Frequently Asked Questions

← Back to database

Inclusion & Exclusion

How do you decide whether a flag belongs in the database?

The metrics by which I gauge a flag’s fit fall along three axes: Life & Liberation, Art & Functionality, and Realization, (or the potential for realization).

A vast multitude of designs and iterations exist, even within the comparably smaller vexillological sub-family of pride flags. These three criteria define a narrow, curated window for the archive. By maintaining this focus, I ensure that the database remains a rigorous diagnostic tool. This focus enables meaningful comparison of design lineages that broader, unstructured collections often obscure. Within these parameters, I privilege the most widely known version of hyper-iterated micro-variants (see fig. 1), though notable variants are preserved in their entries’ galleries.

For instance, significant revisions to the Progress Pride Flag (fig. 2) may be granted dedicated entries. The subtle variations that prevent a design from attaining its own entry typically fulfill an aesthetic rather than expressive function, such as the examples shown to the right. These versions are maintained within the image archive of an established flag, and significant adoption such as real world use or descendency of new flags from a variant would result in full entries being granted.

Life & Liberation

This quality comes down to whether the study of a flag affirms life, liberation, and the human right to self-determine. However, this does not mean that every flag in the database is an unadulterated symbol of peace. This resource exists to document the many permutations and use cases of pride flags, which includes perversions and flagrant misuses. These cases will be included where their study is more instructional than harmful. For example, flags which combine the rainbow with national symbols of the United States. Each entry in the database has a land context section where the physical place is recorded, and in the U.S. this includes knowing the indigenous nations who were the original occupants of any given area. A U.S. pride flag may represent sincere Queer belonging while also tying that belonging to a state symbol shaped by settler colonialism and imperial power (fig. 3). This archive aspires to put the contradictions on record without endorsing state power.

Another example is in the context of Israeli pride flags, where a flag’s place of origin, the community it represents, and the symbols it reproduces are not interchangeable (fig. 4). A pride flag created by an Israeli designer is not necessarily an Israeli national pride flag, just as Jewish symbolism is not synonymous with Israeli state symbolism. These flags are considered according to what they represent and how they are intended to function, not simply where they were created. Inclusion and criticism of edge cases allows for more specific comparison in cases like this. Israeli national pride flags, however, deliberately join Queer visibility to symbols of Israeli state power. They may represent sincere Queer belonging while also tying that belonging to occupation and state violence. Where included, they are presented not to uplift or co-sign that fusion, but to document and examine it. This contradiction is especially visible not in Israeli rainbow flags themselves, but in a six-stripe pride flag hand-inscribed “In the name of love,” carried by an Israeli soldier through Gaza in November 2023 and amplified by Israel’s official social media accounts, where a symbol of Queer liberation was used to frame occupation and military violence as compatible with liberation.[1][2][3]

National symbols throughout the world carry histories of conquest, dispossession, and settler or state violence. When the pride rainbow is transfigured through these symbols, the resulting flags become records of how Queer belonging is articulated through, and sometimes used to legitimize, national power. Documenting these designs allows those histories and contradictions to remain visible.

Where does the archive draw the boundary?

The archive may document a pride flag entangled with a harmful system of power, but it will not reproduce a design that perpetuates harm as an identity. There are flags that cross a boundary whose reproduction causes more harm than their academic utility can justify. These are not depicted, linked, or published even for critical means. There are also striped flags that may not contain blatantly harmful symbolism, but which represent communities bounded by harm, repression, and the desecration of personal autonomy. These are not pride flags, because what they represent depends upon harm to others or the denial of their autonomy. They co-opt the visual language of pride without sharing its basis in liberation and self-determination. As such, they will not be depicted even for identification purposes.

Art & Functionality

What makes something function as a flag?

For the purposes of this archive, flags are designed symbols that can realistically be made as durable, repeatable objects, and flown outdoors. Durability is important because it narrows the project’s focus to symbols that can define public space. Artworks can take the form of flags, and flags can be art. The question is whether a design is intended to function as a flag, rather than only interpreting or appropriating the flag-form within an artwork. For example, a painting of glittery rainbow stripes in flag proportions may be an artwork about flags without being a flag itself (fig. 5). A repeatable design intended to be manufactured, carried, hung, or flown counts as a flag even if it was first created digitally (fig. 6). By limiting this archive to usable, flyable flags, I can expand it to niche and fringe designs while keeping its scope focused on things that can realistically define public space (fig. 7).

Single-Source Flags & Realization

Does a pride flag need to have been physically manufactured?

No. The expectation that a pride flag has already been realized as a physical nylon flag has become slightly incidental to the modern pride flag. Today, flags are often created, adopted, and circulated within communities long before a physical flag is ever made. These digital designs are still called flags because they project meaning in digital space as flags do in physical space. They also maintain the kinetic potential of a flag: if physically realized, it’s inevitable they would be flags. For example, many gender, romantic, and microlabel flags first circulated as digital images through Tumblr, forums, wikis, and other community spaces. Their earliest documented form may be a PNG rather than a sewn object, but they are still designed and used as flags (fig. 8).

Why are some flags included without evidence of adoption?

Some entries record a flag’s invention rather than its adoption. A creator’s original post may establish that a design existed, who made it, when it appeared, and what it was intended to mean, while providing no evidence that a wider community ever used it. In those cases, the entry states that limitation plainly.

