The bisexual pride flag is a lesson in color theory doing political work. Two fifths magenta pink, two fifths royal blue, and between them a single fifth of lavender purple: the purple exists only because the pink and blue overlap, which is the entire point. Michael Page designed it in 1998 for a community that complained, with reason, of being invisible twice over, dismissed by straight society and overlooked inside the LGBTQ+ movement. His answer was a flag whose middle stripe is easy to miss unless you look for it.
A flag from a website
By the late 1990s the rainbow flag was everywhere, and Monica Helms's transgender flag was a year away, but bisexual people had no banner of their own. Michael Page, a bisexual activist in Florida, decided to fix that. Page ran BiCafe, one of the early internet gathering places for bisexual people, and he used its first anniversary party on December 5, 1998 to unveil his design. His stated aim was to give bisexuals a symbol with the same pull the rainbow had for the broader community, something to be recognized by and rally under.
Page was specific about the colors. The pink is Pantone 226, the purple Pantone 258, the blue Pantone 286, rendered in hex as #D60270, #9B4F96, and #0038A8. The stripes are not equal: pink and blue each take two fifths of the flag's height, and the purple band takes the remaining fifth. The usual proportions are 3:5.
He was equally specific about ownership, or the lack of it. The flag, he announced, was for free public and commercial use, not patented, trademarked, or service marked. Like Gilbert Baker before him, Page understood that a symbol spreads fastest when nobody controls it.
The overlap
Page's explanation of the design is compact. The pink stripe is sexual attraction to the same sex, the blue stripe is attraction to the opposite sex, and the purple is the overlap: attraction to both. But his more quoted line is about how the stripes meet. "The purple pixels of color blend unnoticeably into both the pink and blue," he wrote, "just as in the 'real world,' where bi people blend unnoticeably into both the gay/lesbian and straight communities."
That sentence gave the flag a second meaning stacked on the first. The narrow purple band is bisexuality itself, but its blurred edges are bisexual erasure: the tendency of both straight and gay observers to file bisexual people under whichever category their current relationship suggests. A bisexual woman married to a man reads as straight; a bisexual man dating a man reads as gay. The flag's geometry encodes the complaint.
Later readings have loosened the 1998 language. Page's description assumed two sexes and framed bisexuality as attraction to "same" and "opposite," which sits awkwardly with how many bisexual and non-binary people now describe themselves. The common modern gloss keeps the stripes but broadens them: pink for attraction to the same gender, blue for attraction to different genders, purple for attraction regardless of gender. The fabric accommodates both versions without alteration.
The biangles inheritance
The flag's palette was not invented in 1998. It came from the "biangles," a symbol created by the artist Liz Nania, who co-organized the bisexual contingent at the Second National March on Washington for Lesbian and Gay Rights in October 1987. Nania overlapped a pink triangle with a blue one so that a lavender triangle formed where they crossed.
Every element of that symbol carried history. The pink triangle was the badge sewn onto the uniforms of men imprisoned for homosexuality in Nazi concentration camps, reclaimed by gay liberation movements in the 1970s. Lavender had marked queerness in American culture for decades, from the "lavender menace" fights within feminism to older slang. The blue triangle completed the overlap and made the geometry work. Page took the biangles' three colors and unfolded them into stripes, trading the triangles' sharp history for something that read cleanly on a flagpole. Both symbols are still in use, though the flag long ago became the more common of the two.
Erasure, ownership, and a strange month in 2020
The flag spread through the 2000s the way movement flags do: pride marches, pin badges, forum avatars, and eventually the emoji-adjacent visual language of social media. It became attached to Celebrate Bisexuality Day, September 23, first observed in 1999 and now usually called Bi Visibility Day, when the flag is raised at city halls and lit up on landmarks. The pink-purple-blue gradient also escaped the flag entirely: cinematographers' use of pink and blue lighting with a purple wash, common in films and music videos of the mid-2010s, acquired the name "bisexual lighting."
The flag's oddest episode came in April 2020, when BiNet USA, an American bisexual advocacy organization, announced that it owned the flag's copyright and that commercial users would need a license. The claim startled the community, contradicted Page's 1998 declaration, and had no legal foundation: a design this simple, released into free use decades earlier, is not something an organization can fence off after the fact. Out magazine and LGBTQ Nation published rebuttals, vexillologists weighed in, and on May 8, 2020 BiNet USA gave up the fight in an unexpected way, announcing it would abandon the pink, purple, and blue flag and adopt a new design of its own. The community kept the original, which had never been BiNet USA's to give up. Twenty-five years on, Page's three stripes remain exactly as unveiled at the BiCafe party, unowned and unrevised.
References
[1] Wikipedia, "Bisexual flag." https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bisexual_flag
[2] Queer Art History, "Michael Page: Bisexual Pride Flag (1998)." https://www.queerarthistory.com/uncategorized/michael-page-bisexual-pride-flag-1998/
[3] "Everything you need to know about the bisexual flag, including who invented it." PinkNews, August 2024. https://www.thepinknews.com/2024/08/26/every-single-thing-you-need-to-know-about-the-iconic-bisexual-flag-including-who-invented-it/
[4] Flags of the World (FOTW), "BiPride flag." https://www.crwflags.com/fotw/flags/qq-bi.html
[5] Flags For Good, "Bisexual Pride Flag: History and Meaning." https://flagsforgood.com/blogs/news/bi-pride-video