Lipstick Lesbian Flag

Overview

McCray published the flag on 28 July 2010 on her blog This Lesbian Life, framing it as an answer to an absence and naming four gay men's flags as the established examples: "They have a flag for the young gays, leather guys, hairy guys, and girly guys... So I've always wondered...WHERE ARE THE LESBIAN FLAGS????" She captioned the image "The Official Lipstick Lesbian Flag" and gave no meanings for its stripes. It was made for lipstick lesbians rather than for all lesbians. ^[1]

Identity & Context

Represented Identity

Lipstick lesbians

Subcommunity

Lipstick lesbians

McCray made the flag for lipstick lesbians, not for lesbians in general, and said so in the post that introduced it. The terms lipstick lesbian and femme lesbian overlap in ordinary use but are not interchangeable, and she used the first. ^[1]

Creators

The Creators

Fausto Fernós

Designer of the Cougar Pride Flag, the earlier design at issue

Fausto Fernós is a gay Puerto Rican podcaster, performance artist and drag performer who co-hosts the Feast of Fun podcast with Marc Felion, and is its executive producer and host. He began performing at eighteen in Austin, Texas, where he self-produced a weekly live soap opera, "SoftMen," and went on to produce and host "The Minimum Wage Art Series," "The Big Wig Revue" and "Pe.A.Ch. – The Performance Art Church" in Austin and Chicago. His cable access talk show "Faustina!" took the Austin Chronicle's Best of Austin award for best cable access show in 1995. He wrote and directed three musicals, on gay biology ("Homosexual Personæ"), on the fossil collector Mary Anning, and on the search for extraterrestrial life ("Voices From The Sky"). Windy City Media Group gave him a 30-under-30 award in June 2001, and in June 2003 his solo work was one of twenty selected for "Confessions of the Avant-Garde," a retrospective of the Cleveland Performance Art Festival, alongside Blue Man Group, Karen Finley, Guillermo Gómez-Peña, Goat Island and Holly Hughes. ^[5]

He dates the Cougar Pride Flag to 2008: seven stripes in reds and pinks with a semi-transparent dark red lipstick kiss at the upper hoist, made tongue-in-cheek "to draw attention to the ongoing issue of ageism and sexism in women's sexuality." In 2019 he said McCray's flag was taken from it. ^[3][6]

The lipstick lesbian flag was designed by a drag queen, ME! ^[3]

Origin

Digital Origin

This Lesbian Life blog (thislesbianlife.wordpress.com)

Digital origin; no verified physical location.

Published on 28 July 2010 on McCray's WordPress blog This Lesbian Life, in a post titled "Lipstick Lesbian Pride!!!" She captioned the image "The Official Lipstick Lesbian Flag" — her own wording, not a mark of adoption by any organization. The blog is defunct and the post survives in web archives. ^[1]

Dates & Chronology

Year Created

2010

First public use

Not established; published online 28 July 2010

Period in Use

2010 to the present

Creation Bounds

Made by 28 July 2010, the day Natalie McCray published it on This Lesbian Life. The post fixes the date she introduced the design, not the day she drew it, and no earlier bound has been found. It is also not evidence of physical use: the earliest photographs of the flag being flown are later and are not recorded here. ^[1]

The flag circulated online after the blog post, and a version with the kiss mark removed later circulated as a lesbian flag generally, without McCray. The clearest fixed point is 7 October 2015, when Pride-Flags published the kissless design on DeviantArt as "Lesbian," describing it as an adaptation of the This Lesbian Life flag and saying plainly that they did not know who had first removed the lipstick. That is a publication and circulation point, not the date of the change, and no source names the person responsible. ^[2]

A 2019 retrospective thread by the @lesbianflag account recalls that butch lesbians objected, describing "an outcry by Butch lesbians who did not like and appreciate having the Lipstick Lesbian flag be re-purposed for all lesbians and did not feel that the flag represented them." That account is written four years after the fact and is the main evidence for the objection; no contemporaneous record of it has been located. Butch flags were proposed in response, of which the orange design by Butchspace circulated most, and designers then began combining butch and all-pink designs, a line leading to the sunset lesbian flag of 2018. ^[7]

From late 2018 an organized campaign urged lesbians away from the flag. The Tumblr and Twitter account creatoroflesflagisracist ran a poll to choose a replacement for commercial production, reporting around three thousand votes and approaching manufacturers directly, and promoted the results under #altlesmerch and through r/actuallesbians. A Community Lesbian Pride Flag was produced commercially as a result, and Emily Gwen's sunset design was afterwards adopted in this flag's place. ^[4][8][9]

