A glance back at the history of the Pride flag, to remember and revive what it was before capitalism appropriated it.

The often-changing rainbow symbol has taken many forms over the past century, from narratives in novels, to everyday stories, public historian GVGK Tang explains in Smithsonian magazine.

Till 1978, the most common symbol for the LGBTQI+ community was the pink triangle, reappropriated from its violent use by Nazis who used it to label queer and trans folks at concentration camps. But there wasn’t a widely “agreed-upon symbol for LGBTQ rights'' Los Angeles Times reports.

The history of the rainbow can be traced back to 1915, with D.H. Lawrence’s novel The Rainbow, and Nadia Legrand’s 1958 The Rainbow Has Seven Colors, both featuring lesbian love stories, where the rainbows symbolize “new beginnings, different stages in life, and the gradations of time itself,” Tang writes.

Over the years, rainbow was in nonfiction articles, rock groups, autobiographies, poetry, political parties, gay slang like “Friend of Dorothy,” that gay men used to find each other, from L. Frank Baum’s The Wonderful Wizard of Oz and the song, Somewhere Over The Rainbow.

The rainbow gained popularity as a widely recognized symbol when a group of artists came together to create a hopeful symbol that represented different identities within the community for San Francisco’s Gay Freedom Day Parade. This included seamaster James McNamara, a tie-dye artist Lynn Segerblom, activist and drag queen Gilbert Baker, and volunteers from San Francisco’s 1978 pride parade decorations committee.

Over the years, the Pride flag’s been transforming -- in 2018, Daniel Quasar created the Progress Pride Flag to represent the trans community and Black, Brown LGBTQI+ people of color, and last year, columnist Valentino Vecchietti added to it with the Intersex flag.


What does the rainbow mean to you today?