The Rainbow Flag
In 1978, Gilbert Baker of San Francisco designed a flag with six stripes representing the six colors of the rainbow as a symbol of gay and lesbian community pride. Slowly the flag took hold, offering a colorful and optimistic alternative to the more common pink triangle symbol. Today it is recognized by the International Congress of Flag Makers, and is flown in lesbian and gay pride marches worldwide. In 1989, the rainbow flag received nationwide attention after John Stout successfully sued his landlords in West Hollywood, when they prohibited him from displaying the flag from his apartment balcony. Meanwhile, Baker was still in San Francisco, and still making more flags.
Color has long played an important role in our community’s expression of pride. In Victorian England, for example, the color green was associated with homosexuality. The color purple (or, more accurately, lavender) became popularized as a symbol for pride in the late 1960s – a frequent post-Stonewall catchword for the gay community was “Purple Power”. And, of course, there’s the pink triangle. Although it was first used in Nazi Germany to identify gay males in concentration camps, the pink triangle only received widespread use as a gay pop icon in the early 1980s. But the most colorful of our symbols is the Rainbow Flag, and its rainbow of colors – red, orange, yellow, green, blue, and purple – represents the diversity of our community.
The first Rainbow Flag was designed in 1978 by Gilbert Baker, a San Francisco artist, who created the flag in response to a local activist’s call for the need of a community symbol. (This was before the pink triangle was popularly used as a symbol of pride.) Using the five-striped “Flag of the Race” as his inspiration, Baker designed a flag with eight stripes: pink, red, orange, yellow, green, blue, indigo, and violet. According to Baker, those colors represented, respectively: sexuality, life, healing, sun, nature, art, harmony, and spirit. Baker dyed and sewed the material for the first flag himself – in the true spirit of Betsy Ross.
Baker soon approached San Francisco’s Paramount Flag Company about mass producing and selling his “gay flag”. Unfortunately, Baker had hand-dyed all the colors, and since the color “hot pink” was not commercially available, mass production of his eight-striped version became impossible. The flag was thus reduced to seven stripes.
In November 1978, San Francisco’s gay community was stunned when the city’s first openly gay supervisor, Harvey Milk, was assassinated, Wishing to demonstrate the gay community’s strength and solidarity in the aftermath of this tragedy, the 1979 Pride Parade Committee decided to use Baker’s flag. The committee eliminated the indigo stripe so they could divide the colors evenly along the parade route – three colors on one side of the street and three on the other. Soon the six colors were incorporated into a six-striped version that became popularized and that, today, is recognized by the International Congress of Flag Makers.
In San Francisco, the Rainbow Flag is everywhere: it can be seen hanging from apartment windows throughout the city (most notably in the Castro district), local bars frequently display the flag, and Rainbow Flag banners are hung from lampposts on Market Street (San Francisco’s main avenue) throughout Pride Month. Visiting the city, one can not help but feel a tremendous sense of pride at seeing this powerful symbol displayed so prominently.
Although the Rainbow Flag was initially used as a symbol of pride only in San Francisco, it has received increased visibility in recent years. Today, it is a frequent sight in a number of other cities as well – New York, West Hollywood, and Amsterdam, among them. Even in the Twin Cities, the flag seems to be gaining in popularity. Indeed, the Rainbow Flag reminds us that ours is a diverse community – composed of people with a variety of individual tastes of which we should all be proud.
The Pink Triangle
The pink triangle is easily one of the more popular and widely-recognized symbols for the gay community. The pink triangle is rooted in World War II times, and reminds us of the tragedies of that era. Although homosexuals were only one of the many groups targeted for extermination by the Nazi regime, it is unfortunately the group that history often excludes. The pink triangle challenges that notion, and defies anyone to deny history.
The history of the pink triangle begins before WWII, during Adolf Hitler’s rise to power. Paragraph 175, a clause in German law prohibiting homosexual relations, was revised by Hitler in 1935 to include kissing, embracing, and gay fantasies as well as sexual acts. Convicted offenders — an estimated 25,000 just from 1937 to 1939 — were sent to prison and then later to concentration camps. Their sentence was to be sterilized, and this was most often accomplished by castration. In 1942 Hitler’s punishment for homosexuality was extended to death.
