Pride Month 2025: What colors are on a rainbow flag and what is their meaning?
Happy Pride Month! June marks the 55th anniversary of the first LGBTQ+ Pride march held in the United States.
Since its creation in 1978, the Rainbow Pride Flag has become a universal symbol for the LGBTQ community. While the flag's image is well-recognized, its history may not be as well-known.
Here is the history of how the Rainbow Pride Flag came to be and the meaning behind its colors.
Held in June every year, LGBTQ Pride Month is dedicated to the celebration and commemoration of lesbian, gay, bisexual, transgender and other sexualities. It seeks to honor LGBTQ history and the challenges the community faces, past and present, according to Cathy Renna, Communications Director for the National LGBTQ Task Force.
According to History, Pride Month is held in June due to honor the 1969 Stonewall Uprising in New York City. The riots began on June 28 when police officers raided the Stonewall Inn, a gay club located in Greenwich Village, which led to days of protests and violent clashes with law enforcement.
USA TODAY notes that in the year following the riots, some of the first Gay Pride parades were held in Chicago, San Francisco, Los Angeles and New York. Early Pride celebrations still excluded pivotal members, such as trans women and other women of color.
Celebrations soon expanded on their activist roots in the 1980s and 1990s with the onset of the HIV/AIDS epidemic. More recently, activists have used the celebrations to shed light topics from marriage equality to racial justice.
As for why it is called "pride," it again goes back to the Stonewall Riots. Bustle explains that Brenda Howard, a bisexual woman, is known as the "Mother of Pride" for her work in organizing the first LGBTQ Pride March back in 1970. It was also noted that Howard's peers and other key figures popularized the word following its inception.
June became known as Pride Month in the United States when former President Bill Clinton first recognized it in 1999, referring to it as "Gay & Lesbian Pride Month." Former President Barack Obama declared June "LGBT Pride Month" in 2009.
Most recently, former President Joe Biden declared June "LGBTQ+ Pride Month" in 2021, including all sexualities under the acronym.
Each of the flag's six rainbow colors has a unique meaning:
Red: Life
Orange: Healing
Yellow: Sunlight
Green: Nature
Blue: Serenity
Purple: Spirit
In recent years, many flags also feature black and brown stripes to represent marginalized LGBTIQ+ people of color and the trio of blue, pink, and white from the trans flag.
There are also more than 25 different variations of the Pride flag to represent different communities, including lesbians, transgender people and asexuality.
In the 1970s, Harvey Milk – the first openly gay elected official in California – tasked activist Gilbert Baker to design a symbol of hope for the gay community.
"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," Baker said in an interview with the Museum of Modern Art in 2015. "A flag really fit that mission, because that's a way of proclaiming your visibility, or saying, 'This is who I am!'"
The original pride flag had eight stripes, with colors symbolizing:
Hot pink: Sex
Red: Life
Orange: Healing
Yellow: Sunlight
Green: Nature
Turquoise: Magic
Indigo: Serenity
Purple: Spirit
Before the rainbow flag, the pink triangle was used as a symbol for the LGBTQ+ community, according to Baker. In Nazi Germany, people were forced to wear pink triangles. While the symbol was reclaimed, the community wanted a new symbol.
"We needed something beautiful, something from us," Baker said in the MoMA interview. "The rainbow is so perfect because it really fits our diversity in terms of race, gender, ages, all of those things."
The original Pride flag was flown for the first time at the San Francisco Gay Freedom Day Parade celebration on June 25, 1978, the History Channel reports.
The original flag was made by hand, but as the flags started to be mass-produced, the hot pink stripe was removed due to manufacturing difficulties, the New York Times reports.
Parade organizers also wanted the rainbow to have an even number of stripes so they could "split" the flag and use the halves to line the street along parade routes. Baker then removed the turquoise stripe and replaced the indigo stripe with blue, the History Channel reports.
This article originally appeared on Palm Beach Post: Pride Month 2025: What do all the colors in the pride flag mean?
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