Butch Lesbian Flag (Butchspace, 2017)

Overview

Stated by the flag's author in the tags on the post that published it: a falling-out with the maker of an earlier butch flag, and a palette that suited the blog and read as warm. ^[1] The often-repeated account that the flag was made as a deliberate answer to the femme-coded pink lesbian flag is not what its author says. That motive is stated a week later, by a different person, for a different flag: shapeshifter-of-constellation, splicing this flag with the lipstick lesbian flag, wrote that the lipstick flag was being used as the lesbian community's default "which is an act that treats femininity as the default, and makes butches feel left out and ignored". ^[1][4]

The flag was published on 27 June 2017 on butchspace, a butch positivity blog on Tumblr, by the moderator Mod Q, also called Jim. ^[1][2] Its author gave the reason in the post's own tags: "there was some weord drama w/ the creator of the green one so i decided to make my own", adding that the palette "matches the blog theme better and its warm and nice like butches". ^[1] Which earlier butch flag "the green one" refers to is not stated in the post and has not been identified; it is not the 2016 butch flag, which is blue and purple. ^[1][2]

Identity & Context

Represented Identity

lesbian

Subcommunity

butch lesbian

During the 1940s and 1950s, butch and femme roles organized social life in the lesbian bars that were among the few public spaces available to Queer women. Elizabeth Lapovsky Kennedy and Madeline D. Davis documented that working-class culture in Buffalo in their oral history Boots of Leather, Slippers of Gold. Under McCarthyism and the Lavender Scare, butch lesbians bore a disproportionate share of homophobic violence because their visible gender nonconformity made them identifiable targets, and they became defenders of bar spaces during police raids. Second-wave feminism of the 1970s then turned on butch-femme culture itself, dismissing it as an imitation of heterosexuality, a critique led largely by white, middle-class lesbian feminists who marginalized working-class butch communities. Leslie Feinberg's 1993 novel Stone Butch Blues gave literary form to the violence and erasure butch people endured, and helped spark a revival of butch-femme culture in the 1990s. ^[5]

Creators

The Creator

Attribution notes

Jim and Mod Q are one person, a moderator of the butchspace blog. The flag post and the design statement are both tagged by their author "mod q" and "op-q"; in the blog's October 2017 answer to a reader, Mod T writes "Mod Q made the orange one!" and in the next sentence discusses whether "Jim" minds people using "the orange butch flag he created". ^[1][3][2] Wikipedia's account of lesbian flags attributes the flag to "a moderator named 'Jim'". ^[4] The credit line the blog itself suggests is "Jim of Butchspace". ^[2] The Tumblr user princechaotic contributed to the colour meanings but not, as far as the posts say, to the design. ^[3]

Origin

Digital Origin

butchspace Tumblr blog

Digital origin; no verified physical location.

Published on the Tumblr blog butchspace as "A new butch flag" on 27 June 2017. ^[1]

Dates & Chronology

Year Created

2017

Exact date

June 27, 2017

First public use

June 27, 2017

Period in Use

2017–present

Within a week the flag was spliced with the lipstick lesbian flag by the Tumblr user shapeshifter-of-constellation, who opened the post "@butchspace I loooooove your orange butch flag". ^[4] The three orange values pass through that splice unchanged and are the same three in the orange-pink lesbian flag attributed to Emily Gwen in 2018, which Wikipedia describes as combining "the three magenta-pink stripes from the top of the pink flag, with the three red-orange stripes from the lesbian butch flag". ^[1][4] By October 2017 the blog's own moderators named this flag and the 2016 dorian--rutherford flag as "the two flags i see most in use among butches". ^[2]

In October 2017 a reader asked the blog whether an official butch flag existed. Three moderators answered in one chain, and the answers do not agree with each other: Mod L had searched and reported that "as much as i searched, i couldn't find a creator", after which Mod T corrected the record with "Mod Q made the orange one!" ^[2] The exchange is the earliest located account of how the flag was circulating a few months after publication, and of the fact that its own blog's moderators did not all know who had drawn it.

Lineage

Direct children

Sunset Lesbian Flag, Orange-Pink Lesbian Precursor (2017)

Related flags

Butch Lesbian Pride Flag (2016, dorian--rutherford), Lipstick Lesbian Flag, Pink Lesbian Flag, Sapphic Flag

The orange-side source of the modern orange-pink lesbian line, and measurably so: the flag's three orange values, #D62C00, #F07528 and #FF9B57, are the same three values in the shapeshifter-of-constellation flag of 3 July 2017, which its designer described as a splice of "the lipstick lesbian & orange butch flag". ^[1][4] Wikipedia describes the orange-pink flag as combining the pink flag's three magenta-pink stripes with "the three red-orange stripes from the lesbian butch flag". ^[4] Linked laterally to the 2016 butch flag as a separate earlier design in a cool palette. ^[6] The designer's one stated borrowing is a meaning rather than a form: he traced the red band's sense to Gilbert Baker's rainbow flag, and that is recorded in Creators rather than as a design relationship. ^[3] For the full lineage synthesis (lipstick to pink to butch to shapeshifter to Emily Gwen to taqwomen), see emily-gwen-2018-orange-pink-lesbian-flag.

Lineage tree

Every record reachable from this one through documented parent and child relationships: 6 records across 3 generations.