Each prisoner in the concentration camps wore a colored inverted triangle to designate their reason for incarceration, and hence the designation also served to form a sort of social hierarchy among the prisoners. A green triangle marked its wearer as a regular criminal; a red triangle denoted a political prisoner. Two yellow triangles overlapping to form a Star of David designated a Jewish prisoner. The pink triangle was for homosexuals. A yellow Star of David under a superimposed pink triangle marked the lowest of all prisoners — a gay Jew.
Stories of the camps depict homosexual prisoners being given the worst tasks and labors. Pink triangle prisoners were also a proportionally large focus of attacks from the guards and even other inmates. Although the total number of the homosexual prisoners is not known, official Nazi estimates were an underwhelming 10,000.
Although homosexual prisoners reportedly were not shipped en masse to the death camps at Auschwitz, a great number of gay men were among the non-Jews who were killed there. Estimates of the number of gay men killed during the Nazi regime range from 50,000 to twice that figure. When the war was finally over, countless many homosexuals remained prisoners in the camps, because Paragraph 175 remained law in West Germany until its repeal in 1969.
In the 1970s, gay liberation groups resurrected the pink triangle as a popular symbol for the gay rights movement. Not only is the symbol easily recognized, but it draws attention to oppression and persecution — then and now. In the 1980s, ACT-UP (AIDS Coalition To Unleash Power) began using the pink triangle for their cause. They inverted the symbol, making it point up, to signify an active fight back rather than a passive resignation to fate. Today, for many the pink triangle represents pride, solidarity, and a promise to never allow another Holocaust to happen again.
Like the pink triangle, the black triangle is also rooted in Nazi Germany. Although lesbians were not included in the Paragraph 175 prohibition of homosexuality, there is evidence to indicate that the black triangle was used to designate prisoners with anti-social behavior. Considering that the Nazi idea of womanhood focused on children, kitchen, and church, black triangle prisoners may have included lesbians, prostitutes, women who refused to bear children, and women with other “anti-social” traits. As the pink triangle is historically a male symbol, the black triangle has similarly been reclaimed by lesbians and feminists as a symbol of pride and solidarity.
The Bear Flag
Early in 1996, Craig Byrnes, known to many Washington, DC-area bears as Mr. Baltimore Bear Cub ’93 and Mr. TBLC of Virginia ’94, began presenting area clubs and organizations with a new flag—the “INTERNATIONAL BEAR BROTHERHOOD FLAG.” The flag didn’t appear out of nowhere. In fact, this new symbol of bear brotherhood had an earlier, interesting development.
Craig’s work towards earning an undergraduate degree in psychology involved designing a senior project that would explore and discuss the bear culture that has exploded since the early 1980s.
As a member of the Chesapeake Bay Bears (CBB), he had become involved with first-hand experience of the growing bear movement. During the time of of his senior project development, Craig thought it might be fitting to design a flag that would best represent the bear community (since there is no “official” bear flag) and include it with the results of his research. Craig was encouraged by his ex-husbear Bob Nicholson, an Alumni Member of the District of Columbia Bear Club (DCBC).
Bob bought a deluxe box of crayons for Craig’s birthday, and Craig began his search of suitable colors for his flag. Craig constructed the original flag drawing from the colors he selected. After scanning the drawing, Craig enlisted DCBC member Paul Witzkoske to create four computer-generated templates from the original artwork made in crayon from which the four variations were sewing machine constructed of lining material. Bob spent several hours on a sewing machine making the first set of 3′ x 5′ flags out of simple lining material. Craig won approval to display the four prototype flags at the CBB “Bears of Summer” events in July of 1995. Bears were asked to put a quarter in the appropriate box to indicate which flag they thought would best represent the bear community and the proceeds were donated to CBB to add to its AIDS fundraising collections.
The Leather Pride Flag
On May 28, 1989, at the International Mister Leather contest in Chicago, TonyDeBlase presented his design for a Leather Pride Flag. In an editorial in his Off The Top column in Drummer 131, written before DeBlase’s trip to Chicago, but not on the newsstands until afterwards, he explained something of how the idea and design for the flag came about.
“The rainbow flag has become the symbol of Gay and Lesbian pride, and I have been proud to wear it on my clothing, march behind it in parades, and hang it from my balcony. I was thrilled by the rainbow-colored balloons used in the opening and closing ceremonies of Gay Games II and the spectacular rainbow of balloons that arched over the main stage at the G&L pride rally here in San Francisco a couple of years ago.”
