Baker, Gilbert, 1951-2017

Gilbert Baker was an artist, drag queen, and Sister of Perpetual Indulgence who played the central role in the 1978 creation of the rainbow LGBTQ pride flag. Born in Kansas in 1951, Baker was drafted into the U.S. Army as a young man. He was stationed in San Francisco as a medic, remained in the city after his honorable discharge in 1972, and became a drag queen as well as an anti-war and pro-cannabis activist. In 1978, Baker and a team of volunteers dyed and sewed the first rainbow flags for San Francisco Gay Freedom Day, as Pride was then known. The original flags had eight colors, each one standing for a different aspect of queer experience: sex, life, healing, the sun, nature, art and magic, serenity, and the spirit. Later versions of the flag would drop the pink and turquoise stripes, leading to the six-color version most commonly seen today. Baker would spend much of the rest of his career exploring flag imagery, sewing Pride flags for parades (some over a mile long) and creating drag costumes that riffed on the American flag, the Statue of Liberty, and the persona of Betsy Ross. In 1981, Baker became a novice with the Sisters of Perpetual Indulgence, a nondenominational order of queer nuns. The Sisters protested homophobia, distributed safe sex educational materials, and functioned as community and spiritual leaders in tongue-in-cheek drag. As Sister Chanel 2001, Baker was often seen with his friend and fellow Sister, Gilbert Block (Sadie, Sadie the Rabbi Lady). He later left the group after a dispute over his unapproved use of the Sister Chanel persona for a commercial greeting card, but he continues to be associated with the Sisters in popular memory. As time passed, Baker increasingly turned his attention to personal protests against homophobic figures, such as his “Pink Jesus” performance piece at the 1990 San Francisco Pride parade (protesting Jesse Helms’ attempts to defund the National Endowment for the Arts) and the reimagined concentration camp uniforms he created to protest the election of Donald Trump. Baker moved from San Francisco to New York in 1994, and died there in 2017.