A single-source design may still be included when it offers a distinct and relevant example within the design lineages this archive traces. Publication alone, however, does not warrant an entry. Attempting to include every flag ever posted would turn the database into an unstructured inventory of proposals and minor iterations, obscuring the comparisons it is designed to make.

Can I submit a flag?

Encycloflaggia welcomes submissions of new and novel flag-forms that align with the project’s archival mission, as well as the inclusion and exclusion criteria outlined above. I also welcome photographs, media, sources, corrections, and other information related to existing entries. All submissions are evaluated according to the same archival standards. Contribute here.

Research Methodology

How are the database’s sources and media preserved?

Since I began this project, before the second Trump Administration, several mainstream pride flag databases have disappeared, sometimes with their domains changing hands overnight without any public account of what happened to their records.[4][5][6] Encycloflaggia is structured with this instability in mind. Whenever possible, I preserve the pages I cite through the Wayback Machine alongside their live URLs. Every citation is also collected in the Full Database Bibliography, where sources are organized by type and connected back to every entry in which they appear. Publication information, access dates, and archived versions are recorded when available. Images, documents, and videos are treated as archival records in their own right. Each item is preserved at its original available resolution and catalogued with information such as its date, credit, source, context, media type, dimensions, related flags, lineage, location, and tags. These records populate the sitewide Media Archive, where material can be searched and cross-sectioned across the entire database.

Where possible, the public site directs users to the original source or media file. Redundant copies are maintained privately so that a dead link, deleted post, or vanished platform does not remove the material from the record. Preserved copies are available on request.

The site is still very much under construction, and preservation is ongoing. If you encounter a dead link or a source without an archived capture, please let me know.

Where will this research be published?

Encycloflaggia is an ongoing public research project. A fuller account of its methodology, original research, and findings will be developed through my graduate thesis at the School of the Art Institute of Chicago during the 2027–2028 academic year. Once completed, the thesis will be deposited in SAIC’s thesis repository and made available in full on this website. The thesis will extend the arguments made visible through the database, while the archive itself will continue to grow as a living resource.

Editorial Process, AI, & Tooling

How do you use AI?

I use AI selectively for research assistance, source preservation, and technical support. In my research, this looks like agents reading large batches of information to identify relevant entries/posts/articles, locating and reading dead or archived webpages, and maintaining consistency in factual claims across hundreds of entries. I use Claude Code for site structure, implementation, debugging, and technical iteration, currently the premier Anthropic model.

My use of AI in these instances sits within a broader futurist art practice concerned with how emerging technologies reshape authorship, labor, and collective life and pursuit of joy. I develop that position more fully in my pending thesis. Above all, this project is human-authored. I do not treat an AI agent as an authoritative source or use one in place of citation, personal judgment, or community-specific care. Source evaluation, historical claims, editorial interpretation, and the decisions governing inclusion remain my responsibility.

How is Encycloflaggia built and published?

Encycloflaggia is versioned through GitHub and published through Netlify. GitHub stores the files that create the site and maintains a history of its development. Changes can be saved, compared, reviewed, and reversed when necessary. Netlify publishes those files as the live website and automatically rebuilds the public version when approved updates are added.

Notes

  1. Agence France-Presse, “Gaza pride flag images reignite ‘pinkwashing’ debate,” 21 November 2023, published by Al-Monitor: al-monitor.com. Documents the photographs, their first posting online by the screenwriter Lee Kern, their repost by Israel’s official X account with nearly 17 million views within the week, and criticism from Nas Mohamed of the Alwan Foundation, the Palestinian activist Ahmad Nawwas, and Rasha Younes of Human Rights Watch. ↩
  2. Lubna Masarwa, “Israeli soldier flying rainbow flag in Gaza ‘textbook pinkwashing’,” Middle East Eye, 13 November 2023: middleeasteye.net. Identifies the soldier, a 31-year-old reservist photographed in Gaza’s al-Atatra area, records the flag’s inscription in English, Arabic, and Hebrew, and quotes the Palestinian Queer activist Ghadir Shafie. ↩
  3. Rayyan Dabbous, “In Gaza, a photo of Israeli soldier raising a pride flag ‘in the name of love’ goes viral, ‘pinkwashing’ a war,” The Conversation, 26 November 2023: theconversation.com. ↩
  4. Library.LGBT’s flag guide named its operator in its own page footers: “Library.LGBT is brought to you by Albany Pride - an LGBTQIA+/Queer support, networking, and advocacy organisation based in Albany/Kinjarling, Western Australia.” The pages, first published in 2021 and carrying “Last modified: 14th February, 2022,” are preserved by the Wayback Machine, for example the capture of 12 February 2026: web.archive.org. The live site went dark in July 2026 with no closure notice located from its operator. ↩
  5. .lgbt registry RDAP record for library.lgbt, retrieved 21 August 2026: rdap.identitydigital.services. The registry’s event log records the domain’s registration on 1 June 2021 and a registrar transfer on 10 July 2026, two weeks before the guide was found offline; its nameservers now point to a domain-parking service. ↩
  6. Among others: EuroGay.net, a flag guide cited in Flags of the World documentation as early as 2001, now redirects to an unrelated domain; the Rainbow Icon Archive and the designer site gayflagofsouthafrica.co.za survive only as Wayback Machine captures. ↩