Gay Pride Flag Artist Dies – IOTW Report

Gay Pride Flag Artist Dies

Died in his sleep at 65???? Why do I feel something is being left out of the story?

Newser-

Artist and activist Gilbert Baker has died nearly 40 years after creating the Rainbow Flag that now symbolizes gay pride around the world, ABC 7 reports. Baker’s death was first announced by fellow activist Cleve Jones. “Gilbert gave the world the Rainbow Flag; he gave me forty years of love and friendship,” Jones posted on Facebook. According to the San Francisco Chronicle, Baker died his his sleep at his home in New York. He was 65.

Baker was asked by Harvey Milk to create something to replace the pink triangle used to identify homosexuals by the Nazis; he decided on a flag. “Flags are about power,” ABC 7 quotes Baker as saying. “Flags say something.” The first Rainbow Flag flew over the 1978 Gay Freedom Day celebration in San Francisco, according to the GLBT Historical Society, to which Baker gifted one of the sewing machines he used to make his flag. A memorial will be held for Baker Friday night in San Francisco. The GLBT Historical Society is asking that all Rainbow Flags be lowered to half staff in his honor.

48 Comments on Gay Pride Flag Artist Dies

  1. So, the asshole who tried to bastardize God’s gift to us [the promise that he would never again flood the earth and wipe out most of humanity] finally kicked the bucket? Good riddance, excuse me while I enjoy my rainbow sticks w/ little unicorns and look thru my childhood bible that has the arc and a big fat rainbow on it. 😡
    [also known as: Good and correct uses for the rainbow.]

  2. Not “gay.”
    A pervert.
    A man who embraced perversion and depravity.
    A man who celebrated the corruption of the mind and body.

    May God have mercy on his soul.

    izlamo delenda est …

  3. When I was young (early 60s) I belonged to the Rainbow Girls which a Masonic group for girls (Demolay for boys, Eastern Star for women). We had a rainbow flag and pin so I would say he appropriated it from God first and our young group second. He sure wasn’t original.

  4. Yeah.
    Why was this group allowed to culturally appropriate what had been a childhood symbol of innocence – of sunshine coming after a rain?
    Now it’s a symbol sullied by it’s association with a sexually oriented political movement. The innocence is gone.

  5. Oh well, going against the house again. Forty years ago the gays were being beaten, abused, discriminated against, you name it. They weren’t like they are today, that is now they’re the ones bullying, attacking, maligning, judging, manipulating the law and being general all around fascists (well at least a few of them, the rest just want to be left in peace, not everyone marches in those damned parades). For awhile the flag meant a peaceful movement until the assholes took over (much the same as the Democrat Party) I hope the creator of it realized that before he died. Like for most people (there are some exceptions, Clinton’s the clock is ticking) may the may RIP.

  6. I hate the rainbow, which used to be a happy thing for me, has been usurped by these groups.Now I shun rainbows but I never knew whose fault it was. At least he can do no more harm now.

  7. “Does anyone else find it sweetly ironic that given Gilbert’s death, they now want everyone to fly their Rainbow flags at half staff?”

    Jerry, I’m sure every one of our embassies complied.

  8. Well, here I go with scr_north, swimming against the current (curse that Devil who makes me do it), but he’s right. Maybe the pendulum has swung too far now, but at one time it was despicable the way Gay people were treated in this country, and if this was a way for them to feel better about the way they were born (note that I am leaving any “Creator” references out of this because I don’t want to get into all that), then maybe his flag was a positive thing at the time. Any good symbol can be perverted by assholes who appropriate it for their own purposes, just like the KKK appropriated the Confederate battle flag, an act for which I can never forgive them.

  9. @Tim, yep back then they tried to keep to themselves. I did make a mistake though, the real fight was started in 1969 with the Stonewall riots in NYC. That was after the cops raided them one too many times. The next 45 or so years was a case of the gays slowly getting equal rights and then not stopping at equality and getting preferred status and becoming the bullying,
    vicious, cruel, unforgiving buggers they are today. All the things the complained that we were those years ago. It’s all out there on the web and some of it will surprise you.

  10. Fags have always existed. It wasn’t that we attacked them. It was that we knew who they were and chose to ignore them. That, apparently, was unacceptable. We must celebrate them. Or else.

    Good luck with that. It will never happen.

  11. Faggots have always been afforded the same Civil Rights as everyone else.
    They can only be considered faggots at their own insistence.
    Nobody’s watching what they do in the privacy of their own bedrooms.

    No One has a “right” to be married.
    No One has a “right” to abuse children.
    Never did – still don’t.

    All the fuckin faggots EVER had to do was shut the fuck up and mind their own business – and let the humans mind their own.

    izlamo delenda est …

  12. Like I said: give em an inch. See where it leads. Now we’re expected to celebrate perversion while many don’t even know what bathroom to use. Imagine what’s in our future.

  13. @PHenry: “It wasn’t that we attacked them. It was that we knew who they were and chose to ignore them.”

    1940’s, 1950’s. Even as late as the early 1970’s.

    Vass you dere, Sharlie?

  14. Read “The Decameron” by Boccaccio.
    Written in 1350 (~).

    Makes fun of fags. No killing them, no throwing them off buildings, no hangings, no torture, no – nothing! Objects of derision and scorn – as they should be.

    Christianity has a long history of tolerance towards the mentally ill.

    izlamo delenda est …

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