San Francisco Mayor London Breed gave powerful remarks as she signed legislation landmarking the late Gilbert Baker's rainbow flag installation at Harvey Milk Plaza in the Castro during a ceremony Friday, September 13. The oversized banner at Castro and Market streets serves as a welcoming beacon to the LGBTQ neighborhood.
"Even if we have political differences we can all agree that uplifting and supporting and recognizing and investing in our LGBTQ community will always be at the forefront of our values here in San Francisco," Breed said at the ceremony, which was at the GLBT Historical Society Museum on 18th Street. "So I am proud to be here today and to sign this legislation and to share it and tag every anti-LGBTQ elected leader in the world and tell 'em to bring it because this is San Francisco and we will never back down."
The mayor, who is facing a tough reelection in November, also called attention to her administration's efforts on behalf of the LGBTQ community, including supporting plans to renovate Harvey Milk Plaza, where the flag has flown since 1997. Some of the mayor's accomplishments include that also appointed the inaugural drag laureate in the city, appointed LGBTQ heads to the fire and health departments, and declared a public health emergency over the mpox outbreak in 2022 to mobilize city resources in fighting it.
While D'Arcy Drollinger became the first drag laureate in the world when Breed appointed her in May 2023, the city of West Hollywood, California actually approved the position first, but didn't name Pickle, its drag ambassador, until June 2023.
"What I appreciate the most about being here in the Castro community is that we work together, Supervisor [Rafael Mandelman], to make those unprecedented investments in the things to address the disparities that we know have existed in San Francisco," Breed said. "We talk about our values but when we put policy in dollars into those values, we demonstrate our strength as a city and our commitment to showing the rest of the world how it should be done. ... We need to make sure that San Francisco is a place you get to see that when you come to the Castro and you land in Harvey Milk Plaza you need to see that, not just hear it."
Joining Breed and community leaders at the signing was Board of Supervisors President Aaron Peskin, who is one of four major candidates hoping to oust Breed from Room 200 at City Hall.
After the landmarking ordinance was signed, a number of Castro community stakeholders walked the newest flag up to Harvey Milk Plaza, where it was installed.
Mandelman, a gay man who represents District 8 — including the Castro — on the Board of Supervisors and who got the landmarking proposal passed this year, thanked his predecessor in office for spearheading the idea.
"It was Jeff Sheehy who started us down this path in 2017, and Jeff has been dogged and persistent in ensuring we do this right and so thank you, Jeff, for that," Mandelman said.
Sheehy, also a gay man, was friends with Baker and was appointed supervisor by the late mayor Ed Lee in January 2017. He lost to Mandelman in a special election for the District 8 seat a year later.
Sheehy told the Bay Area Reporter after the event that his involvement goes back even further than that — to when the flagpole was first installed.
"Gilbert was my friend. I helped Gilbert put up the flag back in 1997," Sheehy said. "I was president of the [Harvey] Milk [LGBTQ Democratic] Club, and he and I were wandering the Castro Street Fair and we saw [then-mayor] Willie Brown and so Gilbert gave his pitch on the idea."
Brown was in favor of massive public art projects in the city at that time, Sheehy said.
"He wanted San Francisco to be like Paris," Sheehy said.
Brown was initially scheduled to attend the September 13 ceremony but could not make it.
Baker's flag was installed November 8, 1997 — the 20th anniversary of Milk's historic election to the Board of Supervisors, which made him the first openly gay elected official in California. Milk and then-mayor George Moscone were assassinated in November 1978, just 11 months after Milk took office.
Mindful of anti-LGBTQ climate
Mandelman also thanked Bevan Dufty, a gay man who was Brown's director of neighborhood services at the time, before he himself became District 8 supervisor. Dufty, now serving his last term on the BART regional transit agency board, told the B.A.R. after the ceremony "what a day" — but was mindful of the increasingly tense political and social environment in which LGBTQ people operate.
"As we celebrated, we are very aware that Republican forces are again trying to erase us by banning Gilbert's flag. This current crop of [Donald] Trump, [JD] Vance and [Ron] DeSantis should join John Briggs, Jesse Helms, William Dannemeyer, and others in the dustbin of history," he said, referring to the current GOP presidential ticket, the Republican Florida governor, and past anti-LGBTQ political leaders.
Charley Beal, a gay man who is president of the Gilbert Baker Foundation, also spoke on how renewed homophobia and transphobia in the 2020s have led to the flag being banned from flying in government buildings in some school districts and local municipalities. He said he received a letter from a student in a Pennsylvania school district that became the 54th to enact a Pride flag ban.