Fausto Fernós made the plagiarism accusation publicly on 12 June 2019, in a short Medium post: "The Lipstick Lesbian Flag idea was stolen from my design of a Cougar Pride Flag, which was designed to draw attention to the ongoing issue of ageism and sexism in women's sexuality. It was also meant to be tounge in cheek when I came up with it in 2008, which was taken wholesale by this blogger in 2010, and never credited it the source." Spelling as published. He closed "The lipstick lesbian flag was designed by a drag queen, ME!" and offered the posting's timestamp as his evidence: "Here's the original design and the Flickr time stamp." That timestamp is not publicly readable now, the page requiring a sign-in, so the exact upload day is not confirmed here; his post establishes 2008 and no more. ^[3][6]

Both flags carry seven stripes in a pink-red gradient with a lipstick kiss at the upper hoist, and both include a white stripe. They differ in three respects: McCray's flattens the lip print from a photographic mark into solid color with white highlights, lightens and shifts the stripes toward pink, and moves the white stripe from fifth of seven to the center. Nothing located resolves the allegation. ^[6][1]

One detail of the Flickr posting is worth recording. Its title now reads "Cougar Pride / Lipstick Lesbian Pride Flag designed by Fausto Fernós, 2008," and that title cannot date from the upload: the lipstick lesbian flag did not exist until 2010, so naming both designs is necessarily a later edit. ^[6]

Lineage

Indirect influences

Labrys Lesbian Flag, Rainbow Pride Flag

Direct children

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

Related flags

Butch Lesbian Pride Flag (2016, dorian--rutherford), Butch Lesbian Flag (Butchspace, 2017), Sunset Lesbian Flag, Sapphic Flag, Five-Stripe Sunset Lesbian Flag

McCray named her frame of reference in the post itself: gay men's flags, "for the young gays, leather guys, hairy guys, and girly guys." That is what prompted her, not a design she worked from, and she named no visual predecessor. ^[1]

The Pink Lesbian Flag descends from this one directly, and Pride-Flags said so when publishing it: their 7 October 2015 kissless "Lesbian" design is described there as an adaptation of the This Lesbian Life flag. ^[2]

Fernós's Cougar Pride Flag is not recorded as a parent. The allegation is unresolved and the resemblance is formal, so it belongs with the dispute rather than in the lineage. Two community diagrams do draw it as descent: Uwumars's hand-drawn "Flag Family Tree: No Art Is Original" runs the leather and bear flags into the Cougar flag and that into this one, and a Reddit diagram, "History and origin of gay and lesbian flags," traces the same line forward through the kissless flag to the butch designs and Emily Gwen's. Both are community syntheses, useful as such and not as documentation. ^[10][11]

Lineage tree

Every record reachable from this one through documented parent and child relationships: 7 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, Lesbian Lesboy Ally Flag, Lesbian Mspec Lesbian Ally Flag

Colors & Symbolism

Seven stripes running dark magenta through white to dark red, with a lipstick kiss at the upper hoist. The kiss is what separates this flag from the kissless Pink Lesbian Flag and what marks its subcommunity scope. Describing the gradient as femininity-coded is a reading of the design; McCray published no account of it. ^[1]

Measured from the Wikimedia Commons SVG ^[12]

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

Lipstick kiss mark at the upper hoist

The mark that identifies the flag as a lipstick-lesbian flag and distinguishes it from the kissless Pink Lesbian Flag. McCray gave it no stated meaning. ^[1]

McCray's 2010 post gives no stripe meanings, and no later set issued by her has been located. The lesbianflaghistory blog reaches the same conclusion: "As far as we know, the colors in her flag design were never explained." Stripe meanings that circulate online are community-applied. ^[13][1]

McCray published no color values. The seven listed here are measured from the Wikimedia Commons SVG, a later derivative whose kiss mark has been replaced twice over, and they match the palette Library.LGBT publishes. They describe that illustration, not McCray's original blog image. Library.LGBT lists an unlabelled eighth value, #FD5280, which matches nothing on the current Commons file and is not assigned here. ^[14][12]

Design

Aspect Ratio

3:5 · standard

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 with a lipstick print at the upper hoist. No ratio is documented for McCray's original blog image; the flag is presented at the archive's standard 3:5. The Wikimedia Commons illustration is drawn 1,575 by 945, as is Fernós's Cougar file, but that is the proportion of a later file rather than anything McCray specified. ^[12]

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

Usage & Adoption

Online Usage

Wikimedia Commons, where the illustration is used on ten Commons pages and across twenty-five language editions of Wikipedia ^[12]

Current Status

active

Two different things are documented here and are worth keeping apart. As a reference image the flag is everywhere: the Commons illustration serves ten Commons pages and twenty-five language Wikipedias. As a community symbol it was not broadly taken up for lesbians generally, which is unsurprising given that it was not made for them, and campaigns from around 2018 organized a replacement, with Emily Gwen's sunset design adopted in its place. ^[12][4]

