Every year in June, rainbow flags emerge on the facades of homes and businesses to celebrate Pride. The market for rainbow party favors and rainbow novelty clothing booms. In the other months of the year, rainbow bunting and rainbow crosswalks still demarcate LGBTQ+ businesses and historic gayborhoods, creating a visual map of the queer world. In other words, all across the globe, rainbow colors are a reliable signal that something homosexual is afoot.

But when the first gay rainbow flags flew over San Francisco in 1978, they weren’t intended to be an international symbol for a growing social movement. The story of the rainbow flag is a lot more complicated than most tellings would suggest: It starts with anti-gay ballot initiative and ends with accusations of a decades-long lie.

First, the ballot proposition. In the spring of 1978, queer Californians were under attack. As I explore in Slow Burn: Gays Against Briggs, a right-wing backlash against the rising visibility of gay people was sweeping the country. A conservative state senator named John Briggs had filed an initiative that would ban lesbians and gays from working in California public schools. It was known as the Briggs Initiative, or Proposition 6. In an attempt to defeat it, tens of thousands of gay people came out of the closet and built a political movement that was more robust and organized than anything the country’s nascent gay-rights groups had managed before. The real showdown would come in November 1978, when Californians would cast their ballots in the first statewide vote on gay rights.

So when gay San Franciscans began planning for Gay Freedom Day in June 1978, they wanted it to be bigger and grander than ever before. The city had already held several annual Gay Freedom Day celebrations—which would eventually become known as Pride—in commemoration of the Stonewall uprising of 1969, when queers fought back against police harassment at a New York City gay bar, jump-starting the gay liberation movement. But in 1978, with the Briggs Initiative top of mind for gay Californians, the mood surrounding Gay Freedom Day was more charged and confrontational than in previous years.

Those earlier Gay Freedom Days were controlled by the proprietors of San Francisco’s many gay bars, who made the central march a kind of glorified bar crawl, says gay activist Cleve Jones, who was serving as an intern for recently elected city supervisor Harvey Milk. In 1978, Jones and other more politically-minded gays staged what he called a “radical insurrection” to take control of Gay Freedom Day and make it a more pointed political event. When they succeeded, they installed two new people at the head of the decorations committee: Gilbert Baker, a drag queen who was known as a whiz with a sewing machine, and Lynn Segerblom, who was working as a fabric dyer for a local fashion designer.

Baker and Segerblom had first met at the street fair Harvey Milk had started in the Castro district, where they’d sold marijuana candy together. They were roommates for a time, and both had a strong affinity for hippie culture. Baker loved psychedelics; he said he could never truly be friends with someone who had never done LSD. Segerblom was going by the name Faerie Argyle Rainbow at the time—that was even the name on her driver’s license—and she had her closet organized by rainbow colors. “I thought they were healing, or just brightening,” Segerblom said of bold colors in a recent interview. “They have feelings that can be transferred to people.”

Along with fellow decorations committee member James McNamara, Baker and Segerblom began brainstorming ideas for decorations for the Gay Freedom Day parade. What happened next is a matter of contention.

Until his death in 2017, Baker maintained that he originated the idea for a rainbow flag from two sources of inspiration: First, he was wowed by the U.S. bicentennial in 1976, when flags adorned everything from chintzy souvenirs to moving works of art. He liked the idea of a flag as a statement of revolution in the U.S., France, and elsewhere, and thought LGBTQ people deserved their own marker of an insurgent identity. Then, while he was tripping on acid at a club with Jones, twirling under the disco lights and mirror ball, he got the idea to make it a rainbow. A rainbow is a beautiful freak of nature, he said, and it kind of flies like a natural flag in the sky.

This version of the story has been retold and republished in many different ways over the past 25 years or so. Baker has been credited as the creator of the rainbow flag by history books and major institutions, including the Museum of Modern Art, which credits Segerblom and McNamara not as the flag’s creators but as “fabricators.” But according to Segerblom, Baker’s story isn’t true. She came up with the idea, she said, as an outgrowth of her rainbow-centric identity.

