It Belonged to All of Us: Gilbert Baker and the First Rainbow Flag
Drift off to sleep learning how the rainbow flag was made: in an attic, in trash cans, by thirty people with dye on their hands. In June 1978, Gilbert Baker and around thirty volunteers hand-dyed a thousand yards of muslin on the top floor of a San Francisco community center and stitched two flags, each thirty feet by sixty. The eight stripes carried meanings, hot pink for sex, red for life, orange for healing, yellow for sunlight, green for nature, turquoise for magic and art, indigo for serenity, violet for spirit. On June 25 they rose at United Nations Plaza, and Baker said the crowd understood in an instant, that it belonged to all of us. Tonight's story follows him from a Kansas railroad town through the Army, through Harvey Milk's election and his assassination, through the practical accidents that turned eight stripes into six, through a mile-long flag carried by ten thousand people in 1994 and a flag laid from one ocean to the other in 2003, to his death in 2017 and the rediscovered fragment of an original flag that came home to San Francisco with its colors still bright. Told twice, once at a natural pace and once more slowly with longer pauses to carry you into sleep. Expect hot dye stirred with broom handles, stained knuckles, wet cotton, and color drying on lines in the last of the afternoon light. 💛 Support the show: https://restful-rainbow.captivate.fm/support and if not, no need at all, sleep well either way.