Pup play is a form of role play and community within kink culture in which a person takes on a relaxed, affectionate, dog-like headspace.
Definition
Pup play (puppy play) is a kind of role play, usually within kink and BDSM communities, in which a person adopts a playful, dog-like headspace. It can be social, recreational or intimate, and it emphasises play, trust and consent.
It is a practice and a community, not a sexual orientation or a gender identity, and it is practised by people of many genders and orientations.
Flag
Puppy Pride flag
· Designer: Pup Flip Gray, building on designs by Kirk "Brue" Pierce, Jeff Hull and Scott Stevenson
· 10 May 2011
Diagonal black and blue stripes with a white centre and a red bone, inspired by the Leather Pride flag. Several versions exist and the design is not fully standardised.
Pup play grew out of leather and BDSM communities and became more visible online from the 2000s onward.
The flag was not designed once. It changed in stages, through at least four pairs of hands, and each stage kept what came before. Every version descends from Tony DeBlase's Leather Pride flag of 1989: nine black, blue and white stripes with a red heart. The earliest pup flags replaced the heart with a red Doberman head, a design generally credited to Scott Stevenson around 2000. Kirk "Brue" Pierce swapped the Doberman for a red bone, in his words because the head "looked like a Dobermans head and I did not identify myself as a Doberman" and he wanted a symbol that "would be universally recognized around the world that is associated with dogs." Jeff Hull, known as Grungepup Jeff, is credited with a seven-stripe version that tilted the stripes to a 30-degree diagonal.
The version most people fly today was released on 10 May 2011 by Pup Flip Gray, who restored all nine stripes, kept the 30-degree diagonal, widened the central white stripe to one and a half times the others to represent the broadness of the puppy community, enlarged the red bone, and put the design into the public domain so it could be reproduced royalty free.
Two things are worth saying plainly. The dates for the earlier steps are not reliable: Pierce's bone flag is placed anywhere from around 1990 to the mid-2000s depending on which account you read, so all that can safely be said is that it came before 2011. And the sourcing is thinner than it looks. The community flag histories, the Wikimedia Commons file record and the pup archives all appear to trace back to a single self-published account on humanpups.com, apparently Pup Flip Gray's own site, so they are one preserved account and its mirrors rather than several independent sources. "Pup Flip Gray" is a scene handle, and no statement under a legal name has been found. Retailers and some encyclopaedias credit the whole 2011 flag to Pierce, which merges two people's work.
