We’ll never forget that there’s people out there that don’t have it so good.” But it’s home to something that’s global, and it means something to a lot of people around the world.
“You see that flag up at Castro and Market Street, and you think that’s Gilbert’s flag. “It was born here,” Gilbert Baker Foundation President Charley Beal said Friday at the flag’s unveiling at the GLBT Historical Society Museum. Now, after a four-decade-long journey from a leaky storage unit to a dusty closet, a piece of the original fabric is returning home to San Francisco. embassies and symbolizing inclusivity across the world. Since its first flight above the United Nations Plaza during San Francisco’s Gay Freedom Day Parade, the rainbow flag has grown to global significance, painted on city crosswalks, flown at U.S. In 1978, San Francisco resident Gilbert Baker stitched a new symbol: a striped rainbow flag of pink, red, orange, yellow, green, turquoise, blue and purple. For decades, the primary LGBTQ symbol was a small pink triangle - first displayed on the uniforms of prisoners at Nazi concentration camps who had been labeled as homosexual.