She was also denied a marriage license in 1959 because her birth certificate listed her as male. However, when she returned to the U.S., she quickly learned that society did not understand or accept transgender people, and Jorgensen was often a source of public ridicule. Born George Jorgensen in New York in 1926, Jorgensen went to Europe to have sex change surgery gender affirmation surgery in 1950. In the years since the 1978 march, the rainbow flag has become an international symbol for inclusion, peace, and love.Ĭhristine Jorgensen made international headlines for her public life as a transgender woman. “People knew immediately that it was our flag.” Baker never trademarked the flag he felt it was his gift to the world. At the parade, Baker said, people’s faces lit up when they saw the flags. When asked to make a flag for a pride parade in 1978, Baker and volunteers hand-dyed different colored fabric in garbage cans and stitched together the first rainbow flag. Growing up in Kansas and feeling like an outcast because he was gay, Baker moved to San Francisco in 1972 after being stationed there as an army medic. Gilbert Baker called himself “the gay Betsy Ross,” because he designed what became known as the gay pride flag, a rainbow with six colors.
She also expressed anger about social injustice in her poetry, which was not a socially acceptable form of creative expression for women or people of color at the time. Lorde described herself as “black, lesbian, mother, warrior, poet,” and wove these themes into her work as a poet and essayist. We are ordinary people, living our lives, and trying, as civil-rights activist Dorothy Cotton said, to ‘fix what ain’t right’ in our society.”Īudre Lorde was a librarian before becoming a poet, when her 1968 work “The Black Unicorn” was published and received high praise. “We are no more – and no less – heroic than the suffragists and abolitionists of the 19th century. “All of us who are openly gay are living and writing the history of our movement,” says Baldwin. Baldwin, an attorney, was also the first woman elected to congress in her home state of Wisconsin. Tammy Baldwin is the first openly gay politician elected to the U.S. Pride Lesbian Wedding Coloring Page Pride LGBTQ Coloring Page Pride LGBT Flag Color by Number Coloring Page Gay Wedding Coloring Page