The Rainbow Flag

Have you seen the rainbow flag in the main entrance into the Narthex? Do you know what it means?

Color has long played an important role in the gay, lesbian, bisexual and transgender (GLBT) community's expression of pride. In Victorian England, for example, the color green was associated with homosexuality. The color purple (or, more accurately, lavender) became popularized as a symbol for pride in the late 1960s. And, of course, there's the pink triangle. Although it was first used in Nazi Germany to identify gay males in concentration camps, the pink triangle only received widespread use as a gay pop icon in the early 1980s. But the most colorful of our symbols is the Rainbow Flag, and its rainbow of colors - red, orange, yellow, green, blue, and purple (meaning life, healing, sun, nature, art and spirit respectively) - represents the diversity of our community.

The first Rainbow Flag was designed in 1978 by Gilbert Baker, a San Francisco artist, who created the flag in response to a local activist's call for the need of a community symbol. Baker designed a flag with eight stripes: pink, red, orange, yellow, green, blue, indigo, and violet. But, since the colors were custom dyes "hot pink" could not be mass-produced so the colors were reduced to seven.

In November 1978, San Francisco's gay community was stunned when the city's first openly gay supervisor, Harvey Milk, was assassinated. Wishing to demonstrate the community's strength and solidarity in the aftermath of this tragedy, the 1979 Pride Parade Committee decided to use Baker's flag. The committee eliminated the indigo stripe so they could divide the colors evenly along the parade route - three colors on one side of the street and three on the other. Soon the six colors were incorporated into a six-striped version that became popularized and that, today, is recognized by the International Congress of Flag Makers.

The sticker and flag at Bethany's main entrance are symbols recognized by the GLBT community and a sign that all are welcome here as full participants in Bethany's family.

Adapted from The Rainbow Flag by Steven W. Anderson