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The rainbow flag is the most common symbol of gay and lesbian identity, diversity, pride. Designed by San Francisco artist Gilbert Baker, it consists in six coloured stripes, red, orange, yellow, green, blue, and violet. It is most commonly flown with the red stripe on top.
The first pride flag was hand-dyed by Baker, hot pink, red, orange, yellow, green, blue, indigo, and violet. When he decided to mass-produce it, he found that hot pink dye was not commercially available, so he removed that colour. Later, the rainbow colours were used to line either side of the street down which Harvey Milk's funeral cortege was to pass; in order to have an even number, indigo was removed, resulting in the design we see today.
Each colour has a specific meaning:
- red, for life;
- orange, for healing;
- yellow, for sun;
- green, for nature;
- blue, for spirit;
- violet, for art.
The basic rainbow flag has spawned innumerable variations. One common item of jewelry is the pride necklace or freedom rings, consisting of six rings, one of each colour, on a chain. Queer bookstores, sex shops, and souvenir stores are known for selling "pride accessories" - anything you could possibly want, coloured rainbow, from key chains to candles. Any number of national flags have been altered to include rainbows, and the flag itself has taken any number of shapes from inverted triangles to smiley faces.
In Montreal, Beaudry metro station, which serves that city's gay village, was recently rebuilt with rainbow-coloured elements integrated into its design - certainly a first.
See Queer culture, pink triangle.