Gay pride colors on white background
Seen in Provincetown, the US East Coast's gay Mecca. Dimensions appeared to be 2 feet at the hoist by 3 feet on the fly, with the triangle about 18 inches high, i.e. Olive green (or olive drab) field with a large triangle, point down, centered on the flag the triangle striped red-orange-yellow-green-blue-purple, i.e. The "SILENCE = DEATH" slogan is not so much an allusion to the Nazi persecution, but to society's alleged silence about AIDS the slogan is (obviously) of recent vintage. The version with "SILENCE = DEATH" is particularly their symbol. The pink triangle on black is actually an organizational symbol for Act Up, a direct action organization fighting against the bureaucratic stupidity and homophobia that have killed so many during the AIDS crisis. Image by Jorge Candeias and António Martins-Tuválkin, 30 March 2005Ī further variant sets the triangle slightly closer to the top edge to make room for the inscription "SILENCE = DEATH" in white underneath, a political statement obviously alluding to the mentioned pride symbolism. (Pink Triangle with text "SILENCE = DEATH") The local variants I have seen of this flag ( Baltimore and District of Columbia, United States) are black with an inverted pink triangle.Ī similar design is the organizational symbol of Queer Nation. Queer Nation's transgender focus group, Transgender Nation, created T-shirts and banners based on the pink on white version. The triangle, flown as a "gay" flag, is usually shown on white. The use now is an attempt to turn a stigma into a mark of pride. The pink triangle was never used, at least for gays, before the Nazis, as far as I know. The pink triangle dates from Nazi-era stigmatization of homosexual prisoners by forcing them to wear the pink triangle much as Jews had to wear the yellow star. The rainbow is a symbol of gay pride, as opposed to gay liberation, which used the pink triangle on various colored fields.Īlthough it was first used in Nazi Germany to identify gay males in concentration camps, the pink triangle only received widespread use as a gay pop icon in the early 1980s.