Each featured eight stripes in a rainbow of colours: pink to represent sex, red for life, orange for healing, yellow for the sun, green for nature, turquoise for magic and art, blue for serenity and purple for spirit, according to the artist’s foundation. “People hang it in small towns and in countries where they still experience a lot of oppression, but it also has become a political statement to say that we exist, we have the right to love who we want to love and to participate as full members of society,” the museum’s executive director, Terry Beswick, told the local public news station KQED.īaker, who worked at the Paramount Flag Company in San Francisco in the 1970s, created two monumental flags with the help of volunteers including fellow artists Lynn Segerblom, James McNamara, Glenne McElhinney, Joe Duran and Paul Langlotz. To celebrate the start of Pride Month in early June, the hand-stitched and dyed 28ft-long banner, which has become an important symbol of queer identity, has been permanently installed in the museum.

A segment of the original rainbow flag, designed and created by the late artist Gilbert Baker for the San Francisco Gay Freedom Day Parade in June 1978 and thought to be lost since then, was recently rediscovered and donated to the city’s GLBT Historical Society Museum and Archives.