Symbols
Sometimes the symbols associated with gay, lesbian, bisexual, and transgender movements get confusing to keep track of. Here's a list of the most commonly used and encountered symbols.
Flags
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Rainbow Flag
The Rainbow flag or Pride flag of the LGBT community (also known as the gay pride flag) is a symbol of LGBT pride and LGBT social movements in use since the 1970s. The colors reflect the diversity of the LGBT community, and the flag is often used as a symbol of gay pride in LGBT rights marches. It originated in the United States, but is now used worldwide. Designed by San Francisco artist Gilbert Baker in 1978, the design has undergone several revisions. As of 2008, the most common variant consists of six stripes, with the colors red, orange, yellow, green, blue, and violet. The flag is commonly flown horizontally, with the red stripe on top, as the colors would appear in a natural rainbow. More...
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Bisexual Pride Flag
The bisexual pride flag was designed by Michael Page in 1998 in order to give the bisexual community its own symbol comparable to the Gay pride flag of the larger LGBT community. His aim was to increase the visibility of bisexuals, both among society as a whole and within the LGBT community. More...
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Transgender Pride Flag
The Transgender Pride flag was designed by Monica Helms, and was first shown at a pride parade in Phoenix, Arizona, United States in 2000. The flag represents the transgender community and consists of five horizontal stripes, two light blue, two pink, with a white stripe in the center.
Monica describes the meaning of the flag as follows:
The light blue is the traditional color for baby boys, pink is for girls, and the white in the middle is for those who are transitioning, those who feel they have a neutral gender or no gender, and those who are intersexed. The pattern is such that no matter which way you fly it, it will always be correct. This symbolizes us trying to find correctness in our own lives. More...
Triangles
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Pink Triangle
The pink triangle was one of the Nazi concentration camp badges, used by the Nazis to identify male prisoners in concentration camps who were sent there because of their homosexuality. Prior to World War II, pink was historically a male color as an offshoot of red, and pink was chosen not because it meant the wearer was feminine, but because they liked other men. Every prisoner had to wear a triangle on his or her jacket, the color of which was to categorize him or her according "to his kind." Jews had to wear the yellow badge (in addition to any other badge representing other reasons for incarceration), and "anti-social individuals" (which included vagrants and "work shy" individuals) the black triangle. There hasn't been any evidence for the persecution of lesbians under the "black triangle". Only one lesbian (Mary Pünjer) was mentioned in the Ravensbruck archive as being stigmatised with a black triangle, but the reason for her persecution was her Jewish heritage.
The inverted pink triangle, originally intended as a badge of shame, has become an international symbol of gay pride and the gay rights movement, and is second in popularity only to the rainbow flag. More...
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Black Triangle
The symbol originates from Nazi concentration camps, where every prisoner had to wear one of the Nazi concentration camp badges on their jacket, the color of which categorized them according to "their kind." Individuals deemed "anti-social" had to wear the BLACK-TRIANGLE. The majority of black-triangle prisoners were either mentally retarded or had a case of mental retardation. Homeless and homelessness were also considered. The smaller groups of prisoners were also given this badge, including ones for alcoholism or alcoholics, the habitually "work-shy," prostitutism or prostitutes, members of the upper aristocratic classes and/or upper class along with others as well.
Lesbians have over time claimed the black triangle as a symbol of defiance against repression and discrimination, and it is considered a counterpart to the gay pink triangle. Today, it is as a lesbian symbol that the black triangle is most widely recognized, though some anarchists use a black triangle as their symbol.
In the Nazis' meticulous records there is no word of the black triangle having been imposed on lesbians, or of lesbians as a group being confined to concentration camps. However, some have reasoned that since the Nazis believed strongly in a traditional social role for women, lesbians and other sexually unconventional women might logically have been considered "asocial" from the Nazis' point of view.
The archive of the memorial site of Ravensbrück has evidence of four women with an additional remark of being lesbians: two of them had been persecuted for political reasons, two for being Jewish. One of the Jewish inmates was given a black triangle due to sexual contacts with non-Jewish persons. More...
Other Symbols
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Lambda
One symbol which continues to remain popular is the lower case Greek letter lambda. The symbol was originally chosen by the Gay Activists Alliance of New York in 1970. The GAA was a group which broke away from the larger Gay Liberation Front at the end of 1969, only six months after its foundation in response to the Stonewall Riots. While the GLF wanted to work side by side with the black and women's liberation movements to gain unity and acceptance, the GAA wanted to focus their efforts more concisely on only Gay and Lesbian issues.
Because of its official adoption by the GAA, which sponsored public events for the gay community, the lambda soon became a quick way for the members of the gay community to identify each other. The reasoning was that the lambda would easily be mistaken for a college fraternity symbol and ignored by the majority of the population. Eventually though, the GAA headquarters was torched by an arsonist, destroying not only the building but all of the organization's records, and the movement never recovered from the loss. The symbol, however, lived on. More...
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Purple Hand
On Halloween night (October 31), 1969, sixty members of the Gay Liberation Front (GLF) and the Society for Individual Rights (SIR) staged a protest at San Francisco's Examiner in response to another in a series of news articles disparaging LGBT people in San Francisco's gay bars and clubs. The peaceful protest against the "homophobic editorial policies" of the Examiner turned tumultuous and were later called "Friday of the Purple Hand" and "Bloody Friday of the Purple Hand". Examiner employees "dumped a bag of printers' ink from the third story window of the newspaper building onto the crowd". Some reports were that it was a barrel of ink poured from the roof of the building. The protestors "used the ink to scrawl "Gay Power" and other slogans on the building walls" and stamp purple hand prints "throughout downtown San Francisco" resulting in "one of the most visible demonstrations of gay power". According to Larry LittleJohn, then president of SIR, "At that point, the tactical squad arrived -- not to get the employees who dumped the ink, but to arrest the demonstrators who were the victims. The police could have surrounded the Examiner building... but, no, they went after the gays... Somebody could have been hurt if that ink had gotten into their eyes, but the police came racing in with their clubs swinging, knocking people to the ground. it was unbelievable." The accounts of police brutality include women being thrown to the ground and protesters' teeth being knocked out. More...