The history of LGBTQ+ flags is much messier than you realize

By Daniel Villareal

When queer professor Andy Campbell started writing his 2019 book about LGBTQ+ symbols and design, he thought writing about the rainbow flag was boring and stupid. “I had a bad attitude,” he tells LGBTQ Nation. “I really felt like so disidentified from it… I could not see what is still so radical about this thing.”

But as he learned more about the flag and all the ways people have participated in its continual recreations, it anchored him to the creative, innovative, persistent, and enduring nature of queer survival. This feeling seems especially important to him now, as anti-DEI and “Don’t Say Gay” policies compel school boards and governments to argue about the propriety of displaying the flag on government property.

“I think what happens when you show any flag is you are charging public space in a certain kind of way,” Campbell says, “and in this environment that we find ourselves in right now — and maybe it’s the one we’ve always been in in certain respects — that space is really charged.”

Campbell currently works as a professor of Critical Studies at the University of Southern California’s Roski School of Art and Design. He has published two books — one on queer design and another on queer artists who mined leather-fetish history to create contemporary artworks that challenge some of the easier, more corporate-friendly notions of Pride and queer identity. Campbell is also working with Graham Feyl, a doctoral student whose dissertation research on queer flags could yield even more insights into our communities’ flags and their meanings.

While the original rainbow Pride flag and several of its new iterations were created by professional designers, Campbell says that some other queer community flags, like the Leather and Bear Pride flags weren’t. This leaves room for interesting creations that reflect the incredibly diverse and unruly nature of our community, he says.

These days, when Campbell sees a Pride flag displayed in public, he thinks about young queer people who are coming to understand their identities and the feelings they have when they get their first rainbow piece of ephemera.

“That is a decision that is so exciting and brave, and also full of danger in some ways,” Campbell says. “And that is happening all the time within our communities.”

“I feel like when we show [a Pride flag] in public, for me, knowing a deeper history about the flag, I think allows you to understand that those displays in public are miracles, you know? Like each one is a f**king miracle.”

(The following interview has been edited for clarity and length)

LGBTQ Nation: How did the original 1977 Gilbert Baker Pride flag become the template for the most recognizable emblem in the queer community?

Andy Campbell: The rainbow flag’s beginnings are apocryphal, and so little is understood about what went into it… But it’s really important to think about why the rainbow comes up.

First of all, San Francisco had this colorist movement in architecture, where old Victorian houses were being rehabbed and painted by gay men… becoming a bright and multicolored kind of city in very particular neighborhoods. There was also an exhibition, like a few years earlier, at the San Francisco Art Institute, all about the rainbow. It had installations and all kinds of stuff. The catalog for the exhibition has like rainbow-colored pages on its spine. It’s called The Rainbow Book — it’s really amazing. There was also a mime working in San Francisco at the time who was pretty famous, called Rainbow the Mime. So, rainbows were kind of in the air as part of the hippie culture of that era.

So, the flag comes out in some ways as a zeitgeist of a time and feeling of the place… If you want to get real sh**ty and academic about it, its authorship is in some ways shared atmospherically kind of by what’s happening in San Francisco at the time.

[The flag] is made for the 1978 Gay Freedom Day parade, and two versions of the flag are made and flown in the UN Plaza. They’re hand-stitched and hand-dyed by Gilbert Baker, Lynn Segerblom, and James McNamara, and about 30 other volunteers, and it’s done at the Gay Center. So it’s something that’s actually produced at a community center for a community event. It’s raised in a civic space.

I don’t think they knew that it would become the symbol that people would rally around for decades … [But] it really shaped queer visuality in lots of profound ways.

The eight-striped flag isn’t better known today because, a year later, Gilbert Baker was tasked with producing flags to line Market Street… and he needed to work with a flag manufacturer to get it done, and they didn’t have two of the colors in the original eight-color flag. So it became six colors just by virtue of the availability of mass-manufactured colors.

So, yes, part of the answer as to why it becomes really well known is it can be produced and manufactured — it doesn’t have to be handmade by a group of artisans together. [And] it just takes a while. There’s this assumption that once the flags go up, like… everybody suddenly knows the rainbow Pride flag. But… much of the world was not as networked in a way as we are now, and so news and images of the availability of those flags took a while to kind of percolate through the U.S. and then globally. It’s many years in the making, and that’s an organic process.

