Lulu Miller

And he was like, Gilbert, you love fabrics.

You're always making you're always sewing things for our drag queen friends.

Like, can you just make some kind of fun thing?

flag for a banner basically for the parade.

And I guess he'd made banners for Harvey Milk before that are just like, you know, whatever, gay rights now, justice, like that kind of thing.

And he was like, but can you make us like a thing?

And so Gilbert Baker worked with this woman who would call herself the tie dye queen, Lynn Sogerblum.

who was very good at like colors and fabrics and they came up with the idea of well let's use a rainbow and the reason why was yes it's beautiful and also it represents the diversity of sexuality and genders in the queer experience but mainly the fact that it was found in nature yay

Because queerness is natural and this idea that it's like this thing that encompasses the beauty, the celebration and the diversity and naturalness of queerness.

And so each color had its... Originally it had eight colors.

It now has six, but it also used to have like this great pinky magenta, pink and a very cool turquoise, which they then took out because of like, it was hard to reproduce those with dyes or something.

But each color had its own...

Like its own symbolic thing for like something it expressed about the queer experience.

So pink was like for hot sex or just sex, but, you know, hot sex.

Indigo was about serenity and they each I can do all the colors if you want or not, but they each had a different thing.

That's beautiful.

Yeah.

Yeah.

And so with Lynn Sogerblum, they like he felt very strongly he wanted all the dyes to be natural, organic dyes.

And so they did this like extensive dyeing practice and they had something like 30 people working on those first few flags.