In 1978, the flag had eight colors and one designer. By 2021, the most widely used version of that same idea carried eleven colors, arranged as six stripes plus a five-color chevron pointed at the hoist. Nobody planned that outcome. Five separate people, working decades apart and without any shared authority to answer to, kept deciding the flag wasn't finished yet.
That flag is the Progress Pride flag, and its design history reads less like a single decision and more like a public argument that never formally closed. Every addition came from someone looking at the existing version and concluding it left somebody out. Tracing how six stripes became eleven means tracing who made that case, one redesign at a time.
A flag stitched together by volunteers
The story starts with Gilbert Baker, an Army veteran who learned to sew from fellow activist Mary Dunn and used the skill to make banners for gay rights and anti-war marches around San Francisco. In 1978, city supervisor Harvey Milk and other organizers asked Baker, then co-chair of the Pride parade's decorations committee, to design a new symbol for the gay community, something that wasn't a borrowed insignia like the pink triangle. Baker wanted a flag, and he wanted it to look like the diversity of the people it represented.
He and roughly thirty volunteers, including Lynn Segerblom and James McNamara, hand-dyed and hand-stitched two enormous flags, each 30 by 60 feet, and flew them at United Nations Plaza on June 25, 1978, for that year's Gay Freedom Day. The original design carried eight stripes: hot pink for sex, red for life, orange for healing, yellow for sunlight, green for nature, turquoise for art and magic, indigo for harmony, and violet for spirit. Baker never filed for a trademark or copyright on the design, and even challenged an advocacy group that tried to claim ownership of it in 1978. He wanted the flag accessible to everyone, with no one able to fence it off.
Fabric shortages did what no committee managed
The eight-stripe version didn't last two years, and the reasons were mostly practical. After Milk's assassination in November 1978, demand for the flag jumped, and San Francisco's Paramount Flag Company started mass-producing it. Hot pink fabric wasn't commercially available in the quantities a flag maker needed, so Paramount dropped it, leaving seven stripes.
The following year, organizers planning the 1979 parade wanted the flag to hang from lampposts down both sides of Market Street, split evenly across each pole. Seven stripes don't split evenly. Baker worked with Paramount's Ken Hughes to drop turquoise as well and swap indigo for a simpler royal blue, landing on the six stripes still in use today: red, orange, yellow, green, blue, and violet. A design built to symbolize an entire community had been trimmed down for lamppost math. It's a reminder that flags, even ones loaded with meaning, still answer to the same constraints as any other manufactured object.
A second flag, built on its own
While the rainbow flag was settling into six stripes, a separate lineage was forming for a group the rainbow had never specifically named. Monica Helms, a transgender woman and Navy veteran, designed the transgender pride flag in August 1999. She has said the idea came to her in a burst, two weeks after a conversation with Michael Page, who had designed the bisexual pride flag the year before and told her to keep any new design simple, since fewer colors mean a cheaper flag to produce.
Helms settled on five horizontal stripes: light blue, pink, white, pink, light blue. Light blue stands for the traditional color assigned to baby boys, pink for baby girls, and the white band in the center represents people transitioning, people who are intersex, and anyone who considers their gender undefined. She built the stripe order to be symmetrical on purpose, so the flag reads correctly no matter which side faces out or which way it flies. It debuted at Phoenix Pride in 2000, and the original now sits in the Smithsonian's National Museum of American History.
Helms wasn't trying to modify the rainbow flag. She was making a separate statement for a community the six-stripe design had never addressed by name. That distinction matters, because it's exactly the gap the next redesign set out to close.
Philadelphia decides six stripes aren't enough
In the spring of 2017, Philadelphia's Mayor's Office of LGBT Affairs, newly led by director Amber Hikes, was working through a specific local problem. The previous September, a recording had surfaced of a Gayborhood bar owner repeatedly using a racial slur about his own patrons, setting off months of public hearings about discrimination inside the city's own LGBTQ venues. The office paired mandated sensitivity training with a public campaign called More Color, More Pride, and commissioned the ad agency Tierney to design a new flag as its centerpiece.
