Gilbert Baker 66th Birthday: Google Doodle Honors Rainbow Flag Creator

Friday’s Google Doodle honored Gilbert Baker, the creator of a rainbow flag that became a symbol of the LGBT community, on his 66th birthday. Baker died March 31 this year.

“Today we celebrate Gilbert Baker’s pride, creativity, and the lasting impact he’s had on strengthening and uniting people all over the world,” Google wrote.

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Apart from the U.S., the doodle appeared on Google's homepage in most South American countries including Argentina, Brazil, Colombia and Chile. European countries such as Germany, Spain, Hungary and Greece could view it on the search engine's homepage. In Asia, only Japan and South Korea could view the doodle.

Baker was born in Chanute, Kansas, in 1951 and grew up in Parsons. He designed the rainbow flag in 1978 in a bid to replace an earlier symbol for gay pride — a pink triangle. This was the symbol the Nazis used to mark people sent to concentration camps for being homosexuals. Baker’s rainbow flag widely became the symbol of LGBT rights causes and a symbol of gay pride.

“We needed something beautiful, something from us,” Baker said during a 2015 interview with the Museum of Modern Art in San Francisco. “The rainbow is so perfect because it really fits our diversity in terms of race, gender, ages, all of those things. Plus, it’s a natural flag — it’s from the sky!” he added.

The flag’s original colors were hot pink, red, orange, yellow, green, turquoise, indigo, and violet. They represented sex, life, healing, the sun, serenity with nature, art, harmony, and spirit respectively. Now, the modern day flag comprises of only six colors.

Despite the changes, Baker remained proud of his work.

“Together, we’re changing our world, our planet, from a place of hate and violence and war to a place of love and diversity and acceptance,” he said in 2009. “That is why we’re here. That’s the big, long rainbow — from before me to well after me,” he added.

Baker came out as gay at the age of 19.

“[Gay] people were psychopaths, criminals. I was afraid my family would lock me up and give me electroshock. I was a screaming queen,” he told the Miami Herald in 2013.

“My parents didn’t talk to me for ten years, but it allowed me to get past my own suicidal urges, it allowed me to become the artist that was inside of me and it allowed me to say - Well, you know, I can have a dream and I can go for it,” Baker said in an interview with Refinery29 in June 2015.

After leaving the army, he found a home in the LGBT community in San Francisco.

“For me and, really, a whole generation of people, that was really a defining time,” Baker said in an interview with ​New York Times in 2008.

Baker died in his sleep March 31 at his residence in New York City. Doctors revealed hypertensive and atherosclerotic cardiovascular disease to be the cause of his death.