Will Montgomery

This database is an archive of Queer pride flags and their design genealogies. I built it from the belief that pride flags are living cultural organisms through which Queer communities make ourselves visible, demand inclusion, narrate our own histories, and imagine better futures.

Pride flags have an expansive history of reinvention, yet there is still a disproportionately small amount of scholarship seriously asking why these symbols keep being remade. New flags often emerge when older ones no longer feel sufficient, whether because they exclude people, narrow a community, become contested, or fail to reflect changing political and personal realities. Over the past decade, updates to the rainbow flag have helped produce a cultural narrative that dismisses new additions as excessive or overly specific, while rarely asking what failures made those revisions feel necessary in the first place. I have always been drawn to the rainbow flag, as well as the wider field of Queer pride flags, which project solidarity, safety, and affirmation. I see pride flags as visual art in the public sphere that responds in real time to invisibility, erasure, conflict, and the desire to be known on one's own terms. The purpose of this project is to catalog the many permutations of pride flags as exhaustively as possible. I also want to understand what conditions bring a flag into being, how they circulate, and what makes one endure, become disputed, disgraced, disappear, get redesigned, and reappear. Against the backdrop of the supposedly universal rainbow flag, there's an opportunity to read changes in color, shape, and symbolism as evidence of broader shifts in how communities understand themselves and each other.

This project includes comparative analysis of the existing landscape of pride flag archives. It scrutinizes how different databases define what counts as a pride flag, how they handle authorship, debate, provenance, and uncertainty, and what kinds of work they recognize these symbols doing. It also hosts my own research into more avant-garde, hyper-niche, obscure, and sparsely documented flags, including some that may have no established physical form or exist only in singular records.

I am an artist and amateur researcher committed to transparency, fair representation, citational integrity, and honesty about evidentiary limits. I also value lived experience. I recognize that not everyone feels represented by the same flags, or by any of these flags, but I believe in the power of these symbols to keep evolving across borders, language, culture, and religion. My hope is that as communities continue making new symbols, we can create more honest, more expansive, and more liberatory ways of being seen. Better symbols help create better communities and better worlds. Tracing the lineage of our symbols is so important to me for this reason. It gives future artists, students, and organizers tools to think intergenerationally and intersectionally as they push the frontier forward.

This project is not neutral, and I reserve the power of editorial judgment. I am responsible for making choices about what belongs here, what qualifies as a pride flag, and how I distinguish fringe symbols from adjacent, derivative, satirical, or harmful forms that borrow the visual language of pride without serving Queer life or liberation.

I will not publish or reference flags representing harmful, unethical, or oppressive behavior, because that is not a pride flag by the standards of this archive. For the purposes of this database, I also distinguish between a pride flag and flag-adjacent art, (If it can fly in the rain, it is a flag by my standards). By limiting this archive to usable, flyable flags, I can expand to niche and fringe designs while keeping the scope focused on things that can realistically define public space.

Errors are possible. Corrections are welcome.