In Segerblom’s telling, the Gay Freedom Day parade organizers were the ones who suggested she and Baker make a flag. They did so because near the end of the march route, participants would walk between two 80-foot flag poles at United Nations Plaza on the way to San Francisco City Hall. Baker just wanted to make bunting, Segerblom said, but the parade organizers knew someone who had the keys to the flagpoles and suggested the decorations committee make use of them. At the meeting at which the committee leaders were supposed to present their ideas, Segerblom brought her designs for a series of rainbow flags. Baker and McNamara didn’t even show up, she said.

Both Baker and Segerblom largely agree on what came next: With the help of volunteers, they dyed hundreds of yards of cotton muslin in garbage cans on the roof of the gay community center. It was a memorable experience: They needed hot water to mix the dye, but there was no running hot water at the center, so they had to heat pots of water on the stove in the building’s kitchen, then carry the boiling-hot water up a flight of stairs and a wooden ladder onto the roof. Then, they laundered the dyed strips at a dry cleaner, took them back to the community center, sat down at their sewing machines, and pieced the fabric together into 60-foot stripes.

After weeks of work, the end result was two 60- by 30-foot flags. One had eight horizontal rainbow stripes—Roy G. Biv with turquoise instead of indigo, plus pink. Baker said he assigned each of the colors a meaning: pink for sex, red for life, orange for healing, yellow for sunlight, green for nature, turquoise for magic, blue for serenity, and purple for spirit. The other flag used those same colors as the stripes on a version of the U.S. flag, with white tie-dyed stars.

It took three people to load each flag onto the bed of a pickup truck; they were so heavy, no one was even sure they would actually flap once they made it up the poles. But on June 25, 1978, the 300,000 people who attended Gay Freedom Day in San Francisco—at the time, the biggest gay demonstration ever, and likely the largest gathering of people for any reason in the 1970s—saw a sight that captured the whimsy and joy of queer celebration, even in an era of persecution and a season of intense political anxiety: two gigantic rainbow flags, waving in the breeze.

In the months that followed, Baker worked with the local Paramount Flag Company (where he had a paying job designing storefront window displays and decorations for special events) to create smaller rainbow flags to sell to enthusiastic San Franciscans and. Then, he designed a set of rainbow banners for the 1979 Gay Freedom Day festivities. The turquoise and pink stripes were dropped, because those were premium colors that cost more to purchase from a commercial flag producer. And so the six-stripe rainbow flag was born.

It would be several more years before the rainbow flag was adopted by the larger queer community. In 1985, a convening of Pride organizers from around the world took a vote on an official international symbol for the LGBTQ community. The rainbow flag, proposed by the delegate from San Francisco, won. Two years later, major associations of vexillologists began to recognize it as the gay flag. Over time, queer communities all over the place started to display their own rainbow flags, triggering the likes of Martha-Ann Alito the world over. The six-stripe flag remained the standard until a version with black, brown, pink, and light blue (representing queer people of color and trans people) debuted as the “progress Pride” flag in 2018.

Gilbert Baker’s name became synonymous with the rainbow flag—he even began going by the drag name Busty Ross. Today, the Gilbert Baker Foundation licenses his name and likeness to corporations trying to build a queer-friendly image, and donates funds in excess of its annual budget to LGBTQ nonprofits that Baker supported. Segerblom seldom appears in histories of the flag, and when she does, it’s a brief mention of her work dyeing the fabric and physically putting together the flags.

One reason it played out this way is that Segerblom never publicly contradicted Baker in any major way while he was alive. Also, Baker was inarguably the one who took the flag and promoted it so vigorously that it became a widely adopted symbol in the years after its creation (Segerblom moved to Japan soon after Gay Freedom Day 1978), so he became known as the rainbow flag guy. Segerblom readily gives Baker credit for that work, just as Baker gave her credit in his memoir for contributing to the construction of the flags. (Though it’s worth noting that the Gilbert Baker Foundation refers to her as “Faerie Argyle,” omitting her former “Rainbow” surname.)

