I was astounded nobody had thought of making a rainbow flag before because it seemed like such an obvious symbol for us’, he said 2008 in an interview with The Independent (Huppke, 2017). ‘To me, it was the only thing that could really express our diversity, beauty and our joy. Baker didn’t have to think long about a design. Milk, one of the first openly gay politicians, wanted the new flag to be displayed at the annual pride parade in San Francisco (Grovier, 2016) and gave the task of designing it to Gilbert Baker, a former Vietnam-war veteran and then drag-performer. The new symbol, the rainbow flag, was designed on the initiative of Harvey Milk, who thought that reusing the pink triangle was inappropriate, as it was stemming from this dark and painful past and felt forced upon the community. After the second world war, the pink triangle was stripped of its intended humiliation and started to become a sign of pride and the most used image for gay rights movements (Morgan, 2019). The triangle was used by the Nazis, who attached it to the clothing of men being imprisoned in concentration camps for their homosexuality.
As a new symbol for the gay rights movement, the flag had to compete with the pink triangle, which had a heavy history. On the 25th of June 1978, the original rainbow flag made its debut at the San Francisco’s Gay Freedom Day Parade.
