Gay men's flag

Designer: Triton (gayflagblog) · 2019

Most people who say "the gay flag" mean the rainbow flag. This record is the other one: the gay men's flag, the green-to-indigo design the shop sells as Flag - Gay. Created by Triton, who posts as gayflagblog on Tumblr, and published in 2019. Triton worked from an earlier proposal by Mod Hermy of the pride-color-schemes blog, changed the palette and wrote a meaning for each stripe. He has said plainly that the flag is not meant to replace or erase the rainbow flag and that he would like the two used together. No official colour specification has ever been published for this flag, in the way the Gilbert Baker Foundation published one for the rainbow. The values here are the community set that circulates wherever the flag is used, including on the colour-code reference sites. Treat them as community convention, not an authoritative standard. Two smaller notes. Triton's own writing calls the sixth and seventh stripes purple and dark purple; on screen they read as indigo, so they are named that way here. And the flag is often called the MLM flag or the vincian flag. It is not the achillean flag, which is a separate design.

Colour codes: Gay men's flag
Stripe	HEX	RGB	CMYK	Pantone	Meaning
Dark green	`#078D70`	7,141,112	C:95 M:0 Y:21 K:45	n/a	Community
Teal	`#26CEAA`	38,206,170	C:82 M:0 Y:18 K:19	n/a	Healing
Light green	`#98E8C1`	152,232,193	C:35 M:0 Y:17 K:9	n/a	Joy
White	`#FFFFFF`	255,255,255	C:0 M:0 Y:0 K:0	n/a	Trans men, non-binary people who connect with masculinity, and gender non-conformity
Light blue	`#7BADE2`	123,173,226	C:46 M:23 Y:0 K:11	n/a	Love: romantic love, love between friends, and the love the community makes
Indigo	`#5049CC`	80,73,204	C:61 M:64 Y:0 K:20	n/a	Courage, of the people who fought for equality and of anyone living openly
Dark indigo	`#3D1A78`	61,26,120	C:49 M:78 Y:0 K:53	n/a	Diversity and inclusion

History

If someone says "the gay flag", they almost certainly mean the rainbow flag. That is the honest answer, and it is why this page sits alongside the rainbow entries rather than replacing them.

Gilbert Baker's 1978 rainbow was made for the gay community in San Francisco, but it was never a men's flag, and within about a decade it had become the symbol for the whole of LGBTQIA+ life. That is a good outcome, and it left a small gap. There was no widely used flag that meant specifically men who love men, in the way the lesbian flags came to mean specifically women who love women.

Attempts to fill that gap go back decades. Blue-toned designs circulated in the 1990s and 2000s and none of them stuck; the all-blue palettes were criticised for leaning on a tired shorthand for masculinity. Tumblr and DeviantArt produced a run of alternatives through the 2010s, among them a proposal by Mod Hermy on the pride-color-schemes blog.

The design that did stick was published in 2019 by Triton, who posts as gayflagblog. He took Hermy's proposal, reworked the colours and gave each stripe a meaning drawn from his own research and from his and other gay men's experience: community, healing, joy, then a white stripe for trans men, non-binary people who connect with masculinity and gender non-conformity, then love, courage and diversity. The white centre follows Monica Helms' transgender flag. Triton was explicit that the flag was not a replacement for the rainbow, which he described as something he loves and holds close, and that he would rather see the two flown together.

What is still argued about

The date is not settled. Most references give 2019. Some give 2017, which appears to describe an earlier draft, and some give 2020, which describes the closely related vincian version. 2019 is the best supported, but it is not beyond dispute.

The shape is contested too. A seven-stripe symmetrical gradient with a pale centre is the structure lesbian flags use, and some lesbians have objected that borrowing it makes the two harder to tell apart at a distance. That objection is a live disagreement in the community rather than a settled question, and it is worth knowing about either way.

Achillean, vincian, MLM

These words overlap heavily. Achillean and vincian are both umbrella terms for men and masculine-aligned people attracted to men, and MLM is used the same way. This flag is often used for all of them. The flags themselves are different objects, though: the achillean flag is light blue stripes with a green carnation, and it has its own entry.