Lipstick Lesbian Flag

Overview

To provide a pride flag for lipstick lesbians and feminine-presenting lesbians specifically, as McCray noted the gay community had flags for various sub-communities but lacked lesbian-specific ones.

McCray published the flag in 2010 during a period of growing interest in identity-specific lesbian symbols. The design was intended for lipstick lesbians, not as an all-lesbian community flag. However, the flag's visual resemblance to a pre-existing design raises unresolved provenance questions: Fausto Fernós, a gay Puerto Rican drag performer and co-host of the Feast of Fun podcast, had created a Cougar Pride Flag in 2005 and posted it publicly on April 15, 2008, two years before McCray's blog post. Both flags share a seven-stripe pink-red gradient with a lipstick kiss mark in the upper-left corner. Fernós has stated the design was 'taken wholesale by this blogger in 2010, and never credited.' McCray's version made specific modifications (flattening the lipstick graphic, lightening the stripes, and adding a central white stripe) but the structural and conceptual similarities are extensive. ^[1][2][3]

Identity & Context

Represented Identity

lesbian

Subcommunity

lipstick lesbian / femme lesbian

Creators

The Creators

Origin

Digital Origin

This Lesbian Life blog (thislesbianlife.wordpress.com)

Digital origin; no verified physical location.

Published on July 28, 2010, on McCray's WordPress blog This Lesbian Life. The blog post, titled 'Lipstick Lesbian Pride!!!', introduced the flag as the 'very first lipstick lesbian pride flag.' The blog is now defunct but was archived by the Wayback Machine on November 19, 2015. ^[1][2]

Dates & Chronology

Year Created

2010

Exact date

July 28, 2010

First public use

July 28, 2010

Period in Use

2010–present

The flag circulated online after its blog introduction and was adopted primarily in digital spaces. By December 2013, an unknown person had removed the kiss mark and circulated the seven-stripe version as a more general lesbian flag. After 2018, a Tumblr blog called 'creatoroflesflagisracist' organized a push for an alternative, documenting McCray's controversial tweets and organizing community polls that eventually led to the adoption of Emily Gwen's sunset design as a replacement. ^[2][3]

The kissless pink variant circulated as a derivative and became a separate entry. The lesbianflaghistory blog (2019) notes that it took 'a good 8–9 years for any of this to come to light,' referring to both the plagiarism allegation and the creator controversy. Community rejection of the flag was driven by the accumulation of grievances surfacing across late-2010s Tumblr discourse rather than by a single revelation. ^[2]

A SECOND NAME CIRCULATES FOR THE DESIGNER, and the source that gives it doubts it in the same breath. The Twilight Guard's flag gallery dates the flag's appearance on the web to 16 December 2010 and names the "author/creator" as Nmdesigns, immediately qualifying that with "the name listed as the author on wikipedia website, but that may only mean that this person upload the file to wikipedia, and may not be the creator of the flag," and closing "sadly that is all that is known and no other the information is available at this time." ^[4] That is a Wikipedia uploader's name being mistaken for a designer's, flagged as such by the page repeating it. It is recorded here because the name circulates and a reader meeting it elsewhere should find it addressed rather than absent.

Lineage

Indirect influences

Labrys Lesbian Flag, Rainbow Pride Flag

Direct children

Pink Lesbian Flag

Related flags

Butch Lesbian Flag (Dorian Rutherford, 2016), Butch Lesbian Flag (Butchspace, 2017), Sunset Lesbian Flag, Non-Girl Lesbian Flag, Sapphic Flag, Orange-Pink Lesbian Precursor (2017), Five-Stripe Sunset Lesbian Flag

The kissless Pink Lesbian Flag is a direct derivative. Links indirectly to the orange-pink family through the pink-flag route. These are maintained as separate entries. 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: 5 records across 4 generations.

This record

Lipstick Lesbian Flag

Children

Pink Lesbian Flag

Generation 3

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

Generation 4

Five-Stripe Sunset Lesbian Flag

Colors & Symbolism

A femininity-coded gradient flag intended for lipstick lesbian identity. The kiss mark in the upper-left canton distinguishes this design from the kissless Pink Lesbian Flag and marks the flag's subcommunity scope.

Circulating community reconstruction

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

Lipstick kiss mark

Emblem for lipstick lesbian identity. Distinguishes this design from the kissless Pink Lesbian Flag.

No creator-issued stripe-by-stripe meaning set has been found. The lesbianflaghistory blog confirms: 'As far as we know, the colors in her flag design were never explained.' Stripe meanings that circulate online are community-applied rather than creator-issued. The later Emily Gwen design, by contrast, has unusually well-documented creator-side meanings. ^[2]

No official creator-published hex values have been found. Hex values vary across reconstructions.

Design

Aspect Ratio

8:5

Orientation

horizontal

Stripe Count

7

Layout

horizontal_stripes_with_emblem

Stripes (Top → Bottom)

Dark Magenta, Medium Magenta-Pink, Light Magenta-Pink, White, Light Pink-Red, Medium Pink-Red, Dark Red

Additional Symbols

Lipstick kiss mark in upper-left corner

Seven equal horizontal stripes at 8:5 aspect ratio with a lipstick print emblem in the upper-left canton.

A dark-magenta-to-white-to-red gradient with a lipstick kiss mark distinguishing it from the kissless Pink Lesbian Flag.

Usage & Adoption

Current Status

active

Not broadly accepted as an all-lesbian community flag. Its use has been criticized on multiple grounds: McCray's personal views, the plagiarism allegation from Fernós, and the flag's narrow subcommunity scope. Active community campaigns beginning around 2018 organized its replacement with the sunset design.

Discourse & Debates

• Whether the creator's personal views and the flag's narrow intended audience make it unsuitable as a general lesbian symbol
• Whether the design controversy (plagiarism from Fernós's Cougar Pride Flag) and the creator controversy (McCray's blog posts) are the same issue or two distinct issues that have been compressed into a single rejection. Archives that mention both tend to merge them; no comparison source separates them as independent questions.
• Whether the lipstick flag's narrow intended audience is accurately represented in accounts of the community's move to the sunset flag. The flag was designed for lipstick lesbians specifically, not as an all-lesbian symbol. Sources like Colorado and Outright describe the transition as replacing a failed universal symbol, but the lipstick flag was never claiming universality.

Common misidentifications

• Often confused with the Pink Lesbian Flag (kissless variant)

Common confusions

• The kissless pink version is a separate record, not just this flag with the emblem removed

Criticisms

• Exclusion concerns: the flag was intended for lipstick lesbians, not all lesbians, and some community members felt it marginalized butch and gender-nonconforming lesbians.
• Plagiarism allegations: Library.LGBT describes apparent design similarities to Fausto Fernós' 2008 Cougar Pride Flag. Documented as an allegation, not a settled determination.
• TERF association: the flag has been adopted by some trans-exclusionary radical feminists (TERFs), partly because of McCray's own documented transphobic statements and partly because the flag predates the inclusive framing of the later sunset design. This association further complicates the flag's reception, though it does not reflect the intentions of all users.

Footnotes & Citations

Image Sources

Rendering

with kiss mark

• The Lipstick Lesbian Flag as introduced by Natalie McCray on July 28, 2010, through her blog This Lesbian Life. The seven-stripe design features a dark-magenta-to-white-to-red gradient with a lipstick kiss mark in the upper-left canton, distinguishing it from the later kissless Pink Lesbian Flag derivative. · Community reconstruction