GILBERT BAKER

My parents and I didn't speak for 10 years. It took a long time to rebuild that relationship.

A rainbow is something in the sky, so a rainbow flag fits.

I love going to cities around the world and seeing the rainbow flag, knowing that it's a safe place where I can be myself.

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.

We needed something to express our joy, our beauty, our power. And the rainbow did that.

The reason the rainbow flag endures is because people own it. It means something to them.

The rainbow flag is beautiful because it's about love. The Confederate flag is ugly because it's about hate. It's pretty simple from the art level: beautiful versus ugly.

Flags are about proclaiming power... that visibility is key to our success and to our justice.

What the rainbow has given our people is a thing that connects us.

Anita Bryant is an important figure in gay history because she enraged a generation of people who got active.

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.

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.

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.

I was afraid my family would lock me up and give me electroshock. I was a screaming queen.

It's not so easy to be gay or even a woman in some places in the world, and in many countries, it's illegal to be gay. You can be put to death. It's a global struggle. A human rights struggle on a global scale.

That's really how I ended up making the first flag - I was the guy who could sew it.

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.

Anita Bryant had the effect of galvanizing the whole gay movement. She was somebody whom everybody could hate. She was easy to hate.

Our movement is evolving. The movement to liberate our sexuality as a human right, that's an ongoing struggle.

A flag translates into everything, from tacky souvenirs to the names of organizations and the way that flags function.

I came out because I fell in love. It wasn't a terrible, horrible, damn thing. I was in love with somebody, and I wanted to scream it from the rooftops.

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.

Flags say something. You put a rainbow flag on your windshield, and you're saying something.

The rainbow flag is a symbol of freedom and liberation that we made for ourselves.

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.