It was far from an inclusive symbol based on pride rather than fear. The closest thing the movement had to a unifying symbol was a pink triangle - a symbol with roots in Nazi persecution. When he realized that the LGBTQ community didn’t have a symbol to represent the gay rights movement, Baker decided to create one. In the Army, of course, he’d seen that every unit, from divisions to platoons, had a flag, standard, emblem, or patch. He worked as a tailor and made clothes for gay pride events and anti-war protests.
He left the military in 1972 and stayed in San Francisco, becoming active in the flourishing counterculture communities of the time.
And even though everybody else was giving me a hard time I was the one that’s showing them how to have a good time, how to enjoy life and get into the groove.”įulfilling both his draftee obligation and his unofficial role as “party master,” he spent two years in San Francisco working as a medic and nurse in military hospitals and, he claimed, turning most of the soldiers in his barracks onto LSD.
“I was always very social and very outward going a survival mechanism, I think, for me and a lot of gay people was to be the party master. “I was the gay guy and subject to a lot of abuse and violence,” Baker said in 2008 about his treatment in the military. Still, it didn’t take long for his fellow soldiers to catch on. He had known while growing up in Chanute, Kansas, that he was gay, but he hid it when he was drafted. But he might never have created it if not for his two years in the Army.īaker was drafted into the Army in 1970, at the height of the Vietnam War, on his 19th birthday. Gilbert Baker is remembered today as the man who created the rainbow flag, the universal symbol of the LGBTQ rights movement.