The result added a black stripe and a brown stripe above the standard six, unveiled outside City Hall on June 8, 2017. The office described the two new bands as a direct way to make Black and brown LGBTQ Philadelphians visible inside a symbol that, in practice, hadn't been serving them.
The reaction split the community it was meant to unify. Charley Beal, a friend of Gilbert Baker's, told NBC News he worried people would credit the redesign to Baker without his input, and argued the original stripes were chosen to reflect the spectrum of color in nature, not skin tone, meaning the flag was already meant to include everyone. Reverend Irene Monroe, a Black lesbian activist, took the opposite view but arrived at a similarly uneasy place. She called it "pretty sad" that the community needed to spell out inclusion this explicitly at all, since the original flag should have covered everybody from the start. Both objections, from opposite directions, agreed on one thing: adding stripes is never only a design choice. It's an admission about who the previous version left out.
One designer combines the arguments
Daniel Quasar, a Portland-based non-binary graphic designer, was watching both lineages develop at once, the black and brown stripes out of Philadelphia and the pale blue, pink and white of Helms's trans flag, sitting parallel to the original six but never merged into it. In 2018, Quasar redesigned the flag to combine them.
Instead of adding more horizontal stripes to an already crowded field, Quasar pulled the five colors, black, brown, light blue, pink and white, out to the hoist side and shaped them into a chevron, pointing rightward across the rainbow field. On Quasar's own site, the arrow is explained as a signal of forward motion, a way of showing that progress on inclusion is ongoing rather than finished. Quasar also folded a specific meaning into the black stripe beyond representing Black community members: an acknowledgment of the stigma still faced by people living with HIV and AIDS, and a memorial for those the epidemic killed.
Quasar described the motivation to Dezeen in plain terms: "We need to always keep progress moving forward in all aspects of our community." The design spread fast once released. Pride festivals and city governments, from London's mayoral office to festivals in Mexico City and Sitges, started flying it independently of each other, with no coordinated rollout behind any of it.
The circle that arrived three years later
The Progress flag didn't settle the argument either. In 2013, Morgan Carpenter of Intersex Human Rights Australia designed a flag for intersex people: an unbroken purple circle centered on a yellow field, using colors that belonged to neither the pink-for-girls nor blue-for-boys convention. Carpenter has described the circle as symbolizing wholeness, a visual argument for bodily autonomy against a medical history of nonconsensual surgeries performed on intersex infants.
That flag existed on its own for eight years, separate from the Progress design the way Helms's trans flag once sat apart from the rainbow. Then, on June 7, 2021, UK activist Valentino Vecchietti of Intersex Equality Rights UK posted a modified version of the Progress flag, adding a yellow triangle with Carpenter's purple circle at its center, nested into the chevron alongside the black, brown and trans stripes. Vecchietti shared it on social media rather than through any organization with the authority to declare a flag official, and it spread anyway, drawing what Intersex Equality Rights UK described as feedback from intersex people and allies across the globe.
A flag with no one in charge of it
Every national flag on this site has a moment where a government, monarch or constitutional convention made a design official. The Progress flag has never had that moment, and it isn't going to. Baker gave his design away rather than controlling it. Helms built a separate flag rather than petitioning anyone to edit an existing one. Philadelphia's office had the authority to fly a flag over its own city hall, not to redraw a symbol a wider community already claimed. Quasar and Vecchietti both released their versions the same way: by putting an image online and letting other people decide whether to adopt it.
That's arguably the actual design principle running underneath all five versions. A national flag gets fixed the moment a government ratifies it, and change after that requires another government to act. The Progress flag works by the opposite logic. It stays open exactly because no one was ever in charge of closing it, and every stripe, chevron and circle added since 1978 has been somebody making the case, in public, that the flag still had room for one more.
