Most pride flags have a tidy origin story: one designer, one date, one design that stuck. The lesbian flag has none of that. It has a contested history of at least three major designs in twenty years, each provoking arguments about who counts as a lesbian and who gets to say so. The version most people now recognize, five stripes shading from dark orange through white to dark rose like a sunset, only emerged in 2018, and even it exists because an anonymous Tumblr user trimmed two stripes off someone else's design. There is no official lesbian flag. There is only the current least-objected-to one.
The labrys and the black triangle
The first attempt came in 1999, when the graphic designer Sean Campbell created a flag for lesbian visibility: a white labrys, the double-headed axe of Minoan iconography and Amazon myth, over an inverted black triangle on a violet field. It was published in June 2000 in a pride issue of the Gay and Lesbian Times.
Each element had a lineage. The labrys had been adopted by lesbian feminists in the 1970s as an emblem of strength and self-sufficiency. The violet reached back to Sappho of Lesbos, whose poetry mentions violet crowns and from whom the word "lesbian" derives. The black triangle was the badge Nazi camps assigned to women deemed "asocial," a category that included lesbians, reclaimed here the way gay men had reclaimed the pink triangle.
The flag found users, and it still has some. But it never achieved general adoption, and over time two objections hardened. First, Campbell was a man, which struck many lesbians as disqualifying for the designer of their flag. Second, the black triangle's history made some uncomfortable, since its Nazi-era application was broader and murkier than the pink triangle's. By the 2010s the labrys flag read to younger lesbians as a relic, and to some as politically loaded, since it had also been picked up by trans-exclusionary groups.
Lipstick and its problems
The second attempt arrived in 2010, when Natalie McCray posted a design on her blog This Lesbian Life: seven stripes running from dark magenta through white to red, with a red lipstick kiss printed in the upper hoist corner. She called it the lipstick lesbian flag, and it was explicitly a flag for femme lesbians, the "lipstick" of the name being slang for feminine-presenting.
That specificity was the first problem. A flag for femme lesbians is by definition not a flag for butch lesbians, and butch women noticed. The kiss mark drew particular criticism as an emblem of one presentation style planted on a flag that was circulating as if it covered everyone. A version without the kiss, usually called the pink flag, spread more widely than the original and became a de facto lesbian flag for much of the 2010s, its gradient of pinks appearing across merchandise and social media.
Then the design's author became the second problem. McCray was accused of having posted biphobic, racist, and transphobic comments on her blog, which has since been deleted. The accusations circulated widely on Tumblr and Twitter around 2018, and whatever ambivalence the community had felt about the pink flag turned into active rejection. The lipstick flag is now rarely flown, and its pink descendant went down with it. The gap it left is what the next flag filled.
Emily Gwen's sunset
In 2018 Emily Gwen, a non-binary lesbian artist, posted a new design on Tumblr: seven stripes from dark orange at the top to dark rose at the bottom, with white in the middle. The palette deliberately fused the pink flag's femininity with warmer tones drawn from butch flag proposals, and Gwen published a meaning for every stripe. Dark orange is gender non-conformity. Orange is independence. Light orange is community. White is unique relationships to womanhood. Pink is serenity and peace. Dusty pink is love and sex. Dark rose is femininity.
The stated project was inclusion: one flag for butch, femme, and gender non-conforming lesbians, written by someone inside the community. It caught on quickly by the standards of these things, helped by the vacancy the lipstick flag's collapse had created. Another Tumblr user soon produced a five-stripe version by removing the second and sixth stripes, on the practical grounds that seven close shades of orange and pink are hard to distinguish on a small flag. The simplification won. The five-stripe sunset flag, in shades around #D52D00 orange and #A30262 rose, is now the version most manufacturers print and most pride marches carry.
Gwen, for their part, has remained visible as the flag's author, and has occasionally noted the irony of having designed one of the most reproduced queer symbols of the decade while seeing little from its commercial use.
A flag without a referee
The sunset flag's dominance is real but not total. The labrys flag persists in some circles. Older pink flags survive in closets and archive photos. Alternative proposals surface on social media every year or two, and each prompts a familiar argument about femme visibility, butch erasure, and who is entitled to design a symbol for a community.
What the lesbian flag's history shows is how these symbols actually get chosen when no committee exists. The rainbow flag had Gilbert Baker and a city ready to adopt it; the transgender flag had Monica Helms and a Smithsonian donation. The lesbian flag had a series of proposals judged in public, in real time, by the people expected to fly them, with rejection as available as acceptance. The sunset flag holds the position today because it has survived that scrutiny longest. Nothing formally prevents a fourth major design from displacing it, and given the pattern of the last twenty-five years, someone is probably drafting one now.
References
[1] Wikipedia, "Lesbian flags." https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lesbian_flags
[2] "The surprisingly turbulent history of the lesbian flag." The New Feminist, April 2023. https://thenewfeminist.co.uk/2023/04/the-surprisingly-turbulent-history-of-the-lesbian-flag/
[3] Flags For Good, "Sunset Lesbian Pride Flag: History, Colors & Meaning." https://flagsforgood.com/blogs/news/history-of-the-lesbian-flag-video
[4] People's Graphic Design Archive, "The Lipstick Lesbian flag vs the Sunset Lesbian Flag." https://peoplesgdarchive.org/item/13970/the-lipstick-lesbian-flag-vs-the-sunset-lesbian-flag
[5] "Lesbian Flag: The History, Origin, Meaning and Evolution." EveryQueer. https://everyqueer.com/lesbian-flag-history-origin-meaning-evolution/