Gilbert Baker: All you need to know about the man who designed the iconic LGBT flag
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Your support makes all the difference.After hand-dying fabric eight different colours, Gilbert Baker created the rainbow flag that would become a prominent symbol of pride in the LGBTQ community. Google is celebrating what would be Mr Baker’s 66th birthday with an animated doodle.
Mr Baker huddled in the attic of a San Francisco gay community centre in 1978 to create the flag. They dyed the fabric and sewed the original flags, which included eight colours at the time that represented different aspects of their community.
“We needed something beautiful, something from us,” Mr Baker later said. “The rainbow is so perfect because it really fits our diversity in terms of race, gender, ages, all of those things. Plus, it’s a natural flag — it’s from the sky!”
The original colours were hot pink, red, orange, yellow, green, turquoise, indigo, and violet. They represented, respectively: sex, life, healing, sun, serenity with nature, art, harmony, and spirit.
There are only six colours on the modern day gay pride flag.
To make the Google doodle, LGBTQ doodle staffers tried to channel that same do it yourself attitude and community spirit of Mr Baker. A group of them took trips to local San Francisco fabric shops, and put together a stop motion animation of the flag coming together in a tiny kitchen a few blocks away from where the original flag was put together by Mr Baker nearly 40 years ago.
Mr Baker died in his sleep in March. He was 65 at the time, and had been living in New York City for more than 20 years. Following his death, California state Senator Scott Wiener said that Mr Baker “helped define the modern LGBT movement.”
LGBTQ pride groups later put together a rainbow font in memory of the designer of the now-prominent flag that has been used to celebrate their cause.
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