“That's what flags are for. Flags are about proclaiming power...that visibility is key to our success and to our justice.”— Gilbert Baker, cbc.ca
“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. Our job as gay people was to come o…”— Gilbert Baker, rollingstone.com
“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.”— Gilbert Baker, rollingstone.com
“I think that there's some prison factory in China somewhere where LGBT people can't come out, are living lives of desperation, and they're churning out rainbow tchotchkes for gay pride parades for people that don't even know the history of what they're wearing and waving.”— Gilbert Baker, cbc.ca
“We needed something to express our joy, our beauty, our power. And the rainbow did that.”— Gilbert Baker, cnn.com
“They had a whole code of emblems that they used to oppress people, and we needed something to answer that.”— Gilbert Baker, cbc.ca
“Up until the rainbow flag, the pink triangle was the dominant symbol for our movement. But it was negative. It had a depressing origin. You know, Holocaust and murder was put on us by Hitler. We needed something from us.”— Gilbert Baker, npr.org
“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.”— Gilbert Baker, chicagotribune.com
“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.”— Gilbert Baker, militaryoneclick.com