In 2017, Philadelphia’s Office of LGBT Affairs introduced black and brown stripes to the Pride flag to recognize queer and trans people of color. When I was young and newly out of the closet, around 2013, I saw LGBTQ flags for every community imaginable online, including esoteric variants, such as the green, black, white, and grey aromantic flag, and a pale pink and yellow flag for slim, hairless 20-something twinks. The now-familiar six-stripe flag is actually a redesign. Later that year, though, the flag lost its pink stripe because of fabric unavailability at the local manufacturer, and turquoise fell off the year after for the same reason. That earliest iteration included pink and turquoise stripes, symbolizing sex and art, respectively-parts of queer life that the designers thought were worth fighting for. Other variations of the Pride flag include Genderfluid, Genderflexible and Genderqueer Pride flags for the Leather, Bear, and BDSM communities a Polysexual Pride flag Agender and Aromantic Pride flags and even a rarely-seen Straight Ally Pride Flag with a large rainbow triangle amidst black and white stripes.Since its first flight at 1978’s Gay Freedom Day Parade in San Francisco, the rainbow flag has evolved multiple times. The Asexual Pride flag, created in 2010, has four stripes: Black to represent asexuality, grey for demisexuality, white for allies, and purple for community. A variation on the Poly flag turns the black stripe into a triangle and replaces the Pi symbol with a yellow stripe. The Pansexual Pride flag is comprised of pink (representing attraction to femmes), yellow (attraction to nonbinary people), and blue (attraction to masc people) stripes.Ī less widely adopted Polyamory Pride flag has a blue (represention openness), red (passion), and black (solidarity) stripe with a gold (emotional attachment) Pi symbol in the middle.
As designed, the pink represents same-sex attraction, the blue represents other-sex attraction, and the thin purple stripe stands for the breadth of the gender spectrum. It has a pink block at the top, a thinner purple stripe, and then a blue block at the bottom. The Bisexual Pride flag has also seen common use for many years. Lesbian, bisexual, transgender, and even leather groups created symbols for their communities, and over time came into more widespread use.
But over the years, groups within the queer community felt the need to assert their presence as well. Over the years, the rainbow-striped Pride flag came to be thought of as the sole icon of Pride. “Gay” as a catch-all term for anything gender-nonconforming is a fast-vanishing vestige of patriarchy. Today, Pride is much more inclusive of lesbians, bisexual people, and people who are trans or poly or asexual or queer. Though it was often called the “Gay Pride Flag” at first, it’s now come to represent a much broader community than just gay men. Baker and a friend named Lynn Segerblom, also known as Faerie Argyle Rainbow, developed a rainbow version that had eight colors, with a hot pink stripe later removed because it was difficult to dye. There, he befriended Milk, who challenged him to create a symbol for what was then more commonly called the gay community. Baker had served in the Army, and moved to San Francisco following his honorable discharge. The history of the Pride flag can be traced back to Harvey Milk, the famous San Francisco city Supervisor, and his friend Gilbert Baker in the 1970s. None of those symbols was particularly widespread in modern times, however.