by Currie Jean

Created on: May 13, 2008   Last Updated: January 19, 2009

Over the course of the last century, homosexuality has been striving with increasing success to break from the shackles of Victorian and totalitarian views of sexuality. The fight has produced numerous linguistic and visual symbols of gay pride, acceptance, and struggle.

Gay Pride Flag

The LGBT (lesbian, gay, bisexual, transgendered) community has numerous representative flags. The most common was developed in 1978 by Gilbert Baker for that year's San Francisco pride parade, and was inspired by the rainbow's relationship with diversity. The way to tell a pride flag from an actual rainbow lies in its number of colors: pride flags have six (red, orange, yellow, green, blue, purple), while actual rainbows have seven (red, orange, yellow, green, blue, indigo, violet). The AIDS crisis of the 1980s inspired the addition of a commemorative black stripe to the bottom of the flag.

The Triangle

The relationship of the point-downward pink triangle to homosexuality has a dark past: Nazi Germany used the symbol to designate gay prisoners, the same way Jews were designated by two overlapping yellow triangles, or the star of David. In concentration camps, gays were castrated as a form of "rehabilitation," and later, routinely murdered.

A similar black triangle was used by the Nazis to designate those deemed "anti-social." Anyone who didn't fit into their ideals, including women who didn't want to marry men, tend homes or have children, were considered anti-social. Many lesbians fit into this definition, so it is likely that many were abused and murdered wearing the black triangle symbol. The symbol is now sometimes used as a lesbian pride symbol.

In present-day culture, in which gay pride is symbolized by an image that once represented their oppression, the pink triangle often points upward in a display of defiance and strength.

Gender Symbols

The Greek "Venus" symbol representing "female" (a circle with a downwards-dangling cross) and the "Mars symbol representing "male" (a circle with a protruding arrow, pointing to the right upper diagonal), are considered a representation of heterosexual relations when linked together. Likewise, overlapping the circles of two male or two female circles represents homosexual men and women, respectively.

Posters for Gay-Straight Alliance meetings sometimes show the symbols overlapping side by side, in a male-male-female-female pattern. The transgendered symbol is made by adding the hanging cross and diagonal arrow to a single circle.

The Lambda

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