So when we have these conversations about which flags get taken up and which flags don’t, it’s because people respond to them, and they take them up and they feel like they are invested in them in a certain way. And that’s hard to manufacture, quite honestly. Ad agencies try really hard, and sometimes they do it, but it’s just difficult. Humans are kind of really tough in that way.

What ultimately made the rainbow seem like a decent emblem for our community?

There is something that is really hard to hide about that flag. Like, you can be in a dark room and you can know that it’s there. It speaks loudly because of its many vibrant and bright colors. It is present as a form, and what people react to sometimes is much deeper than just a meaning that is assigned to a thing. Sometimes they respond to the feeling of being in the room with that thing, and I think that’s the case with the rainbow flag.

It represents something that is maybe aspirational for a lot of queer people — it’s undeniability. Like, you cannot deny that I am here and that I am present, and that works against so much of what we know about queer history, which is it’s not just the question of visibility, it’s also just the question of being able to live one’s life in the way that one wants to, and to be undeniable and unassailable in that kind of life that one leads… and however one wants to fashion oneself as a being in the world.

Some people point to the rainbow flag and say that its colors represent everyone. But then, in 2017, Philadelphia’s Office of LGBT Affairs throws a black and brown stripe on there after publishing a report exposing widespread racism in the city’s gay bars. So we have an increasing awareness of racist institutional discrimination, the historic contributions to queer people of color, and the ongoing fight for racial justice and inclusivity in this flag. And when it first came out, some white cisgender men I talked to in Texas disliked the flag because “the rainbow flag already represents everyone.”

You’re kidding! White men in Texas don’t like this flag? Shocking.

No, actually, part of the point I make in the Queer x Design book is that the [Pride] flag is changing from year one basically, and it’s not a stable symbol… If you were really thinking about the deep history of this object, you wouldn’t be so tied to this idea that there can’t be any changes or emendations to it at all…

Our community is always shifting and changing and understanding itself in different ways, and like, what more beautiful way to represent that than a symbol that is constantly itself kind of changing with us… All these flags are valid in a way, and so it’s like, “Yeah, bring them on!”

But… the Philadelphia thing is like super interesting because… it also marks a certain kind of awareness and understanding of who we are in civic spaces. … [It] tells us a lot about how our various communities relate to each other, or don’t, or the antagonisms within our communities as well…

Historically, it’s made to respond to and to connect with the various racial reckonings, post-Civil Rights era reckonings, which are themselves kind of echoes of post-Reconstruction reckonings…  They have a place in our collective imagination, and we need to be able to welcome those things without shutting it down as invalid from the very start.

So, in 2000, transgender woman Monica Helms designs the Transgender Pride flag; in 2013, Australian activist Morgan Carpenter creates the Intersex Pride flag; in 2018, non-binary designer Daniel Quasar creates the Progress Pride flag; and, in 2021, Valentino Vecchietti slaps the Intersex Pride flag symbol onto Quasar’s flag, creating the Intersex-inclusive Progress Pride flag.

Understandably, after this, people ask things like, “Are we just gonna keep adding colors until everyone’s represented?” and “If the flag represents everyone, it represents no one.” What do you make of all this?

Maybe it’s on the brain for me, because of the recent Supreme Court case [Louisiana v. Callais, which essentially invalidated anti-racist provisions of the Voting Rights Act], there’s just this decimation to the movement that was really important in solidifying civil rights gains, which again were a response to the retrenchment from Reconstruction… for so many years, people were either considered not a person, three-fifths of a person, or just not seen at all by the political polity.

So, we can talk about universal abstractions until we’re blue in the face, but there’s also the political reality on the ground. And it is just a fact that a lot of the emergent, mostly gay, but also lesbian spaces that come up in cities and urban centers are segregated in major ways. There is not a lot of interaction. Obviously, it’s not like “Never the twain shall meet,” but there’s a sense that the cares and concerns of white gay men in particular are centered in the movement and in the liberation movement for years.