“For the 20th anniversary of Stonewall, I felt that the time was right for the Leather men and women, who have been participating in these same parades and events more and more visibly in recent years, to have a similar, simple, elegant banner that would serve as a symbol of their own identity and interests. I decided that calling a committee meeting to design it would be counterproductive, so I just did it. I consulted with most of the staff here at Drummer, and some of their suggestions were incorporated. I do not expect this design to be the final form, but [rather] the basis from which a widely accepted banner will evolve.”
“The flag is composed of nine horizontal stripes of equal width. From the top and from the bottom, the stripes alternate black and royal blue. The central stripe is white. In the upper left quadrant of the flag is a large red heart. I will leave it to the viewer to interpret the colors and symbols.”
“Desmodus Inc. [DeBlase's company, at the time, publisher of Drummer] has a copyright on the design and anyone wishing to use it for purely commercial purposes must receive our written approval. However, we welcome members of the Leather/SM community to use the design for flags, banners, pins, printed material, etc. to be distributed free or sold at cost, or to be used for fund raising for not-for-profit causes that benefit Leather men and women. No permission is required for these uses, but we do ask that you inform us of the use and, where possible, send us samples.”
Nonetheless, the enthusiastic welcome the design received at IML was barely the beginning. Before anyone really had a chance to think whether the design should or shouldn’t be changed, it was everywhere. In fact, perhaps strangely, Drummer magazine, did not work for the adoption of the flag with anything like the fervor you might expect. The process took on a life of its own and, in effect, ignored the fact that the designer was waiting for feedback and expecting to make changes. The promised pictures in the next issue of Drummer were hardly a push for acceptance.
In the IML coverage, Mister Marcus mentioned the presentation of the flag and that it had already appeared in “gay parades across the country.” Marcus also said, “The flag obviously represents the leather/SM fraternity and their caring, loving brotherhood.” No pictures of the flag or its presentation at IML were published. What’s more, the nine parade pictures published, five of them showing the new flag, were in black and white. The [parade] coverage [also] mentioned that the flag was flown over the Society of Janus booth in San Francisco and that several Portland, OR, leather women had “sewed their own leather pride flag.”
The Portland flag followed the DeBlase design exactly. On the back cover of that issue of Drummer, the new IML, Guy Baldwin, and his runners up were pictured in front of the flag. The next Drummer- designer-related appearance of the leather pride flag was in September, on stage at the Mr. Drummer finals, and the flag that graced the stage (along with gay pride flags) appeared on the cover of Drummer 135—just in the background.
By this time there were authorized and unauthorized version of the flag for sale in endless forms: pins, bumper stickers, patches and even Christmas ornaments, but the Aussie flag set off a stir. Everyone began working at variants, some of them great extensions of the flag and its purpose (titleholders’ sashes), others downright funny (a Thanksgiving card on which the red heart is replaced by a roast turkey in red). But there was definitely no doubt by the time of the 1991 Drummer contest that the flag was, as DeBlase had hoped, “a widely accepted banner.” And, even at this time, Drummer was not pushing the leather pride design. In fact, the only ad for the leather pride design was a small classified ad offering the original pins at $6, 2 for $10.
Now, the leather pride flag design is solidly accepted around the world. Used and reused everywhere, twisted and warped into every shape, wrapped around every kind of product and made of every material from leather to crochet yarn. It has even been worked into the permanent colors of some leather clubs, a use that DeBlase sees as particularly significant, a special level of acceptance.
The original prototype of the flag and many, many examples of the design’s application are on exhibit at the Leather Archives and Museum in Chicago. Among the examples, you could see there are: window stickers, run pins, key chains, beaded safety pins, business cards, jewelry, the logo of Bandanna magazine, the cover of a cookbook, letterhead and a hand-crocheted cock and ball cover (a cozy?). We have also seen the colors and design elements of the leather pride flag used as whip handles and whole whips, worked into clothing designs, done as tattoos and hair dye jobs, and many, many times as cake decoration.
Of course, the leather pride flag has flown as an arch of balloons at any number of events, perhaps completing the circle from the inspiration DeBlase started with to the fully realized emblem we have today.
