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She spoke at a One City One Pride panel in West Hollywood during Pride Month in June. She recently received a proclamation from the City of West Hollywood for her contribution to LGBT history. Segerblom has been busy during the 40th anniversary of the original rainbow flag. The three are sharing and comparing notes about how the rainbow flag came to be at the Gay Freedom Parade for documentation. Segerblom reunited with Glenne McElhinney, a historian who was also a member of the parade committee in 1978. McElhinney is making an upcoming documentary about the original rainbow flag with the help of Paul Langlotz, a Larchmont marriage and family therapist, who also witnessed the making of the giant banners.
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The Gay Community Center where it was created has been demolished to make way for a parking garage, James McNamara died from complications of AIDS in 1999, and Gilbert Baker died of hypertensive heart disease in 2017. (Photo by James McNamara, courtesy of Paul Langlotz)Ĥ0 years have passed since the rainbow flag was conceived. (L-R) Gilbert Baker, Lynn Segerblom, Robert Guttman and volunteer holding up one of the original rainbow flags for the Gay Freedom Day Parade in San Francisco, 1978. There was also an army of volunteers and artists who gathered at the Gay Community Center, a three-story building, on 330 Grove Street, to work on the flags. She says the glorious moment when two giant 30圆0ft rainbow colored flags and several smaller versions debuted at the Gay Freedom Day Parade in 1978, never would have happened, were it not for the tireless efforts and skills of clothing designer James McNamara, as well as her own fabric dyeing and designing techniques. She’s come out of the dark to set the record straight about two missing flag makers who she says Baker wrote out of the rainbow flag history.Īccording to Segerblom, who went by hippy name Faerie Argyle Rainbow in the late 70s, the birth of the original rainbow flag had a mother (a young Faerie Rainbow) and two dads (seamster James McNamara and yes, Gilbert Baker). The story of the creation of the original rainbow flag from San Francisco’s Gay Freedom Day Parade in 1978 tends to credit American artist and gay rights activist Gilbert Baker as the sole creator and designer of the colorful flag that would become an international symbol of LGBT pride, LGBT rights and LGBT Freedom, however, dye artist and designer Lynn Segerblom, has a different tale to tell.