The rainbow is a part of nature, and you have to be in the right place to see it. It's beautiful, all of the colors, even the colors you can't see. That really fit us as a people because we are all of the colors. Our sexuality is all of the colors. We are all the genders, races, and ages.
We needed something to express our joy, our beauty, our power. And the rainbow did that.
You don't have to live a lie. Living a lie will mess you up. It will send you into depression. It will warp your values.
The rainbow flag is a symbol of freedom and liberation that we made for ourselves.
When I was young, they thought I was from outer space. I was the only gay person they probably knew, and they struggled with that. Everybody knew I was gay. They just didn't want to talk about it.
The reason the rainbow flag endures is because people own it. It means something to them.
I think the Rainbow Flag will survive forever, primarily because it's the perfect flag, regardless of whatever political meaning it may have or evolve to.
Once I was finally liberated from my Kansas background, the first thing I did was get a sewing machine, because it's 1972, and I have to look like Mick Jagger and David Bowie every single second. Taffeta jumpsuits.
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.
When I fell in love, all the shame and guilt I carried with me for years suddenly vanished.
Anita Bryant had the effect of galvanizing the whole gay movement. She was somebody whom everybody could hate. She was easy to hate.
I was astounded nobody had thought of making a rainbow flag before because it seemed like such an obvious symbol for us.
Harvey Milk was a friend of mine, an important gay leader in San Francisco in the '70s, and he carried a really important message about how important it was to be visible, how important it was to come out, and that was the single most important thing we had to do.
In 1978, when I thought of creating a flag for the gay movement, there was no other international symbol for us than the pink triangle, which the Nazis used to identify homosexuals in concentration camps. Even though the pink triangle was and still is a powerful symbol, it was very much forced upon us.
Vexillography is a very big word! Vexillography is really the high science and art and understanding of flags and their history - the academic word for flag making and heraldry.
What the rainbow has given our people is a thing that connects us.
A true flag is not something you can really design. A true flag is torn from the soul of the people. A flag is something that everyone owns, and that's why they work. The Rainbow Flag is like other flags in that sense: it belongs to the people.
A rainbow is something in the sky, so a rainbow flag fits.
I decided that we should have a flag, that a flag fit us as a symbol, that we are a people, a tribe if you will. And flags are about proclaiming power, so it's very appropriate.
Anita Bryant is an important figure in gay history because she enraged a generation of people who got active.