Part of what is being addressed with these symbols is a sense that the movement, at its very start, while it strove to be inclusive… however deeply imperfect that was, it just wasn’t happening. So, let’s not be surprised when people want to create amendments to the Constitution that ensure that people have access to the vote. Or let’s not be surprised when people create items of visual and material culture that reflect their presence in a kind of deep and obvious way.

While one day, maybe, everybody unites under one banner, I also don’t like it if that’s the utopian wish of people. That also misses something quite fundamental about our communities: We are really different, and some of those differences aren’t reconcilable under a universal abstraction, and that’s okay. Like, that doesn’t need to be our singular goal in life, to erase all differences between us. We can be in a space where we’re respectful of each other’s differences, needs, and wants, and even be at odds with each other around that without invalidating each other.

So I feel like a lot of those comments about the flags and adding colors and whatever, they move into the space of, “Why can’t it be like the good old days?” And that reveals a deeply conservative and retrenched kind of mindset that also exists within our communities… Not every LGBTQ person is a progressive at all. In some ways, I welcome that crankiness — it’s really good. But I find the desire to erase or wholesale delete some of what people are expressing to be quite dangerous, ideologically and practically.

A handful of flags will toss on a little extra cherry on top, like the heart on the Leather Pride flag, the paw print on the Bear Brotherhood Pride flag, and the red bone in the middle of the Puppy Play Pride flag. What do you make of these small accents?

There’s a 1989 edition of Drummer magazine [a gay leather publication], edited by Tony DeBlase, designer of the Leather Pride flag, that comes out the month after the International Mister Leather, where the flag was first displayed.

And the first letter to the editor is about this Pride flag. It’s about some of the community feedback about the flag that comes in: There was no design contest to create it, the meaning seems vague, and maybe the heart’s a little corny… [and] the blue and black seem too obvious… maybe about blue and black bruising.

And Tony DeBlaise … says, I didn’t want to overdetermine the meaning… I want there to be some interpretive leeway for people with this flag, and if you feel like it’s obvious, maybe some other people don’t. And I didn’t do it by community because, even if I did a design contest, people would still be unhappy [with it].

Essentially, the upshot is he proposes this flag, and it’s been widely adopted within leather communities, in part, because of his placement within leather communities, and he’s a great promoter of leather at this particular time, and before long, it gains a lot of traction. But also, again, just like the rainbow flag, it’s because people actually invest in it in some way and feel like it represents something about them.

[As for the] little heart… There is this idea within leather BDSM practices more broadly that they’re misunderstood as sociopathic or violent. And that heart does something, which is to say, as corny as it may be, that there’s something about love, care, and attention to another person, that’s really kind of deeply involved in these various practices, and then identities, and so I love that.

The Pup bone works similarly [to the heart on the Leather Pride flag]. It’s a more niche community within a broader leather umbrella, but the bone is funny. It’s like, “Give a dog a bone,” but also like, it’s a boner, and it’s part of our body too. There are so many ways to read that out. And the cleverness, the humor, the corniness, these things are super important when thinking about symbols like this. So I love what these flags do in that way — the more clip art flags, the better!

There are so many niche flags, like the Skoliosexual Pride flag, that, in my opinion, are kinda random and ugly, and that most people wouldn’t even understand if they saw one. Why, then, do these flags still matter to those and our communities nonetheless?

Why are there incredibly niche communities to begin with, with [internal] fights amongst them? I mean, people gonna people.

In some ways, this is a sociological question: What is it that makes someone feel the need to be seen or validated by a particular kind of design in some way? And I don’t know the answer to that.

There’s the possibility that someone who accepts a new flag would completely disidentify from other designs. But I think it’s more of a “Yes, and” [where a new flag can help address] specifically where I am in my life and world, and that’s great. I don’t begrudge anybody that.

I rarely see somebody say, “I like this flag because I hate all the other flags.” Maybe what’s happening is they’re feeling like there’s not a recognition of their particular kind of place within this kind of vast heterogeneity that is LGBTQ communities, and maybe that’s something to think about further, but… it doesn’t feel like an aggressive act to me. It feels like a creative and loving act to me, and that’s a good place to move from, generally.

Source: https://www.lgbtqnation.com/2026/06/the-history-of-lgbtq-flags-is-much-messier-than-you-realize/