History

This page is meant to be a comprehensive and complete ordered explanation of pride flags and their history leading up to our own, if something is wrong or missing click this button.

Gilbert Baker Flag

Designed by artist Gilbert Baker at the request of San Francisco City Supervisor and first openly gay elected official in the history of California, Harvey Milk, the original rainbow flag made its debut at the San Francisco Gay Freedom Day Parade celebration on June 25, 1978. The rainbow has a symbolic meaning of diversity and differences within the community. Each stripe color has a meaning, hot pink for sex, red for life, orange for healing, yellow for sunlight, green for nature, turquoise for magic, indigo for serenity, and violet for spirit. Gilbert Baker died on March 31, 2017.

6 Stripe Rainbow Flag

As the Gilbert Baker Flag gained popularity it needed to be mass manufactured. Due to difficulties finding pink cloth the color was dropped. Turquoise was also hard to find so they combined it with indigo into royal blue. Leading to the very popular 6 stripe rainbow flag in 1979.

Victory Over AIDS Flag

This flag was created at some point in the 1980's during the height of the HIV/AIDS epidemic. Supposedly due to the suggestion of a San Francisco group, it adds a black stripe to the 6 stripe rainbow to honor those living with HIV/AIDS and those we have lost to it. The openly gay Sergeant Leonard Phillip Matlovich died of HIV/AIDS complications June 22, 1988. During his lifetime he proposed that when a cure is found the black stripe be removed and flags with it be burned. There is not much documented history about this flag otherwise.

Transgender Pride Flag

Created by Monica Helms, an openly transgender woman in 1999. The light blue and light pink symbolize the traditional colors for baby girls and baby boys, respectively. Meanwhile, the white represents others who identify as intersex, gender-neutral, non-binary or in between. It’s symmetrical to be equal for both men and women and others.

Intersex Pride Flag

In 2013 Morgan Carpenter, PhD created this flag with the influence of Mani Bruce Mitchell. It avoids gender stereotyped colors entirely with a bright field of golden yellow, and a purple circle emblem. He has a website with a page explaining this quite well.

Philadelphia Pride Flag

In 2017 as part of the More Colors More Pride movement started by Tierney Marketing Firm, this flag was created by AJ Hikes. Including a new black and brown stripe to emphasize the intersectionality and hate queer people of color face. This flag is often confused to be part of the black lives matter movement which it is not.

Progress Pride Flag

In 2018 Daniel Quasar made the progress pride flag. The chevron, uses the trans colors, along with a brown and black stripe as shown in the Philadelphia pride flag. Daniel Quasar also states that the black stripe also has it's meaning from the Victory Over AIDS flag.

Intersex Inclusive Pride Flag

In 2021 Valentino Vecchietti created the intersex-inclusive pride flag. This is very similar to the progress pride flag however adds a triangle to the chevron for the intersex flag.

Philadelphia Dawn Pride Flag

This is our flag. This final version was created on March 13, 2024. For a more in depth explanation of every part go to the "Our Flag" tab of this website.