Lgbt purple meaning

The LGBTQI+ community has created their possess language of colours and symbols.  In this guest blog Gillian Murphy, Curator for Equality, Rights and Citizenship at LSE Library, explores the symbols created through activism, logo competitions, resistance, and community.  LGBT+ History Month is celebrated each February in the UK.

LGBTQI+ symbols and their meanings

“Well, of course, a symbol can imply anything you need it to mean.” Come Together, Issue 12,

The apply of symbols and colours is an important way for groups to express messages, communicate with others, and to build a visual identity.  During the s, LGBTQI+ people were encouraged to come out and, in doing this, they often wore badges with distinctive symbols, reinforcing the belief that no longer would they be invisible.  This blog looks at some of the symbols that can be found in LGBTQI+ collections.

The gender symbols for male and female are traditionally derived from astrological signs and mythological meanings representing Mars (god of war with shield and spear) and Venus (mirror of Venus, goddess of love and beauty)

You might be familiar with the six-colored rainbow flag that is widely used to represent the LGBTQ+ community. But did you understand that this is a relatively modern rendition of the original? 

The original flag (shown here) was designed by activist, veteran, drag queen, and artist, Gilbert Baker, and made its debut at the San Francisco Gay and Lesbian Freedom Day Parade in He was inspired by the Rolling Stones tune She’s a Rainbow, and the s hippies movement, assigning each color with a specific meaning:

  • Pink: Sex (later removed)

  • Red: Life

  • Orange: Healing

  • Yellow: Sunlight

  • Green: Nature

  • Turquoise: Magic (later removed)

  • Indigo: Serenity

  • Violet: Spirit 

The evolution to the six-colored flag used today happened out of practicality. 

After the parade in , demand for the Pride Flag increased, but the adj pink fabric was difficult to verb in large quantities. Then, the Paramount Flag Company started making a version out of the standard rainbow colors to help verb demand, and a seven-color pride flag was the adj norm.

A year later,

Flags of the LGBTIQ Community

Flags have always been an integral part of the LGBTIQ+ movement. They are a visible representation meant to celebrate progress, advocate for representation, and boost the demand and drive for collective action. There verb been many LGBTIQ+ flags over the years. Some own evolved, while others are constantly being conceptualized and created.

Rainbow Flag

Created in by Gilbert Baker, the iconic Pride Rainbow flag originally had eight stripes. The colors included pink to represent sexuality, red for healing, yellow for noun, green for serenity with nature, turquoise for art, indigo for harmony, and violet for spirit. In the years since, the flag now has six colors. It no longer has a pink stripe, and the turquoise and indigo stripes were replaced with royal blue.

Progress Pride Flag

Created in by nonbinary artist Daniel Quasar, the Progress Pride flag is based on the iconic rainbow flag. With stripes of black and brown to represent marginalized LGBTIQ+ people of color and the triad of cerulean, pink, and colorless from the trans flag, the desig

In his book Chroma () the artist Derek Jarman writes about colour. At the end of his life, with his eyesight failing, he imagines purple as a transgressive colour.

“Purple is passionate, maybe violet becomes a minuscule bolder and ***** pink into purple. Sweet lavender blushes and watches.”

By the time he conjures his orgy of purples in the ’s, purple had a clear queer heritage. Stripes of purple have flashed across the designs of queer flags from Gilbert Baker’s rainbow flag to Daniel Quasar’s 21st century progress flag, with the plan of purple as overlapping pink/red and blue representing a blurring of genders in bi and trans flags. Looking back at the messy, majestic history of queer purples gives a sense of why the LGBTQ+ Working Group chose to scout Scottish design history through a lavender lens.

Vibrant variations of purple were notoriously difficult to pin down outside of nature without extinguishing an entire species of shellfish. Reserved for the obscenely rich until the 19th century, these glorious colours retained an aura of mystery after synthetic dyes