Pride season is here again and with our Proud to Support Pride range becoming a permanent collection in our shop we thought that writing a post about each of the flag colours that feature in the collection, what they stand for etc, would be a really good idea, especially for those folks who are not as familiar with the LGBTQ+ community.
Over the years the LGBTQ+ community have adopted many symbols of self identification to promote unity, shared values, allegiance and of course pride in who they are. The pride flags are something that have evolved alongside the community as it has expanded and grown over the years and there are now many different ones that span many different areas of the community.
The most well known of the pride flags is obviously the rainbow flag which was designed for the 1978 San Francisco Gay Freedom Celebration. It represents the diversity of gays and lesbians around the world. In the original eight-color version, pink stood for sexuality, red for life, orange for healing, yellow for the sun, green for nature, turquoise for art, indigo for harmony, and violet for spirit. However the current version only has 6 colours, Red, Orange, Yellow, Green, Blue and Purple.
The lesbian pride flag has been a fairly hotly debated subject over the years and there are a number of different versions which various sections of the lesbian community have adopted. One of the reasons we didn’t include the Lesbian Flag colours at first was because we were struggling to find which one would work, both from the point of view of the community but also something that would transfer into our products. But with the help of Fluffigator on Twitter we discovered this version.
B is for Bisexual and the three colour bisexual flag was designed by Michael Page and launched in December 1998 increase try to increase visibility of bisexuals in the LGBTQ+ community and society as a whole. The meaning of the colours is that the pink represents sexual attraction to the same sex only and the blue represents sexual attraction to the opposite sex, the purple colour in the middle is where those two things overlap representing the attraction to both sexes.
T
he beautiful light blue, pink and white transgender flag was designed in 1999 by Monica Helms. The blue and pink stripes are to represent the traditional colours for a baby boy and girl and the white stripe is for non-binary. The stripes are all completely equal which means that no matter which way up you fly it, it is always correct which signifies transgender people finding correctness in their lives with their gender identity.
Genderqueer, also known as non-binary is defined as “a spectrum of gender identities that are not exclusively masculine or feminine—identities that are outside the gender binary.” Non-binary folks can identify as having two or more genders or no gender at all. They may fluctuate between genders or be ‘other-gendered’ or might choose to not place a name on their gender at all.
The Genderqueer pride flag was designed in 2011. The Lavender colour represents androgyny or queerness, white represents agender identity, and green represents those whose identities are defined as outside the binary.
The bright and bold Pansexual pride flag has been widely in use since 2010. The pink stripe is for women; the blue, men; and the yellow, those of a non-binary gender, such as agender, bigender or genderfluid. Pansexuality is the sexual, romantic and/or emotional attraction to people regardless of their sex or gender identity.
And finally we have the Polysexual flag. Polysexuality is sexual attraction to multiple, but not all, genders. The Polysexual flag was designed by a Tumblr blogger in 2012. The colors and design of the flag are based on the pansexual and bisexual pride flags. The pink stripe represents attraction to female-identified people, the green stripe represents attraction to people who identify outside the traditional male-female binary, and the blue stripe represents attraction to male-identified people.
There are of course other pride flags such as Aromantic, Asexual, Genderfluid, Intersex and some countries have their own version of the pride flag too. The LGBTQ+ community is constantly evolving and growing and expanding its subsections to welcome more and more people with differing sexual and gender and identities into the community. In many ways it is a movement that is still very much in its infancy but one that has made a huge a impact in a very short amount of time and one we are very happy to be associated with and to support with our Proud to be Pride collection.
Molly Moore – Author, Blogger, Photographer, Speaker, Director of Operations @Eroticon Find me in my corner of the internet at Molly’s Daily Kiss and on Twitter @mollysdailykiss