Image Archive

The flag's lineage and the 2015 split

Discourse & Debates

• Whether the design dispute with Fernós and the criticism of McCray are one objection or two. Accounts that mention both tend to merge them, and no source separates them as independent questions. ^[13][4]
• Whether accounts of the move to the sunset flag describe this flag accurately. Several present it as a failed universal lesbian symbol; it was never offered as one. ^[1]

Common misidentifications

• Regularly confused with the Pink Lesbian Flag, which is this design with the kiss removed and has its own record. The two are separate flags with separate histories, and the kissless one circulated for lesbians generally while this one did not. ^[2]

Criticisms

• McCray's own posts. Screenshots circulated by the creatoroflesflagisracist campaign, attributed to her Twitter account and dated January and May 2011, show "Why don't butches shave their armpits!!! IT'S DISGUSTING!" and "The second season of the real l word has too many butches." The original tweet pages have not been recovered, so what survives is the campaign's screenshots rather than the posts themselves. The campaign described her as "racist, biphobic, and butchphobic." ^[4][15]
• Responses attributed to McCray are reported by Library.LGBT, which says she answered the charge of racism by citing her own mixed-race heritage, the charge of biphobia by saying she had dated more bisexuals than lesbians, and the charge of transphobia by pointing to her work with homeless people. That guide gives no date, venue or link for any of them and cites nothing, so the responses are recorded as reported rather than as statements this entry can place. ^[14]
• The fullest account is more careful than the campaign's. The lesbianflaghistory blog notes that "a cursory browse through Natalie McCray's social media did turn up some casual cissexism," while finding nothing to indicate she was a TERF. ^[13]
• Scope. The flag was made for lipstick lesbians, and some readers took its later use for all lesbians as marginalizing butch and gender-nonconforming lesbians. ^[7]
• Fernós's allegation drew a challenge he did not answer. The only response on his 2019 post, from the reader Kaut Bonetti in December 2019, asks: "hadn't people assume that flag was a recolored seven-striped rainbow flag? didn't you base yours on bear brotherhood flag? did you originally design the lipstick sign?" The questions go to whether the Cougar flag was itself derivative. ^[3]

Lipstick lesbian and femme lesbian overlap in ordinary use but are not interchangeable terms with a single history. McCray used the first. ^[1]

Footnotes & Citations

Image Sources

Rendering

with kiss mark (Wikimedia Commons illustration)

• The flag shown is the Wikimedia Commons file, licensed CC BY-SA 4.0, the illustration in use on ten Commons pages and twenty-five language Wikipedias. xles uploaded it on 7 July 2015 as a "modified version" of McCray's design with the kiss symbol altered. The Anome re-artworked it on 27 December 2019 by combining File:Lipstick Lesbian flag without lips.svg with File:Emojione 1F48B.svg to make the file CC-4.0-compliant, then "made the kiss redder and bolder," so the kiss shown is the EmojiOne emoji rather than McCray's lip print. No image of McCray's original is available under a known licence; her blog is defunct. ^[12]
• Fausto Fernós's Cougar Pride Flag, the earlier design at issue, from his own Flickr posting: seven stripes with a photographic lip print at the upper hoist and the white stripe fifth of seven. Set beside the flag above, the differences are the lip print's treatment, the stripes' shift toward pink, and the white stripe moving to the center. ^[6][3] · Credit: Fausto Fernós · Fausto Fernós on Flickr (feastoffun.com)
• The @lesbianflag thread of 17 March 2019, recalling the removal of the lipstick mark and the butch objection that followed. A retrospective account, written four years after the events it describes. ^[7] · Credit: @lesbianflag · Twitter thread
• Butch flags proposed after the 2015 repurposing, the orange design by Butchspace circulating most, and the combinations of butch and all-pink designs that followed. ^[7] · Credit: @lesbianflag · Twitter thread
• Uwumars's flag chart, headed "Flag Family Tree: No Art Is Original," which places the lipstick lesbian flag downstream of Fausto Fernós's 2008 Cougar Flag and that flag downstream of the leather and bear flags. Uwumars describes the chart as showing "the lineage of flags leading up to the modern day gay man flag"; the lesbian branch is one strand of a wider diagram. A community researcher's synthesis, not a documented chain. ^[10] · Credit: Uwumars · Uwumars, "Gay man flag chart," Wikimedia Commons · CC BY-SA 4.0
• A community lineage diagram circulated on Reddit, "History and origin of gay and lesbian flags." It runs Baker 1979 to DeBlase's leather flag of 1989 to Byrnes's bear flag of 1995 to Fernós's Cougar Pride Flag of 2008 to McCray's flag of 2010, and from there to a kissless "Lesbian Flag" it labels "Pride-Flags on Deviant Art (2015)." No other source names the party who removed the kiss, and the diagram gives no evidence for the attribution. One uploader's synthesis, recorded for the leads it offers rather than as documentation. ^[11] · Credit: Uploader not identified · Circulated on Reddit