BDSM Rights Flag (2005, Tanos)
Leather / Kink / BDSM Subculture Flag ·
Tanos's flag sets a red-and-white BDSM triskelion on the nine black, blue and white stripes of Tony DeBlase's Leather Pride Flag. He published it as a rights symbol, asserting that BDSM practitioners "deserve the same human rights as everyone else," and released it for anyone to reproduce, commercially and without asking. [1][2]
Key facts
- Designer
- Tanos
- Created
- In use
- 2005–present
- Aspect Ratio
- 3:5 · standard
- Stripes
- 9
- Origin
- United Kingdom
- Represented Identity
- BDSM community
Also known as
- BDSM Pride Flag
Status Canonical
Archive categories Subculture Pride Flags
Overview
Tanos published the BDSM Rights Flag through bdsmrights.com "as a symbol of the BDSM movement," asserting "that people whose sexuality or relationship preferences include... BDSM deserve the same human rights as everyone else, and should not be discriminated against for pursuing BDSM with consenting adults." [1]
The design combines the Leather Pride Flag's striped structure with a modified version of Quagmyr's 1995 BDSM emblem. Tanos meant it to be reproduced freely: it "was originally developed for use on the Informed Consent website as a BDSM symbol without the restrictions against commercial use that the other two suffer from, so that other organisations, groups and businesses could freely adopt it." [2] Built around a rights claim, it has since circulated more generally as a BDSM flag, and retailers sell it under both names. [3]
Identity & Context
- Represented Identity
- BDSM community
- Subcommunity
- BDSM / kink
Creators
The Creator
Tanos
Designer
Tanos writes and builds under that name alone, from near Manchester in England, with a web presence whose copyright line runs from 1997. By his own account he has "been involved in several BDSM projects over the years": the Slave Register, a registration service he started in 2000 which had issued over 160,000 registration numbers; Ownership & Possession, a framework he describes as "a new view of D/s & M/s built from familiar concepts"; KinkPodcasts; and BDSM Book News. From the end of 1997 he ran Informed Consent, a UK BDSM and fetish site begun as UKBDSM and renamed in spring 1998, which grew out of the events list he maintained for the uk.people.bdsm newsgroup; it relaunched in rewritten form at the start of 2005 and was refocused in March 2013 "on to its core activism aims." The flag was developed for that site. [4][2] In 2008 he bought Bridgewood, twenty acres of Shropshire woodland he manages jointly for BDSM events and for wildlife, running open-air event days from May to October. He states his original interest as "the Master / slave relationship, involving the transfer of not just power but also authority." [5]
Motivations
- That BDSM practitioners "deserve the same human rights as everyone else, and should not be discriminated against for pursuing BDSM with consenting adults" [1][6]
Documented design sources
- Tony DeBlase's 1989 Leather Pride Flag, whose colour arrangement the design carries[6]
- Quagmyr's BDSM Emblem, deliberately altered to fall outside its copyright claim[6][7]
Attribution notes
Tanos is the name the designer publishes under, across bdsmrights.com and tanos.org.uk; he gives no personal name on either and writes from near Manchester in England. [5] The triskelion at the centre is a deliberate near-miss of Steve "Quagmyr"'s BDSM Emblem, "different enough to be free from the copyright restrictions which Quagmyr claims on certain specified versions of the Triskelion symbol." [6][7] The vector in general circulation is AnonMoos's 2007 rendering of Tanos's design rather than a file of Tanos's own. [6]
Origin
- Country
- United Kingdom
- Digital Origin
- Yes
Created in the United Kingdom. No specific city documented.
The designer writes from near Manchester, England. [5] The flag entered circulation through bdsmrights.com and then Wikimedia Commons; no launch event or physical debut is documented. [6]
Dates & Chronology
- Year Created
- Period in Use
- 2005–present
The flag circulates widely online: the Commons file illustrates BDSM articles across more than twenty language editions of Wikipedia and the Wikidata item. [6] It is manufactured and sold as a standard three-by-five-foot flag with grommets and double-stitched edges. [3] It has been photographed in physical use: Tim Sheerman-Chase photographed it carried at Portsmouth Pride on 10 June 2023. [8]
Its own source site is gone. Flags For Good describe the designer's statement as appearing on "now inactive webpage bdsmrights.com," and the Commons file page cites that statement through the Wayback Machine. [3][6]
The emblem at the centre of the flag is ten years older than the flag and was drawn to do the opposite job. Quagmyr dates it to a discussion in late 1994 on America Online that turned on how many BDSM practitioners "could not afford to be out about their BDSM interests for fear of persecution," and whether there might be "a symbol we could wear to identify ourselves to each other without anyone in the often hostile vanilla world being the wiser." The Leather Pride Flag was considered and set aside: some considered themselves a different subculture from leather people, and some feared it "was too well known to be surreptitious enough. It was a Pride symbol, after all, and meant to declare BDSM interest loudly, making it unsuitable for those who needed discretion." His brief followed from that: a symbol "subtle and discreet enough so that it could be worn in a vanilla environment without raising eyebrows or questions," yet "distinctive enough to be recognized by those 'in the know'." Asked later how the emblem differed from the flag, he put it plainly: "The Flag is a shout and the Emblem a whisper." [7]
Quagmyr had working prototypes by mid-April 1995, ordered production that May, and the first pins and pendants shipped about six weeks later; the emblem spread across the web in late 1997. [7] Sources dating this flag to 1995 are giving the emblem's year rather than the flag's. The Commons file page dates the flag to 2005 with a question mark of its own. [6]
Lineage
- Direct predecessors
- Leather Pride Flag
- Related flags
- Rubber Pride Flag
The flag takes the Leather Pride Flag's nine-stripe arrangement of black, blue and white and replaces its red heart with a modified BDSM triskelion at the centre. [6] Other leather-derived designs share that stripe structure without descending from this one.
