History of the Raibow Flag
- Jun 26
- 3 min read
The history of LGBTQ+ flags is much messier than you realize
A queer professor explains the chaotic creative process behind the creation of our modern-day community banners.
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.
The pink triangle originated in Nazi Germany during the 1930s and 1940s as a dehumanizing badge of shame. The SS forced prisoners identified as gay men or transgender women to wear the downward-pointing triangle on their concentration camp uniforms. [1, 2, 3]
Evolution of the Symbol:
Holocaust Era (1930s–1940s): The Nazis utilized a complex system of colored badges to categorize prisoners. The pink triangle was assigned to homosexuals under Paragraph 175 of the German criminal code. Up to 15,000 gay men were imprisoned in camps, where they were treated with extreme brutality.
Liberation & Reclamation (1970s): In the early 1970s, LGBTQ+ activists in West Germany and later the United States reclaimed the symbol. They inverted the triangle to point upward and adopted it as a positive emblem of queer pride, self-identity, and remembrance.
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d "Silence=Death" to protest institutional neglect during the AIDS crisis.
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