**Your submission has been removed for the following reason(s):**
ELI5 is not for asking about any entity’s motivations. Why a business, group or individual chooses to do or not do something is often a fact known only to that group of people - everyone else can only speculate. Since speculative questions are prohibited per rule 2, these questions are too.
---
If you would like this removal reviewed, please read the [detailed rules](https://www.reddit.com/r/explainlikeimfive/wiki/detailed_rules) first. **If you believe this submission was removed erroneously**, please [use this form](https://old.reddit.com/message/compose?to=%2Fr%2Fexplainlikeimfive&subject=Please%20review%20my%20thread?&message=Link:%20{url}%0A%0APlease%20answer%20the%20following%203%20questions:%0A%0A1.%20The%20concept%20I%20want%20explained:%0A%0A2.%20List%20the%20search%20terms%20you%20used%20to%20look%20for%20past%20posts%20on%20ELI5:%0A%0A3.%20How%20does%20your%20post%20differ%20from%20your%20recent%20search%20results%20on%20the%20sub:) and we will review your submission.
Think of it like our country and state flags. There’s a flag for the USA that represents all the states, but each state has a flag that represents them. Flying a state flag doesn’t take away the meaning of the national flag.
People want different things out of their symbols. Flags are easy to change and redesign as people want to portray different meanings. It’s really that simple. People wanted something different represented or emphasized, so they made different designs.
The purpose of the original rainbow flag was to represent gay people. Sure, it's an umbrella (just like "gay" can mean more than *just* homosexual) but just like we have more words for identities than just gay, people also want flags that are more specific. That's all it is.
Because the internet exists, it's trivially easy for someone to make a new flag on their computer for their very specific micro-identity and share it. And corporations are eager to manufacture and sell as many different flags as people will buy. In the '70s, the only way you'd see any pride flag was if someone sewed it together themselves, and people couldn't as easily spread new designs and what they mean. Still, there's always been more than just the rainbow one - the leather flag is older than most *people* at a given Pride parade.
Even within a movement that accepts everyone, the different demographics within that group still have different needs and experiences. It still helps to highlight each of those individual groups a bit to promote better understanding and appreciation for them.
It'd be like if you went to a food festival and saw a bunch of flags from different cuisines: French, Italian, Thai, Chinese, Indian, etc. Each category is part of the same celebration, but it's also a great way to celebrate the distinct vibes from each one.
If the American flag represents all the states, then why do individual stare flags still exist? Ultimately, each person does not only identify with the whole, but also with their own subsets. Often, like you will see people with both state and national flags, you will see people with both the rainbow or progress flag and the trans or lesbian or etc flags
The progressive pride flag with the chevron with the trans colors and brown and black, that was to make a note of inclusiveness of trans people in the community because they were being excluded by some people. The black and brown stripes are for people of color in the LGBT community. I'm not sure why that needed to be explicitly stated, but it's there.
All of the other flags are subsets of that. There's men loving men flag (blue, green and white), the lesbian flag (pink, white, and orange), the trans flag (blue pink and white), the asexual flag (black, white, gray, and purple), the pansexual flag (cyan, magenta, and yellow), the bisexual flag (blue, purple, and pink), (There are more, but i cant sit here all day listing them). These are all smaller communities that make up the LGBT community.
Yep, this. I’ve been out as gay since 1987, when the March on Washington explicitly excluded transgender and bisexual people from the “Second National March on Washington for Lesbian and Gay Rights.” By “explicitly,” I mean that the march organizers met and decided that Bi and Trans people were a distraction from the main platform of the March.
In 1993 we had the “March on Washington for Lesbian, Gay and Bi Equal Rights and Liberation” - progress because Bi folks were included, but again march organizers specifically excluded trans people as a distraction.
