Rainbow Warrior: My Life in Color
by Gilbert Baker
Chicago Review Press. 256 pages, $26.99
THERE’S ONE THING readers need to know before diving into Rainbow Warrior: My Life in Color. Its author, Gilbert Baker, died at the end of March, two years ago, and this book was crafted from several sources that Baker apparently left behind after being urged to write his autobiography. This fact is not revealed, alas, until the last chapter of this book, but it would have helped to know that this often ungainly memoir came about in this piecemeal fashion.
Best known today as the man who invented the rainbow flag, Baker grew up in Kansas and was given the tools he needed to be creative with both paper and fabric. Indeed, he wanted to be an artist, but his parents didn’t think art was any sort of career. So, when he was old enough, Baker, in passages that are humorous in the telling, hid his gayness and enlisted in the army. It didn’t take long before he realized that he was about to be bullied for the rest of his time served—not to mention the specter of Vietnam—so he told his commanding officer that he would henceforth refuse to carry a gun. He attempted to get a discharge as a con- scientious objector, but the Army assigned him to be a medic, and they sent him to San Francisco to work in a government laboratory. It was an assignment that changed Baker’s life.
“When I got to San Francisco,” he said, “I knew I wasn’t ever going back to Kansas.” With no small amount of drama, Baker explains how being in San Francisco “opened my closet door.” He fell in love—and out of love, repeatedly—and experienced the freedom to be who he always knew he was. This was not long after the time of the “Summer of Love” (1967), and Baker embraced all that was available to a man who had suddenly seen the light. He wore dresses with impunity, danced at clubs all night, and lived as an openly gay man.
He reached back into his past and connected with his creative side, renewing his interest in fashion, though there was a lot he had to teach himself. With practice, he eventually gained a reputation for being talented enough to create uniquely fabulous costumes and banners for the almost daily protests that were happening in this era. By 1977, he was making enough money at it to live. When organizers of the Gay Freedom Day Parade of 1978 asked him to “come up with a new symbol” to represent the gay rights movement, he thought immediately of a flag, but wrestled with what to put on the it. High on LSD one night at a disco, he noticed rainbows flickering on a dance floor, and he had his answer.
It is at this point that the tone of Rainbow Warrior seems to change, going from a humorous, mild-mannered personal memoir to a long account of protests and battles over civil rights, and an endless parade of names (famous and otherwise) of activists on both coasts. It’s not a bad history of these times, however scattershot, and the writing is sometimes angry, sometimes breathless, as though the author was in a frenzy to get it all down. Baker recounts the bitter, frustrating arguments among his contemporaries for control of gay rights groups, but he also writes about falling in love with beautiful men, some of whom broke his heart.
Given the times, readers will not be surprised to learn that lots of drugs and easy promiscuity figure prominently in this book; it was the ’70s. The memoir continues into the plague years, and Baker watches his friends as they waste away and perish. But Baker survived, moving to New York City in 1994 and remaining active in LGBT political life until his death in 2017.
Terri Schlichenmeyer is a freelance writer based in Wisconsin.