This record

Butch Lesbian Flag (Butchspace, 2017)

Children

Orange-Pink Lesbian Precursor (2017), Sunset Lesbian Flag

Generation 3

Five-Stripe Sunset Lesbian Flag, Lesbian Lesboy Ally Flag, Lesbian Mspec Lesbian Ally Flag

Colors & Symbolism

Seven named values, assigned to the bands by the flag's designer three days after publishing it and credited in part to the Tumblr user princechaotic: passion and sexuality, courage, joy, renewal, chivalry, warmth and honesty. ^[3] The palette itself the designer explained plainly in the original post's tags, as suiting the blog and reading as warm. ^[1]

Measured from the file published with the flag on 27 June 2017. ^[1]

This flag has no official digital palette. Color values shown are approximate.

The meanings are quoted from the design statement of 30 June 2017, which opens "Based off of @princechaotic's suggestions and my own feelings, I have assigned meanings to each of the colors." ^[3] They were assigned after the flag was drawn, not before it. The post also carried a graphic with each meaning handwritten across its band. The 2016 butch flag uses an entirely different cool blue-and-purple palette for the same community, so there is no single settled colour language for butch pride. ^[6][5]

The colour names are the designer's own, from the design statement of 30 June 2017; the values are measured from the PNG published with the flag three days earlier, taking the modal colour of each band's interior across the full width. ^[3][1] No hex specification was ever published by the designer. Two of the names describe the flag loosely: the band called white is a warm cream, and the band called brown is a dark mustard gold, which is why Wikipedia's summary of the palette reads "red, orange, white, yellow, and brown". ^[4] Earlier versions of this entry carried a circulating reconstruction in reds and true browns; none of those seven values is close to the file.

Design

Aspect Ratio

613:345 · apparent

Ratio Notes

Measured from the designer's own file, 613 by 345 pixels, a width to height of 1.7768. Tumblr's 1280-pixel derivative of that upload returns the same 613 by 345 image, so those are the dimensions as posted rather than a resized copy. 613:345 does not reduce further, and it falls within a third of a pixel of 16:9, which at 345 high would be 613.33 wide. No proportion was ever published. ^[1]

Orientation

horizontal

Stripe Count

7

Layout

horizontal_stripes

Stripes (Top → Bottom)

Red, Red Orange, Light Orange, White, Beige, Orange, Brown

The seven bands are 48 to 52 rows deep apart from the topmost, which is 42, against an equal-sevenths ideal of 49.3, so the design is equal sevenths as drawn by hand in a raster editor. Adjacent bands meet across a few rows of blended pixels rather than at a hard edge. Each band's interior is close to a single value: the top band is 97 per cent one colour across its 42 rows, and only eight colours appear anywhere in it. No construction sheet exists. ^[1]

Seven horizontal bands. The designer's own names for them, top to bottom, are red, red orange, light orange, white, beige, orange and brown; the fourth is a warm cream rather than a pure white, and the last two are a saturated amber and a dark mustard gold. ^[3][1]

Seven horizontal bands of equal depth. Top to bottom: a deep red-orange, a mid orange, a light orange, a warm cream, a pale apricot, a saturated amber and a dark mustard gold. Wikipedia summarises the palette as "red, orange, white, yellow, and brown". ^[4] The designer's own names, given with the meanings on 30 June 2017, are red, red orange, light orange, white, beige, orange and brown. ^[3]

Usage & Adoption

Online Usage

Named by the butchspace moderators in October 2017, together with the 2016 dorian--rutherford flag, as one of "the two flags i see most in use among butches". ^[2]

Current Status

Documented online circulation from 2017; physical use not documented

Circulated within butch communities on Tumblr and, through the July 2017 splice by shapeshifter-of-constellation, supplied the orange half of the lesbian flag in widest use today. ^[1][4]

Discourse & Debates

• Whether butch is a gender expression, a gender identity, or both. Leslie Feinberg defined it as a gender unto itself, while others use it solely as a descriptor for masculine presentation within womanhood. ^[5]
• The relationship between butch identity and transmasculine identity, and whether the two overlap or are distinct categories. Queer theorist Jack Halberstam has argued that butch and trans male are fundamentally separate, while others see them as historically intertwined. ^[5]

Common misidentifications

• Confused with the 2016 butch flag, which uses cool blues and purples rather than warm oranges and golds. The two are separate designs by separate people; butchspace said of the older one, "The purple and blue one we did not create and I don't know who did." Its authorship remains open at two removes: the moderator answering pointed to a DeviantArt copy, said the original maker had deleted their account, and reported only that "the person who re-posted it said that their tumblr is @dorian--rutherford". ^[6][2]
• Reproduced in reds and true browns. The flag has no true brown band: what its designer calls brown measures #A16F00, a dark mustard gold. ^[1][3]
• The orange bands of the orange-pink lesbian flag are often not recognised as coming from this design. ^[4]

Criticisms

• Some community members question whether a separate butch flag is necessary, arguing that the lesbian flag should already encompass all gender expressions within lesbian identity. Butch community members counter that the pink flag's color language is inherently femme-coded and that butch invisibility is itself a form of erasure worth resisting with distinct symbols. ^[5]

In Black and Latinx lesbian communities, "stud" is the culturally specific counterpart to butch, created by Black lesbians to express gender roles developed within the Black community rather than adopting terminology from white lesbian culture. The two terms are not interchangeable. ^[5]

Footnotes & Citations

Image Sources

Rendering

2017 butchspace version