Lineage tree
Every record reachable from this one through documented parent and child relationships: 2 records across 2 generations.
- Ancestor
- Leather Pride Flag
- This record
- BDSM Rights Flag (2005, Tanos)
Colors & Symbolism
The flag stands for the claim that BDSM practitioners are entitled to equal human rights. [1] Its Commons description states that it carries "the color symbolism of the previous Leather pride flag" without itemising what that symbolism is; DeBlase assigned his own flag's colours no meanings, writing "I will leave it to the viewer to interpret the colors and symbols," so the individual colour readings that circulate are later community interpretations rather than either designer's statement. [6][9]
The central device descends from Quagmyr's emblem, and its ancestry is documented by the man who drew it. The idea repeatedly proposed on AOL was to "take it from the description of the ring from The Story of O"; Quagmyr's first sketch did that, but he moved away from copying the novel's ring, since accounts of its design differed, a company was already selling "O" jewellery in one of those forms, and duplicating a book's description "sounded like possible copyright infringement." He settled on "a design inspired by, but not identical to, the 'O' design." [7] He also found, after the fact, that his shape resembled the Celtic triskele, and treated the resemblance as an asset: "What could be better, from a standpoint of discretion, than having a symbol which was just similar enough to something neutral so as not to raise attention? It would be a form of camouflage." [7]
| Colour | Hex | Note |
|---|---|---|
| Black | #000000 | The 2007 Commons vector of Tanos's design, vectorized by AnonMoos. [6] |
| Blue | #0000FF | The 2007 Commons vector, which uses pure blue (#00f) rather than the royal blues that circulate for the Leather Pride Flag. [6] |
| White | #FFFFFF | The 2007 Commons vector. [6] |
| Red | #FF0000 | The 2007 Commons vector; the roundel behind the triskelion. [6] |
This flag has no official digital palette. Color values shown are approximate.
- Modified BDSM triskelion
- Quagmyr attached three readings to the emblem from which this flag's central device derives: the three arms as B&D (Bondage and Discipline), D/s (Dominance and Submission) and S&M (Sadism and Masochism); as Safe, Sane and Consensual; and as the roles of Top, Bottom and Switch. These are Quagmyr's meanings for his emblem, not statements by Tanos about the flag. [7]
No colour specification by Tanos has been located. The values above are those of the widely circulated 2007 vector, whose SVG source the Commons file page prints in full; the file credits the design to Tanos and the vectorization to AnonMoos, so they document that reproduction rather than a creator-issued palette. [6] Manufactured flags render the blue and red differently: the three-by-five-foot flag Flags For Good photograph for their listing shows a muted slate blue and a brick red. [3]
Design
- Aspect Ratio
- 3:5 · standard
- Orientation
- horizontal
- Stripe Count
- 9
- Layout
- stripes_with_emblem
- Stripes (Top → Bottom)
- Black, Royal Blue, Black, Royal Blue, White, Royal Blue, Black, Royal Blue, Black
- Center Symbol
- Modified BDSM triskelion, red within a white-edged roundel, centred on the flag
Nine horizontal stripes of equal height in the Leather Pride Flag's arrangement, black at top and bottom, alternating with blue, and white in the centre. Centred on the flag, a roundel: a white outer ring encloses three red arms that spiral from the centre, divided by curved white channels, each arm pierced by a white circle. [6]
Tanos's triskelion is not the BDSMblem, and the difference is precise. Quagmyr publishes four criteria that make a triskele his emblem: the rims and spokes must be a metal colour, gold, iron or silver; they must be of uniform width with the arms rotating clockwise; the inner fields must be black; and "the holes in the fields are truly holes and not dots." [7] On the flag the rims and spokes are white and the fields red, which is what the Commons file page means by "different enough to be free from the copyright restrictions." [6] The holes are the criterion a flag cannot meet at all: Quagmyr chose pierced fields over dots because "the symbol would reveal its true design only in 3-dimensions," and printed or woven cloth has no third dimension. [7]
Tanos states the design brief: the flag was "designed to be recognisable by people familiar with either the Leather Pride Flag or BDSM Triskelion (or Triskele) as 'something to do with BDSM'; and to be distinctive whether reproduced in full colour, or in black and white (or another pair of colours)." [2]
He made the two-colour version himself, editing the vector to black and white; it was uploaded on 30 March 2011. [10] It is not a mechanical desaturation. In the colour flag the light values fall at the second, fourth, sixth and eighth stripes (blue) and the fifth (white), so mapping blue to white would have run stripes four, five and six together into one wide band. In the two-colour version blue becomes white and the white centre stripe becomes black, and the nine-stripe alternation survives: black, white, black, white, black, white, black, white, black. The emblem inverts with it, from red arms in a white ring to black arms in a white roundel. [6][10]
Usage & Adoption
- Geographic Usage
- United Kingdom: Portsmouth [8]
- Online Usage
- Wikimedia Commons, where the file illustrates BDSM articles across more than twenty language Wikipedias and the Wikidata item [6]
- Event Usage
- Portsmouth Pride, 10 June 2023 [8]
- Current Status
- active
Circulation is documented in three forms: online through Wikimedia Commons and the Wikipedia articles it illustrates, commercially through pride-flag retailers, and physically at Portsmouth Pride in June 2023. [6][3][8]
Image Archive
Filed on Commons as copyrighted free use.
