The iced tea is flowing, and the women of Parsons High School’s class of 1969 are on a roll.
A handful of them are circled up at a table in the increasingly crowded fellowship hall of St. John’s Episcopal Church, where yearbooks from 50 years ago are spread out at the front of the room and laughter from old stories grows louder amid the white cinder block walls and green-and-yellow linoleum-tiled floor. One of the women at the table has purple hair — not the subtle tint of elderly ladies’ salon rinses but the declarative violet in vogue among queer kids.
All of these women have clear recollections of a classmate who got the hell out of Kansas as soon as he could and went on to change the world.
Gilbert Baker, born in Chanute, on June 2, 1951, designed the rainbow flag, now flown all over the world to signify support for LGBTQ equality and pride.
“He always was into the arts,” one of Baker’s classmates remembers.
“He was a personality unto himself,” says another.
“He was always at our lunch table. He really did feel comfortable with us, and we felt comfortable with him.”
“He loved to act, and help us do the plays.”
They remember a dark-haired boy with thick Buddy Holly glasses. “You know, he would be the kind to wear a scarf or shawl, whatever you’d call it.”
“A snappy dresser.”
“This may not be etiquette, but in ‘69, we didn’t know what gay was. So Gilbert was just different,” says Debbie Sailsbury Burke. “People would make fun of him because he was different, but he set the stage way before it was ever a norm.”
One time, he asked Patty Eakins Edgington on a date. “I’d evidently broken up with a boyfriend. I don’t know what I’d done, I was 16 or 17, who knows. And I don’t know why he said — that’s just Gilbert — he said, ‘Let’s go to the drive-in.’ So we went to the drive-in movie and it was a quote, date, but I kind of knew it wasn’t really a date.”
Everyone agrees: “Just a friend — just a friend.”
“The next day,” Edgington continues, “I got yellow roses delivered to my house: ‘Thank you for a great time.’ He was just a nice guy.”
In the decades since they graduated, people began to realize what Baker had done after leaving Kansas. Eventually Facebook came along.
“I shot a request to him and he accepted,” Edgington says. “I posted some stuff over the years because I fiddled around in art, and he’d comment.”
At some point there was talk of inviting Baker back for one of the reunions, but that brought up other memories.
