After flying at the event, the flag was tucked into Beal’s closet, where it collected dust for several months, a news release said.įor Pride Month, here are 22 L.A.-centric ways to show support for the LGBTQ community Unknowingly, she gave him her brother’s first flag fragment. He salvaged a piece - measured at 10 feet by 28 feet - and kept it until his death in 2017, when it was given to his sister, Ardonna Cook.įor the New York Pride parade in 2019, commemorating the 50th anniversary of the Stonewall uprising, Beal asked Cook to use a rainbow flag from Baker’s collection. When Baker returned to collect them at the San Francisco Gay Community Center the following year, he discovered they had been badly damaged with mildew from a leaky roof.
Pride hosting in-person events in June after parade canceledĪn LGBTQ+ night at Dodger Stadium and a Pride-themed movie screening at Hollywood Forever Cemetery are both scheduled for June.Ī group of at least 30 volunteers, including tie-dye artist Lynn Segerblom, seamster James McNamara and Baker hand-stitched and dyed two eight-striped rainbow flags for the 1978 parade, according to Beal’s statement. We’ll never forget that there’s people out there that don’t have it so good.” But it’s home to something that’s global, and it means something to a lot of people around the world. “You see that flag up at Castro and Market Street, and you think that’s Gilbert’s flag.
“It was born here,” Gilbert Baker Foundation President Charley Beal said Friday at the flag’s unveiling at the GLBT Historical Society Museum. Now, after a four-decade-long journey from a leaky storage unit to a dusty closet, a piece of the original fabric is returning home to San Francisco. embassies and symbolizing inclusivity across the world. Since its first flight above the United Nations Plaza during San Francisco’s Gay Freedom Day Parade, the rainbow flag has grown to global significance, painted on city crosswalks, flown at U.S.
In 1978, San Francisco resident Gilbert Baker stitched a new symbol: a striped rainbow flag of pink, red, orange, yellow, green, turquoise, blue and purple. For decades, the primary LGBTQ symbol was a small pink triangle - first displayed on the uniforms of prisoners at Nazi concentration camps who had been labeled as homosexual.