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The ‘’Stolen’’ Gay Male Pride Flag

Let’s talk about the popular and sorta controversial gay flag from @gayflagblog, shown below. please check out my sources linked throughout the post for yourself.

The Reason a Flag is Needed In The First Place

The rainbow flag has always been the most popular flag for gay men to signify gay-ness and still is, even though this flag is gaining some popularity. Because of the centring of (cis, white, rich) gay men in general, due to our world’s generally patriarchal modern structure, society’s image of the LGBT+ community, the rainbow flag from 1978 and its new 6 stripe form has often been mistakenly attributed to gay men in particular, despite the rainbow flag being a deliberately inclusive flag that includes all LGBT+ people. So, for a while, gay men and lesbians didn’t have popular, widely used flags for our specific identities as gay men and lesbians, though more flags started to be popularised for specific identities, such as bisexual, transgender and asexual while previous lesbian and gay male flags hadn’t achieved widespread use. Lesbians and gay men started using the internet to figure out specific identity flags. why? because enough people wanted something more specific.

The Objections

I’m going to go through some reasons that some people have for not only not using this flag, but discouraging its use by other people.

‘‘It’s ugly’‘

I disagree, but beauty is in the eye of the beholder. this isnt an actual reason to discourage use of this flag.

people have started making fun of the flag by saying that it looks ‘’like toothpaste’’. I think this is just people who mistakenly believe that this flag has big problems (that im going to debunk in this post) and are making fun of it because of that, rather than the appearance of the flag being their main problem with it.

‘‘it was made by a *insert bad adjective here* person’‘

A lot of people seem to believe that the @gayflagblog flag was ‘’made by a truscum/misogynist/[insert bad adective here’]’. Personally i don’t believe that because a symbol was made by someone you don;t agree with or who has done harm, doesnt mean it is necessarily unusable. I think it should be on a case-by-case basis and based on whether you are actually perpetuating those ideas or providing camouflage for dangerous movements by using the symbol, but lets talk about whether this objection is based in facts.

 @gayflagblog is an anonymous account that does not talk about issues that are not to do with the flag, and specifically has made the flag inclusive of all gay men, which makes these accusations factually baseless.

here is why people began believing this.

[ID: gayflagblog flag left, Pride-flags flag right]

These flags look pretty damn similar. The @gayflagblog flag is clearly meant as an improved version of the flag on the right. people who are unfamiliar with these flags or who have impaired vision/colour blindness are totally going to mix them up.

A lot of people believe the flag on the right was created by a truscum. This is not actually true. The flag was posted on deviantart by a mod, (who is not a truscum) from an account called Pride-Flags, in 2017. [alt source]

A blogger with transmedicalist views, @discourse-king on tumblr (now deactivated) posted the flag that mod Hermy made, and worded the post in a way that made it seem like they had created it. The post got more reach than the original post on Deviantart. 

@gayflagblog and mod Hermy are not transmedicalists. discourse-king was a truscum/transmed blog, but they didnt make either flag. 

‘‘i dont like that it mainly uses the colour blue because it seems stereotypical’‘

The colour blue is definitely the stereotypical masculine colour. That doesn’t mean that it shouldn’t be used to represent men, however. there are several pride flags that utilise pink and blue to represent men and women, such as the pansexual, bisexual and transgender flags.

[ID: pansexual, bisexual and transgender flags]

It’s understandable to be uncomfortable with the dominance of blue in the standard @gayflagblog​ flag ,however, there are variations of the flag that have less blue in them.

the presence of blue in the flag is an obvious choice, but the creator could have scaled it back a bit in my opinion.

it’s stolen from the sunset lesbian flag’’

[ID: 7 stripe and 5 stripe gay man and lesbian flags side by side, One lesbian flag is upside down to show different alignments]

This is a very popular reason people have for being uncomfortable with the popular gay male flag. The sunset lesbian flag was proposed in 2018 ,the @gayflagblog flag was posted on tumblr on July 10th 2019. it’s very clear that the creator of the popular gay male flag was inspired by the design of the sunset lesbian flag. But is it a case of copying? is this flag just a ‘’hue shifted lesbian flag’’ as people often say?

this is what happens when you try to make the sunset lesbian flag look like the gay man flag using photshop’s hue shift feature. not only are the colours not the correct luminosity/brightness, they are much less diverse in hue than they need to be. the amounts of the colour spectrum that we label as certain colours like pink, orange, green, purple are not equal in size.

[ID: photoshop colour picker]

as you can see, the size of the ‘’orange’’ part of the spectrum is much smaller than the ‘’blue’’ side of the spectrum. the idea that this flag was created literally by hue shifting is mathematically impossible. 

So we know just by looking at it that this flag was inspired by the 2018 sunset lesbian flag, but is it a problem that this gay flag was partly inspired by this lesbian flag? Well, firstly we have to figure out how original the sunset lesbian flag is in the first place, and actually, the origins of this lesbian flag are a lot more gay (of the male variety) than you may expect.

Wow. that’s complicated. I’m sure I left out a lot of history in this chart, but you get the general idea. Gay and lesbian symbols have always been very intertwined, inseparable, it seems.

How do you copy a flag that is a merging of 2 versions of another flag, that was copied from another flag, that was inspired by 2 flags that were inspired by another flag? this isn’t a case of copying, it’s chaotic flag-ception. it’s actually quite beautiful, gay and lesbian communities interacting and making art throughout the years.

