Background
Baker grew up in a small town in Kansas, and his grandmother owned a woman"s clothing store.
Baker grew up in a small town in Kansas, and his grandmother owned a woman"s clothing store.
He served in the United States Army from 1970 to 1972. He was stationed in San Francisco at the beginning of the gay rights movement. After his honorable discharge from the military, he taught himself to sew.
He used his skill to create banners for gay-rights and anti-war protest marches.
In 1979 he began work at Paramount Company in San Francisco, then located on the southwest corner of Polk Street and Post Street in the Polk Gulch neighborhood. Baker has designed displays for Dianne Feinstein, the Premier of China, the presidents of France, Venezuela and the Philippines, the King of Spain, and many others
He also designed creations for numerous civic events and San Francisco Gay Pride. In 1984 he designed flags for the Democratic National Convention.
In 1994 Baker moved to New York City, where he now lives, and continued his creative work and activism.
That year he created the world"s largest flag (at that time) in celebration of the 25th anniversary of the Stonewall Riots that took place in 1969. In 2003, to commemorate the Rainbow ’s 25th anniversary, Baker created a Rainbow that stretched from the Gulf of Mexico to the Atlantic Ocean in Key West. After the commemoration, he sent sections of this flag to more than 100 cities around the world.
Due to his creation of the rainbow flag, Baker has used the drag queen name "Busty Ross".
The colors on the Rainbow reflect the diversity of the LGBT community. When Gilbert Baker raised the first rainbow flags at San Francisco Pride (his group raised two flags at the Civic Center) on June 25, 1978, it had eight colors, each with a symbolic meaning:
Hot Pink: sexuality
Red: life
Orange: healing
Yellow: sunlight
Green: nature
Turquoise: magic/art
Blue: serenity/harmony
Violet: spirit
Thirty volunteers had helped Baker hand-dye and stitch the first two flags in the top-floor attic gallery of the Gay Community Center at 330 Grove Street in San Francisco.
As they were not supposed to use dye in public washing machines, they waited until late at night to rinse out the dye from their clothes, and put Clorox in the washing machines after they left. The design has undergone several revisions to first remove then re-add colors due to widely available fabrics.
As of 2008, the most common variant consists of six stripes, with the colours red, orange, yellow, green, blue, and violet.
Baker refers to this version of the flag as the "commercial version", because it came about due to practical considerations of mass production. Specifically, the rainbow flag lost its hot pink stripe when Baker approached the Paramount Company to begin mass producing them, and the hot pink fabric was too rare and expensive to include. The rainbow flag lost its indigo stripe before the 1979 Gay Freedom Day Parade, as the committee organizing the parade wanted to fly the flag in two halves, from the light poles along both sides of Market Street, so it became a six-striped flag with equal halves.
The Rainbow is commonly flown horizontally, with the red stripe on top, as it would be in a natural rainbow.
In 2003, Baker and his Key West project were the subject of Rainbow Pride, a feature-length documentary by Marie Jo Ferron, bought by Public Broadcasting Service National and debuting in New York on W National Educational Television. Baker recreated his original Rainbow for the Academy-award winning 2008 film Milk, and is shown being interviewed on one of the featurettes of the Digital Video Disc release.
