Common Symbols of the GLBT Community

The following are by no means all the symbols used by the GLBT community.  However, they are among the more commonly seen or popular of the many symbols used.

Rainbow Pride Flag	Gilbert Baker designed the rainbow flag for the 1978 San Francisco's Gay Freedom Celebration. The flag does not depict or show an actual rainbow. Rather, the colors of the rainbow are displayed as horizontal stripes, with red at the top and purple at the bottom. It represents the diversity of gays and lesbians around the world. The purple stripe is sometimes replaced with a black stripe to show masculinity or leather pride. Red stands for life, orange stands for healing, yellow stands for the sun, green stands for nature, blue stands for harmony, and purple stands for the soul.    The creation of the rainbow flag has led to many other designs that incorporate the core six colors of the standard rainbow flag as seen here. [more on the rainbow flag...]
HRC Logo	Logo for the Human Rights Campaign (HRC), the largest national lobbying group for GLBT rights.  This symbol is popular with many supporters of this organization as well as individuals who don't want to place the more "obvious" colorful rainbow emblem on their car.  The HRC "equality" logo is a way for some people to be "out" without being really "OUT".
Pink Triangle	One of the oldest of these symbols is the pink triangle, which originated from the Nazi concentration camp badges that homosexuals were required to wear on their clothing. It is estimated that as many as 220,000 gays and lesbians perished alongside the 6,000,000 Jews whom the Nazis exterminated in their death camps during World War II as part of Hitler’s Final Solution. For this reason, the Pink Triangle is used both as an identification symbol and as a memento to remind both its wearers and the general public of the atrocities that gays suffered under Nazi persecutors. AIDS Coalition to Unleash Power (ACT-UP) adopted the inverted pink triangle to symbolize the “active fight back” against HIV/AIDS “rather than a passive resignation to fate.” While the pink triangle was used exclusively with male prisoners, lesbians were not included under Paragraph 175. However, women were arrested and imprisoned for "antisocial behavior," which include anything from feminism, lesbianism, and prostitution to any woman who didn't conform to the ideal Nazi image of a woman: cooking, cleaning, kitchen work, child raising, passive, etc. These women were labeled with a black triangle. Modern-day lesbians have reclaimed this symbol for themselves as gay men have reclaimed the pink triangle.  [more on the pink triangle and other triangles...]
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. What the symbol means, or meant when it was introduced, has been topic for speculation and a number of rumors.  [more on the lambda symbol...]
Bisexual Pride Flag	First unveiled on 5 December 1998, the bisexual pride flag was designed by Michael Page to represent the Bisexual community. This rectangular flag consists of a broad magenta stripe at the top, representing same-gender attraction; a broad stripe in blue at the bottom, representing opposite-gender attraction; and a narrower deep lavender band occupying the central fifth, which represents attraction towards both genders.  [more on bisexual symbols...]
Bisexual Pride	The blue and pink overlapping triangle symbol represents bisexuality and bi pride. The exact origin of this symbol, sometimes facetiously referred to as the "biangles", remains ambiguous. It is popularly thought that the pink triangle may represent homosexuality, as it does when it stands alone, while the blue stands for heterosexuality. The two together form the color lavender, a blend of both sexual orientations and a color that has been associated with homosexuality for almost a century. It's also possible that the pink may represent attraction to females, the blue attraction to males and lavender attraction to both.  [more on bisexual symbols...]
Transgender Pride	Popular transgender symbols, used to identify transvestites, transsexuals, and other transgender people, frequently consist of modified gender symbols combining elements from both the male and female symbols. The most popular version, originating from a drawing by Holly Boswell, depicts a circle with an arrow projecting from the top-right, as per the male symbol, a cross projecting from the bottom, as per the female symbol, and with an additional striked arrow (combining the female cross and male arrow) projecting from the top-left.  [more on transgender symbols...]
Transgender Pride Flag	Another transgender symbol is the Transgender Pride flag designed by Monica Helms, and first shown at a pride parade in Phoenix, Arizona, USA 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. Helms described 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 intersex. 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 on transgender symbols...]
Two Spirit Pride Flag	The two spirit community has adopted its own flag, based on the six color rainbow flag with the symbol of the two spirit community. Both symbols were developed by the Spirit Committee.  [more on two spirit symbols...]

For more symbols of the GLBT community, click here.