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An important piece of LGBTQ+ history is returning home, just in time for Pride Month. Throughout the month of June, the GLBT Historical Society in San Francisco will be exhibiting a fragment of one of the two original Pride flag designs by Gilbert Baker, which hasn’t been seen by the public in 43 years. Only flown once at the Bay Area city’s Gay Freedom Day Parade in 1978, the iconic banner was long thought to be lost.
Unveiled on June 4 at a ceremony attended by San Francisco Mayor London Breed, the flag looks markedly different from the version we know today. Baker’s design originally had eight stripes before he was forced to eliminate neon pink and turquoise for practical considerations.
According to Gerard Koskovich, a founding member of the GLBT Historical Society, pink was too expensive to manufacture, and a seven-stripe version would have been logistically difficult. For the 1979 parade along Market Street in the Castro district, Baker wanted to hang the flags vertically on light poles to flank the procession. “You need an even number of stripes,” he quoted Baker as saying on the subject. “You can't have three on one side and four on the other. It will look strange."
But when Koskovich saw the flag in person, what he was struck by was its size. The original was 30 feet by 60 feet and had to be carried by eight people to install it in 1978, and even the fragment was 29 feet by between 12 and 13 feet. The remnants had to be “bunched up like a drag queen's fabulous dress” just to be put on display, he says.
“It’s awe-inspiring how gigantic these things are, which also explains why they probably didn't survive over the years,” Koskovich tells them. over the phone. “It takes a lot of space to store that stuff.”
Of the two original Pride flags designed by Baker, one was stolen following the 1979 parade: an eight-stripe design with a square in the upper-left-hand corner containing tie-dyed stars, closely resembling the American flag. The other, which will be on display through the GLBT Historical Society for the remainder of the year, mysteriously vanished. It was originally stored at the San Francisco Gay Community Center before being damaged by mildew, owing to the building’s leaky roof.
As Koskovich explains, Baker “simply chopped off the part that was ruined, threw it away, and kept the remaining piece that was still fresh and lovely looking.”
“In 1979, that remnant wasn’t a precious remnant of the founding object that created an internationally recognized symbol for the LGBT community,” he says. “It was just damaged leftover decorations from last year's parade. It makes sense that nobody paid any particular attention to it.”
But as the rainbow flag grew in importance as a symbol for the LGBTQ+ community throughout the 1980s and 90s, the fragment saved by Baker was nowhere to be found. It would not be discovered until 2019, when Koskovich says that Charles Beal, president of the Gilbert Baker Foundation, contacted Baker’s sister looking for materials from his estate that could be carried at the Stonewall 50 Parade. Baker passed away in 2017 at the age of 65, and among his belongings was a portion of a rainbow flag.
Initially, it did not occur to Beal that the flag now in his possession could be the long-lost Pride banner until he was contacted by someone who had visited Baker’s apartment in the 80s and remembered seeing it. At that point, Beal looked at the remnant he had been bequeathed and noticed “that it was hand-dyed fabric and fairly artisanal production,” Koskovich says.
After sending the material to flag expert James Ferragin, who worked with Baker during the 1970s, the artifact’s provenance was soon verified. Koskovich says it’s oddly fitting that the banner was in his “belongings for 40 years, and then by fluke, identified a couple of years after Gilbert's death.”
“He did a lot of LSD in the 1970s and early 1980s,” Koskovich says, noting that Baker openly discussed the subject throughout his life. “He was a major pot smoker for the rest of his life. To me, it’s not surprising that in his many moves and his numerous projects that he worked on, that he simply lost track of the fact that among those various boxes was this fragment of the original flag.”
Following its authentication, the flag was given to the GLBT Historical Society, where it stands as the centerpiece of an exhibition paying tribute to its maker: “Performance, Protest and Politics: The Art of Gilbert Baker.”
In a statement, GLBT Historical Society Terry Beswick notes that the value of this discovery cannot be understated. “For LGBTQ people, there are few artifacts that carry the historic, political, and cultural significance of this seminal work of art, the original rainbow flag,” Beswick says in a joint statement with Beal.
Koskovich agrees, saying the flag remnant is one of the “20 most important symbolic artifacts of LGBTQ history of the 20th century.” He also believes the material is a reminder of the way that Baker’s design has flourished in the decades since the flag’s creation, with the rainbow becoming a universal symbol of the LGBTQ+ community all over the world.
“To produce a trademark that becomes internationally recognized normally requires a massive, years-long, corporate campaign with an enormous budget to make sure everybody knows what Coca-Cola is or what Barbie is,” Koskovich explains. “This one had nothing going for it except that the simplicity of its design clearly connected with some resonances that are really wonderful. The rainbow comes from nature, just like LGBTQ people come from nature.”
“Ultimately, I think it demonstrates the strength, the force, and the inspiration of the LGBTQ movement and LGBTQ people,” he adds.
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