Words matter. These are the best Gilbert Baker Quotes, and they’re great for sharing with your friends.
In 1978, when I thought of creating a flag for the gay movement, there was no other international symbol for us than the pink triangle, which the Nazis used to identify homosexuals in concentration camps. Even though the pink triangle was and still is a powerful symbol, it was very much forced upon us.
When I fell in love, all the shame and guilt I carried with me for years suddenly vanished.
You don’t have to live a lie. Living a lie will mess you up. It will send you into depression. It will warp your values.
I was astounded nobody had thought of making a rainbow flag before because it seemed like such an obvious symbol for us.
Harvey Milk was a friend of mine, an important gay leader in San Francisco in the ’70s, and he carried a really important message about how important it was to be visible, how important it was to come out, and that was the single most important thing we had to do.
A rainbow is something in the sky, so a rainbow flag fits.
I was afraid my family would lock me up and give me electroshock. I was a screaming queen.
Our movement is evolving. The movement to liberate our sexuality as a human right, that’s an ongoing struggle.
Flags say something. You put a rainbow flag on your windshield, and you’re saying something.
When I was young, they thought I was from outer space. I was the only gay person they probably knew, and they struggled with that. Everybody knew I was gay. They just didn’t want to talk about it.
Anita Bryant is an important figure in gay history because she enraged a generation of people who got active.
What the rainbow has given our people is a thing that connects us.
A flag translates into everything, from tacky souvenirs to the names of organizations and the way that flags function.
Anita Bryant had the effect of galvanizing the whole gay movement. She was somebody whom everybody could hate. She was easy to hate.
A true flag is not something you can really design. A true flag is torn from the soul of the people. A flag is something that everyone owns, and that’s why they work. The Rainbow Flag is like other flags in that sense: it belongs to the people.
The rainbow is a part of nature, and you have to be in the right place to see it. It’s beautiful, all of the colors, even the colors you can’t see. That really fit us as a people because we are all of the colors. Our sexuality is all of the colors. We are all the genders, races, and ages.
I decided that we should have a flag, that a flag fit us as a symbol, that we are a people, a tribe if you will. And flags are about proclaiming power, so it’s very appropriate.
The rainbow flag is a symbol of freedom and liberation that we made for ourselves.
In 1978, the first flag was organic everything. It did have eight colors: the six colors of the rainbow we see today plus hot pink and turquoise. But pretty quickly on I realized that I would never be able to satisfy the demand for them by hand-dying fabric and these colors.
Flags are about proclaiming power… that visibility is key to our success and to our justice.
It’s not so easy to be gay or even a woman in some places in the world, and in many countries, it’s illegal to be gay. You can be put to death. It’s a global struggle. A human rights struggle on a global scale.
That’s really how I ended up making the first flag – I was the guy who could sew it.
Vexillography is a very big word! Vexillography is really the high science and art and understanding of flags and their history – the academic word for flag making and heraldry.
My parents and I didn’t speak for 10 years. It took a long time to rebuild that relationship.
The reason the rainbow flag endures is because people own it. It means something to them.