But this year, Segerblom has been more vocal than ever with her accusation that Baker lied about generating the idea for the flags. In a new podcast series and oral history, Segerblom and a few friends express anger at what they said were Baker’s deliberate misrepresentation of how the idea came about.

I’ve asked the Gilbert Baker Foundation for comment and will update this piece if I hear back. In an interview with the Los Angeles Times back in 2018, Charley Beal, manager of creative projects for the Gilbert Baker Estate, said that Baker was “effusive with credit” for Segerblom and others and “never claimed to have made [the flags] himself.” Beal also said the notion that Gilbert passed off someone else’s idea as his own “is an insult to him as an artist and an insult to his legacy.”

So who made the flag, the woman who was so serious about rainbows she put it in her name or the man who was so into psychedelics that he couldn’t hang with people who wouldn’t try them? Honestly, I’m not here to decide whether the germ of the idea originated with Segerblom or Baker. After so many years, with so many witnesses now deceased, it would be near impossible to reconstruct the story with certain accuracy. And in the end, the personality behind the initial design seems far less important than what it has become: a globally recognized symbol that allows LGBTQ people to find affirming spaces, friendly allies, and each other.

But Segerblom’s allegation raises a potentially awkward possibility: that the affirming emblem claimed by LGBTQ people worldwide was designed by a heterosexual. In 1978, Segerblom was dating both men and women—“it was really just experimenting,” she said—but she now identifies as straight. Queer people who feel invested in the idea of a community run on LGBTQ ingenuity may be troubled by the notion that a straight woman delivered us the symbol of our movement.

There’s another part of this story that may have been warped as it’s been retold through the years. It is often said that Harvey Milk specifically assigned Baker the task of creating a symbol for the LGBTQ community to rally around—a narrative that is repeated in a popular 2018 children’s book, Pride: The Story of Harvey Milk and the Rainbow Flag, and in Baker’s memoir, Rainbow Warrior.

According to Jones, both Milk and Baker were part of ongoing conversations in San Francisco’s gay community about how the burgeoning gay-rights movement needed a visual marker. At the time, the most widely used symbols for LGBTQ people were the lambda (the Greek letter L) and the pink triangle, a symbol of suffering and persecution that was used by the Nazis to mark gay people in concentration camps. There was a sense that queer people were in need of a more positive, affirming emblem that could be a beacon of hope. Nevertheless, both Jones—who maintains that Baker invented the flag—and Segerblom agree that when the two committee co-chairs made the first gay rainbow flags, they weren’t striving for a global symbol. They were making hippie-dippie decorations for a parade.

In my view, this makes the story of the flag more meaningful, not less. The rainbow didn’t catch on because it was voted on by some decision-making body, or because it was focus-group tested by some major gay organization. It wasn’t dictated by any one movement leader. And it wasn’t made by a single person, regardless of who invented it. It was a communal effort, and it stuck around because it resonated with people as a moment of ecstatic queer expression in the face of a nationwide anti-gay backlash.

Hundreds of thousands of people saw the flags that day, their faces lighting up as they witnessed two 60-by-30-foot feats of ambition and imagination, created and painstakingly executed just for them. The flags told queer people that they deserved everything—not just equal rights and protection from discrimination, but frivolity, playfulness, and glamour. Baker saw the potential to carry the magic of that day into a lasting statement for LGBTQ people, then did what he could to make it stick.

As with the symbols and cultural products of so many marginalized communities, the rainbow flag has been neutered of its meaning in the decades since its creation. (It was never meant to be straightforwardly political, per se, but neither was it meant to engender fond feelings for banks and weapons manufacturers.) But its history, however contested, is a powerful reminder that this flag that’s now as ubiquitous in June as the U.S. flag during the bicentennial started out as a thoroughly DIY art experiment. The people who made it in 1978 gave queer people an enduring gift: an association with creativity, bold color, and a beautiful freak of nature that brings splendor after a storm.