’s Google Doodle is honoring Gilbert Baker’s 66th birthday.

Baker is a person most people possibly aren’t acquainted with, despite the fact that they’ve possibly seen his paintings many, many times — in particular within the next 28 days as the sector celebrates LGBTQ pleasure Month. He invented the rainbow flag.

Google’s timing is great: now not handiest is it LGBTQ pride Month, but Baker died in advance this year, on March 31.

So how did Baker give you the flag, and what does it mean, besides?

The flag was meant to replace an in advance symbol for gay people with terrible roots: the red triangle. This was the symbol that the Nazis used to mark folks that have been despatched to awareness camps for their homosexuality and other meant sexual deviancy.

The red triangle has been used by a few LGBTQ businesses, which include Act Up (which changed into founded for the duration of the early HIV/AIDS crisis), in an try to reclaim it from its terrible origins.
but no longer all and sundry is comfy with it. “It got here from the Nazis. It turned into put on us,” Baker informed within the life Media in 2009. “It had a absolutely terrible, poor origin approximately murder and [the] Holocaust.”

So Baker, who taught himself how to stitch (in part so he may want to dress like David Bowie), got here up with the Rainbow Flag in 1978.
As Clive Moore wrote in Sunshine and Rainbows: development of homosexual and Lesbian subculture in Queensland, “shiny hues have usually been types of gay identification, mainly green, yellow, pink, lavender and crimson.” Baker latched onto this records to create a brand new image in the Rainbow Flag.

“I didn’t even assume twice about what the flag could be,” he later said. “A rainbow fit us. it's miles from nature. It connects us to all of the shades — all the shades of sexuality, all the range in our community.”

The unique Rainbow Flag had eight shades, every with an individual that means: purple for intercourse, pink for lifestyles, orange for restoration, yellow for the sun, green for nature, turquoise for magic, blue for serenity, and pink for the spirit. “This became the hippie, 1978 meanings for the factor,” Baker stated.

over time, the flag become cut down to six colorings. First, purple turned into cut due to the fact the dye for it became apparently tough to obtain at the time for mass production. Then the committee organizing the 1979 gay Freedom Day Parade reduce turquoise to give the flag a fair range of colours, so it could be flown as two halves in San Francisco.
notwithstanding the modifications, Baker remained deeply pleased with his work via his very last years.

“collectively, we’re changing our world, our planet, from an area of hate and violence and battle to a place of love and diversity and popularity,” he stated in 2009. “that is why we’re right here. That’s the massive, lengthy rainbow — from earlier than me to well after me.”