Gilbert Baker is an artist

Artist

An artist is a person engaged in one or more of any of a broad spectrum of activities related to creating art, practicing the arts and/or demonstrating an art. The common usage in both everyday speech and academic discourse is a practitioner in the visual arts only...

 and civil rights

Civil rights

Civil and political rights are a class of rights that protect individuals' freedom from unwarranted infringement by governments and private organizations, and ensure one's ability to participate in the civil and political life of the state without discrimination or repression.Civil rights include...

 activist who in 1978 designed the Rainbow Flag

Rainbow flag

A rainbow flag is a multi-colored flag consisting of stripes in the colors of the rainbow. The actual colors shown differ, but many of the designs are based on the traditional scheme of red, orange, yellow, green, blue, indigo and violet, or some more modern division of the rainbow spectrum .The...

, sometimes called the Pride Flag, Gay Pride Flag, or, since the early 1990s, Queer Flag, that is often used as a symbol of gay pride in LGBT rights marches.

Biography

Baker served in the U.S. Army from 1970 to 1972. He was stationed in San Francisco at the beginning of the gay rights movement. After his honorable discharge from the military, he taught himself to sew. He used his skill to create banners for gay-rights and anti-war protest marches. It was during this time that he met and became friends with Harvey Milk

Harvey Milk

Harvey Bernard Milk was an American politician who became the first openly gay man to be elected to public office in California when he won a seat on the San Francisco Board of Supervisors...

.

In 1979 he began work at Paramount Flag Company in San Francisco, then located on the corner of Polk Street

Polk Street

Polk Street is a street in San Francisco, California, that travels northward from Market Street to Beach Street and is one of the main thoroughfares of the Polk Gulch neighborhood traversing through the Tenderloin, Nob Hill, and Russian Hill neighborhoods. The street takes its name from former U.S....

 and Post Street in the Polk Gulch neighborhood. Baker has designed displays for Dianne Feinstein

Dianne Feinstein

Dianne Goldman Berman Feinstein is the senior U.S. Senator from California. A member of the Democratic Party, she has served in the Senate since 1992. She also served as 38th Mayor of San Francisco from 1978 to 1988....

, the Premier of China, the presidents of France, Venezuela and the Philippines

President of the Philippines

The President of the Philippines is the head of state and head of government of the Philippines. The president leads the executive branch of the Philippine government and is the commander-in-chief of the Armed Forces of the Philippines...

, the King of Spain, and many others. He also designed creations for numerous civic events and San Francisco Gay Pride

Gay pride

LGBT pride or gay pride is the concept that lesbian, gay, bisexual, and transgender people should be proud of their sexual orientation and gender identity...

. In 1984 he designed flags for the Democratic National Convention

1984 Democratic National Convention

The 1984 National Convention of the U.S. Democratic Party was held at the Moscone Center in San Francisco, California from July 16 to July 19, 1984, to select a candidate for the 1984 United States presidential election. At the convention Walter Mondale was nominated for President and Geraldine...

.

In 1994 Baker moved to New York City and continued his creative work and activism. That year he created the world's largest flag (at that time) in celebration of the 25th anniversary of the Stonewall Riots

Stonewall riots

The Stonewall riots were a series of spontaneous, violent demonstrations against a police raid that took place in the early morning hours of June 28, 1969, at the Stonewall Inn, in the Greenwich Village neighborhood of New York City...

 that took place in 1969.

In 2003, to commemorate the Rainbow Flag’s 25th anniversary, Baker created a Rainbow Flag that stretched from the Gulf of Mexico to the Atlantic Ocean in Key West. After the commemoration, he sent sections of this flag to more than 100 cities around the world.

Flag

The colors on the Rainbow Flag reflect the diversity of the LGBT community. When Gilbert Baker raised the first Rainbow Flag at San Francisco Pride

San Francisco Pride

The San Francisco Lesbian, Gay, Bisexual, Transgender Pride Celebration, usually known as San Francisco Pride, is a parade and festival held in June each year in San Francisco to celebrate the lesbian, gay, bisexual, and transgender people and their allies...

 on June 25, 1978, it had eight colors, each with a symbolic meaning:

• Hot Pink: sexuality
• Red
  Red
  Red is any of a number of similar colors evoked by light consisting predominantly of the longest wavelengths of light discernible by the human eye, in the wavelength range of roughly 630–740 nm. Longer wavelengths than this are called infrared , and cannot be seen by the naked eye...
  
  : life
• Orange: healing
• Yellow
  Yellow
  Yellow is the color evoked by light that stimulates both the L and M cone cells of the retina about equally, with no significant stimulation of the S cone cells. Light with a wavelength of 570–590 nm is yellow, as is light with a suitable mixture of red and green...
  
  : sunlight
• Green
  Green
  Green is a color, the perception of which is evoked by light having a spectrum dominated by energy with a wavelength of roughly 520–570 nanometres. In the subtractive color system, it is not a primary color, but is created out of a mixture of yellow and blue, or yellow and cyan; it is considered...
  
  : nature
• Turquoise
  Turquoise (color)
  Turquoise or is a slightly blueish tone of light green. The color is based on the gem turquoise. The term comes from the French for Turkish.At right is displayed the X11 color named turquoise....
  
  : magic/art
• Blue
  Blue
  Blue is a colour, the perception of which is evoked by light having a spectrum dominated by energy with a wavelength of roughly 440–490 nm. It is considered one of the additive primary colours. On the HSV Colour Wheel, the complement of blue is yellow; that is, a colour corresponding to an equal...
  
  : serenity/harmony
• Violet
  Violet (color)
  As the name of a color, violet is synonymous with a bluish purple, when the word "purple" is used in the common English language sense of any color between blue and red, not including either blue or red...
  
  : spirit

Thirty volunteers had helped Baker hand-dye and stitch the first two flags for the parade.

The design has undergone several revisions to first remove then re-add colours due to widely available fabrics. As of 2008, the most common variant consists of six stripes, with the colours red, orange, yellow, green, blue, and violet. Baker refers to this version of the flag as the "commercial version", because it came about due to practical considerations of mass production.

The Rainbow Flag is commonly flown horizontally, with the red stripe on top, as it would be in a natural rainbow

Rainbow

A rainbow is an optical and meteorological phenomenon that causes a spectrum of light to appear in the sky when the Sun shines on to droplets of moisture in the Earth's atmosphere. It takes the form of a multicoloured arc...

.

Media

In 2003, Baker and his Key West project were the subject of Rainbow Pride, a feature-length documentary by Marie Jo Ferron, bought by PBS National and debuting in New York on WNET

WNET

WNET, channel 13 is a non-commercial educational public television station licensed to Newark, New Jersey. With its signal covering the New York metropolitan area, WNET is a primary station of the Public Broadcasting Service and a primary provider of PBS programming...

.

Baker recreated his original Rainbow Flag for the Academy-award winning 2008 film Milk

Milk (film)

Milk is a 2008 American biographical film on the life of gay rights activist and politician Harvey Milk, who was the first openly gay person to be elected to public office in California, as a member of the San Francisco Board of Supervisors...

, and is shown being interviewed on one of the featurettes of the DVD release.

External links

• Biography on Gilbert Baker Website