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In 1978, San Francisco City Supervisor Harvey Milk, the first openly gay elected official in the history of California, asked artist and drag activist Gilbert Baker to create a flag that would celebrate gay life.
If you don’t know who Milk is—he was charismatic, fascinating, and beyond courageous, and his story was ably told in Gus Van Sant’s 2008 Milk, with Sean Penn in the title role, for which he won an Academy Award.
No wonder Milk asked his comrade to design a flag! “Our job as gay people was to come out, to be visible, to live in the truth, as I say, to get out of the lie,” Baker once explained. “A flag really fit that mission, because that’s a way of proclaiming your visibility or saying, ‘This is who I am!’” The original rainbow flag made its debut at the San Francisco Gay Freedom Day Parade on June 25, 1978, almost exactly 46 years ago. It had six colors: hot pink for sex, red for life, orange for healing, yellow for sunlight, green for nature, turquoise for art, indigo for harmony, and violet for spirit.
The first versions were made by hand by Baker and a team of volunteers; because of production issues, the pink and turquoise stripes were ditched, and indigo was replaced by basic blue, which resulted in the contemporary six-striped flag. In 1994 Baker made a mile-long banner, to mark the 25th anniversary of the Stonewall insurrection.
Now, decades later, the rainbow flag is ubiquitous in June—flapping outside banks and restaurants, plastered on walls, decorating t shirts and caps, hanging from windows. (Or at least it should be! Shamefully, there are some stores across the country that have bowed to pressure and removed Pride displays from their shelves.)
Which brings us to the wonderful world of rainbow-hued jewelry. Multi-colored spans of gems have been coveted for hundreds of years. Of course, the most beautiful of these baubles aren’t only meant to be worn in June –they will also look swell the rest of the year. Still, there is one item on our curated roster that is especially poignant this month: a pig with gem-stone studded wings. Because, if you read your history, you will see that not so long ago, the very notion of gay civil rights, gay marriage, gay families was considered as likely as an airborne swine. But stick around—as the character Prior Walter says in Tony Kushner’s Angels in America: “The world only spins forward. We will be citizens. The time has come.”
The time is now! Wear these rainbow jewels with pride.