We came from the Gilbert Baker rainbow flag, to the Leather and Bear flags, to an obscure flag made by Fausto Fernós, that was turned into a borderline-copied lipstick lesbian flag, that turned into a gay male flag, a general lesbian flag and a butch flag, and those flags were smooshed together into another flag with influence from the trans flag (and I believe the green, grey and black aromantic flag was also an influence but I would have to ask Emily Gwen), and that smooshed together with the gay flag and the other Frankenstein lesbian flag into the gay flag you see at the bottom. Isn’t queer art amazing?

My point here is not to say that copied or heavily inspired flags are a bad thing, though. this is the nature of queer symbols. we arent divided into separate factions who only unite for the occasional issue, we are constantly mixing with each other, because we have similar political needs. A huge amount of us LGBT+ people have gone through multiple labels, personally i have lived as a bisexual girl, a cis lesbian, a nonbinary genderfluid pansexual person with a preference for women, a bisexual/omnisexual trans boy, an abrosexual trans boy, and a genderfluid gay/opalian/technically also bisexual trans man. the categories we have between experiences of gender and sexuality are lines we have drawn, they are not clearly defined and they are not objective, and that’s okay. despite the different words that we use to describe ourselves, we are all impacted by the way the world reacts to our divergence from the most common norms of sexuality, sex, romance and gender. 

This isn’t a case of one artist claiming another artist’s work as their own, or maliciously profiting off of another party’s labour, those situations are deceptive and potentially harmful. So where does the idea that because a queer symbol, (something used in a fashion similar to folk songs, where the ownership is communal and the art is always evolving) is inspired or even copied, it is therefore bad, come from?

Capitalism.

The structure of the societies and systems we live in have shaped the way we see the world, and it has happened from such young ages that we haven’t even noticed. we view everything as something that could potentially be commodified for profit. we don’t think of it this way consciously, but the evidence is there in the way we interact with many things, including queer art and queer symbols. I recommend this video from Patricia Taxxon that questions the legal institution of intellectual property, even if you don’t agree with her overall point that the legal institution of intellectual property is a problem, it will still give anyone reading this a critical look at the way we subconsciously think about art.

I guess the bigger point of this post isnt really ‘’stop telling people not to use the blue purple and green gay flag’’, though you really should stop doing that.

 It’s this: Let’s de-commodify queerness and de-capitalize our minds.

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Neither hypervisibility nor invisibility is a privilege. Repeat it. Repeat it again. Hit yourself over the head with it. Do whatever it takes for you to internalize compassion for your peers with different issues. Being gawked at, fetishized, tokenized, and forced into the spotlight is not a privilege. Being ignored, silenced, neglected, and dismissed is not a privilege. Being forced to be an ambassador for your identity is not a privilege. Being told that you don’t even count as a member of your identity is not a privilege.

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if i'm being honest there's so many video games to play

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"fuck you my child is completely fine" your child is in their bedroom listening to nvr pass by she/her/hers and crying

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I put some of the rat stickers on redbubble!

You can now buy the trans, rainbow and nonbinary rat stickers to put on stuff :-P share pics of what you put your stickers on and i’ll reblog it!

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Double standards for who is allowed to exist as the gender they identify as. 

Gender non-conformity and refusal to cut yourself down to patriarchal size is going to get you harassed or worse whether you’re cis or trans,but that isn’t the point of this post. it is about the fact that cis people are at least allowed to be who they say they are - though a ‘perverted, degenerate’ version of it, and we are only afforded the ‘perverted, degenerate’ labels and not the ones we choose for ourselves.

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Outfits i wanna wear after top surgery

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I’m doing good. Way better than ever, really. But there’s this buzz at the back of my brain that never really shuts up, day and night. I started to face it more directly last year but it’s not easy. The last two days were bad.

I’ve drawn about all hard topics that hurt me, so I decided to tackle this one as well. One might ask the purpose of showing things like these to thousands of people but I find it cathartic in a way, to take it out of my brain for just a little while and quite literally put it into another physical place. I also think it’s important to speak about the things that make us afraid and sad. Whatever way that may be. So, thanks for listening.

[Okay to reblog~!]

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Re: Septemberfalconer's thoughts on chickens and compost. Chickens+garden is an awesome combination. The composted chicken bedding/poop feeds my entire garden. Icky veg gets fed to chickens, and tomatoes get crushed egg shells.

It’s pest control, AND manure for the compost, AND scrap processing, AND eggs!

Seriously, after turnaround here I’m buying a garden shed, half of which is going to be turned into a chicken coop, and next spring we’re getting chickens.

Also, if you have bees, and use drone frames for mite control…a great way to clean those out when you pull them is to give the frame to the chickens. As far as chickens are concerned, immature drone brood is candy.

Mom used to clean her drone brood frames out that way. She didn’t have chickens but the neighbors did.

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Hello fellow Australians let’s start a support group called “GOD! GOD NO! NOOOOO!” and all we do is bitch about how terrible the Liberal/National party are

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hope everyone visited the great barrier reef while they could bc the australian state it is in just voted for the LNP in the federal election, so goodbye healthy climate policy possibilities, they’ve basically just signed their own death warrant

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Melbourne, the only beacon of hope in a sea of being terrible… 

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“Stupid Greens Party and their -” *checks notes* “- pro clean air, anti torturing refugee children agenda.”

— Queensland, apparently.

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@ everyone responsible for the coalition lead right now.

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Dog Ruins Every Frame of Google Street View by Chasing the Camera (x)