Last year, a Gallup survey showed a decline in the number of Americans who felt homosexuality morally acceptable (64% agreed, down from a record-high of 71% in 2022), as conservative-led states passed laws restricting transgender people's ability to access bathrooms, sports teams that corresponded to their gender identities, and gender-affirming care for minors.
Beal had to blink back the tears as he intoned "even though the narrow-minded bigots there are saying 'you can't fly that flag,' the people of San Francisco, here, are telling them, 'yes, you can.'"
Gay state Senator Scott Wiener (D-San Francisco) who has faced death threats and false accusations from anti-LGBTQ forces, as the B.A.R. previously reported, also reflected on this point.
"They're saying anything that represents our community is something harmful to children," he said. "When it's in fact the opposite — it's about saving the lives of our kids."
Mandelman and Beal thanked the late Tom Taylor, the keeper of the key to the Castro flagpole, and his late husband Dr. Jerry Goldstein, for their years of support. Taylor died in 2020, as the B.A.R. reported, and Goldstein passed away in 2023.
Taylor's niece, Angela Traeger, 48, was at the ceremony, and stated to the B.A.R. afterward her memories of her late uncle in an email.
"My memories of Gilbert and Tom were mainly in Tom's shop on Isis St.," she stated. "Gilbert walked in one day while I was working with Tom and his friend, an honorary auntie of mine, on my wedding invitations. The wedding invitations included dried ferns and a sheer baby blue cloth wrapping. When Gilbert saw us trying to cut the sheer cloth without threads fraying out, he threw up his arms, grabbed a pair of scissors, and gasped, 'STEP ASIDE!'"
She continued that "for as much as Tom accomplished, I was impressed at how whenever I called his cellphone, he always picked up and took my call."
"From my earliest memories Tom & Jerry were my uncles," she stated. "There was never an alternative cover up story. They were a couple, loved each other, and were the glue in our family. If you didn't call them for a few months, guaranteed one of them would call you. They sat in their fair share of traffic driving up to my house for family parties in Marin. I am so thankful they were safe to be out for my entire life."
The flag is now changed quarterly by the Castro Merchants Association, which happened September 13 as the neighborhood prepares for the Castro Street Fair October 6. Begun by Milk and marking its 50th anniversary this year, the outdoor festival helps raise funds to pay for the flags flown on the flagpole.
The association's president, straight ally Terry Asten Bennett, said she was grateful for the role she played in the landmarking.
"I am so grateful to have been part of the process in getting us to this point," she stated to the B.A.R. after the ceremony. "I love our community and want the whole world to know there are places where you will be accepted and free to be who you are and love who you love. I worked with our community to raise this now landmarked beacon of hope. I am so grateful to everyone who made this day possible."
As the B.A.R. previously reported, Baker co-created the first rainbow flag with friends Lynn Segerblom, a straight ally who now lives in Southern California, and James McNamara, a gay man who died of AIDS-related complications in 1999. Baker and his friends came up with a rainbow flag design that had eight colored stripes, with one version also sporting a corner section of stars to mimic the design of the American flag. It debuted at the 1978 San Francisco Pride parade.
"It really is a three-person, not a one-person, flag making. Everybody played their part and then some," Segerblom told the B.A.R. in a 2018 phone interview from her home in Torrance, southwest of Los Angeles.
Baker would go on to eliminate the stars and reduce the number of colored stripes to six. Over the ensuing years, Baker turned that standard six-color banner into an international symbol of LGBTQ rights.
Baker died unexpectedly in 2017 at the age of 65, and the foundation created in his name donated a segment from one of the first rainbow flags that flew in front of San Francisco City Hall during the 1978 parade to the GLBT museum, where it is now on public display.
The historical society is looking for a site for a larger, permanent museum. Wiener, who helped appropriate state funds for this purpose, said in his remarks, "We are going to ... create a much larger and amazing LGBT history museum in this neighborhood."
In July, the Board of Supervisors accepted a $5.5 million grant from the state for an LGBTQ history museum but finding a site has been elusive, so far. Wiener had secured the state funds, which have a deadline of March 1, 2026 to be spent, as the B.A.R. reported. LGBTQ leaders and the GLBT Historical Society would like the museum to be located in the Castro, potentially kitty-corner from the flagpole site on the property of a long vacant commercial building.
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