With six colors, the flag could still be evenly split to line two sides of the street for a march in protest of Milk's assassination in 1979. Pink dye was prohibitively expensive, and blue and turquoise were 'merged' into royal blue.

The contemporary version has six colors, but the original had eight. Each color had its own symbolic meaning:īy 1979, the flag had collapsed to six colors - for practical reasons. People knew immediately that it was our flag.' 'We stood there and watched and saw the flags, and their faces lit up,' Cleve Jones, an LGBT rights activist present at the parade, told The New York Times.