Released into the public domain by Tanos at English Wikipedia.
Discourse & Debates
- Whether the BDSM community needed a symbol separate from the leather community's is recorded from the emblem's beginning. Quagmyr gives four reasons the 1994-95 AOL group set the Leather Pride Flag aside, from subcultural difference to a wish for discretion to simple dislike of the design; and when he took the project to the alt.sex.bondage newsgroup, "there were a couple people who seemed to consider the idea an affront to the Leather Pride symbol and disparaged the whole thing. Others supported it." [7]
- The emblem's spread beyond its specified form brought a documented conflict with Celtic Pagan practitioners, who use the triskele religiously. Quagmyr publishes a letter from a correspondent on a Druidic path reporting that "a few people in my area have complained to me about being approached for BDSM while wearing a very close variant of this symbol, which we as followers of a Druidic path call a triskele," and Quagmyr's reply locates the cause in uncontrolled circulation: "people started spreading the Emblem across the Web without the background information required for proper understanding. Some people took to considering ANY Triskele as a BDSM symbol which is, flatly, wrong." The exchange concerns the emblem rather than this flag. [7]
Common misidentifications
- Frequently confused with the Leather Pride Flag due to the identical stripe pattern.
- Retailers sell the flag under both its own name and "BDSM Pride Flag"; Flags For Good title the product BDSM Rights Flag at a URL reading bdsm-pride-flag. [3]
- Sources dating the design to 1995 are giving the year of Quagmyr's emblem rather than the flag's. [7][6]
- Not every triskele is Quagmyr's emblem or this flag's device. He documents the Celtic triskele, an Okinawan family crest, a Buddhist drumming school's badge, the Taoist taegeuk, the arms of Trinacria, the flag of the Isle of Man and the logo of the United States Department of Transportation among shapes that are not his emblem. [7]
BDSM is an acronym combining B&D (Bondage and Discipline), D/s (Dominance and Submission), and S&M (Sadism and Masochism).
Footnotes & Citations
Sources and footnotes 10 sources
- 1. Designer page The BDSM Rights Flag. Tanos. BDSM Rights · Archived version
- 2. Encyclopedias & Reference BDSM Rights Flag (Wikipedia article, archived copy). Academic Dictionaries and Encyclopedias, mirroring Wikipedia (2010) (2010). Accessed 2026-08-05
- 3. Retail listing BDSM Rights Flag. Flags For Good. Accessed 2026-08-05
- 4. Community Informed Consent (website). Wipipedia contributors. Wipipedia (2019-05-27). Accessed 2026-08-05 · Archived version
- 5. Primary statement Tanos (personal site and projects index). Tanos. tanos.org.uk. Accessed 2026-08-05
- 6. Image file page File:BDSM-rights-flag-Tanos.svg. Tanos (design); AnonMoos (vectorization). Wikimedia Commons (2007-08-11). Accessed 2026-08-05
- 7. Designer page The History of the BDSMblem (The Emblem Project). Quagmyr. BDSM Emblem Project. Accessed 2026-08-05
- 8. Image file page File:BDSM Pride flag.jpg (Portsmouth Pride 2023). TimSC (Tim Sheerman-Chase). Wikimedia Commons (2023-06-10). Accessed 2026-08-05
- 9. Leather Pride Flag. FOTW contributors; page editor Randy Young. Flags of the World (FOTW) (2025-01-11). Accessed 2026-08-05
- 10. Image file page File:BDSM Rights Flag Black and White.svg. Tanos (design and black-and-white recolour); AnonMoos (vectorization). Wikimedia Commons (2011-03-30). Accessed 2026-08-05
Image Sources
- Rendering
- AnonMoos vectorization of Tanos's design, 2007
- Flag design, and the black-and-white recolour. Released for any use including commercial. [6][10]
- The SVG in general circulation, made 11 August 2007 from raster images on the BDSM Rights site. [6]
- Colour vector, Wikimedia Commons, 2007 · Credit: Tanos (design); AnonMoos (vectorization) · Wikimedia Commons
- Black-and-white vector, Wikimedia Commons, 2011 · Credit: Tanos · Wikimedia Commons