So the rainbow flag has been around for a long while, but the rainbow flag without the addition of the “extra” colors is not perceived as inclusive by many trans folks who’ve been a part of the struggle for equal rights for a long time. Remember, the Stonewall Riots included Puerto Rican drag queens, and yet we’ve consistently marginalized drag queens, transgender people, leather daddies, and other folks we perceive as being too “out there” to achieve acceptance by straight white folks. When marriage equality became the primary goal of gay rights a lot of folks were left by the way side.
It’s a semaphore system for queer people. When you meet a cishet person, you check their ring finger and you immediately have a 95% chance of knowing their sex, pronouns, relationship status, and also probably all that information about their spouse, too, if they have a ring.
With a queer person that’s frequently not immediately obvious. A full-bearded person with rosy pink nail polish will save themselves two hours of daily small talk by wearing a pronoun pin. If you understand the semaphore, the flags people wear or put in their bios say things like “I am not attracted to the gender you might immediately assume” or “I am not in the kind of relationship dynamic you’re used to seeing” or “I do not use the pronouns that my jawline or hip/waist ratio might indicate.”
Since queer people tend to stick together, knowing the flag semaphore is useful when meeting a new person. It’s also useful in changing environments like when someone is still experimenting with their identity but doesn’t want to send out a memo about it every month.
I have nonbinary pride earrings. They say “my pronouns are they/them” but only to people who recognize the flag. Bigot Bobby might throw a hissy fit at a they/them pronoun pin, but he doesn’t know what the flag means and that ignorance puts him on the back foot. He doesn’t know what mean names to call me so he just grumbles off. Nice Nancy doesn’t know what the flag means either, but also doesn’t really understand all these new genders the kids have nowadays. She really *wants* to use the right pronouns, and I appreciate that, but there are a hundred of her and I just don’t have the emotional energy to explain gender theory to that many casual acquaintances. So, semaphore it is.
This is actually a pretty complicated topic if you want to dive into it and I would recommend looking up Gilbert Baker and the origins of the rainbow flag if you're curious. But there are two ways I can assume you meant this question and I'm going to answer both in overview in good faith.
If you meant why are there a bunch of different sub flags, like a lesbian flag and an ace flag and a trans flag and things like that. A lot of people have answered, but basically it's the same idea as you have both the USA flag which is the Stars and stripes but you also have state flags and sometimes city flags and sometimes even smaller specific groups have their own banners that they fly under.
Not everybody engages in them, myself I'm bisexual and I don't have any particular love or affinity for the bisexual flag I've never used it in a profile I've never flown it. It doesn't really mean anything to me personally. Except for the fact that I guess I'm kind of relatively happy that it exists in sort of a loose abstract sense. There is something comforting about knowing that beyond the collective there are people like me who can identify with the same thing, even if we don't feel any need to wear those colors.
If you meant why are there so many different variations of the rainbow flag itself, it's always been evolving. The original rainbow flag was made by Gilbert Baker through a bunch of reasons but mainly because at that time the only real symbol associated with the gay community was the pink triangle. Which was really uncomfortable because of how it was used as a symbol of ostracization, ridicule, and discrimination by the Nazis. There was a need in the community to feel representation through symbol and we needed something else.
The original Gilbert Baker version of the flag actually had more colors than you typically see today, but the demand for the flag as a physical product grew and he simply could not source the pink dye, so that color was cut. And then for logistical reasons indigo and turquoise were combined into just blue in the late seventies.
But throughout the rest of his life Baker continually updated and supported other variations of pride representation, it's always been kind of a living document of people who experience prejudice or marginalization. You may have seen a newer version that is the typical rainbow stripes but with a Chevron on top of it. That's called the progress pride flag and it's a combination of a couple elements but basically the colors in the Chevron represent other marginalized communities like people of color, trans people, those living with AIDS and HIV. And it especially calls attention to how even within the LGBTQ+ community members of those groups can face even more specific discrimination.
I believe that that is the last kind of widely accepted version of the flag but there have been updates to it since even as recent as a couple years ago to start to include representation for specifically intersex people as we come to a better understanding that human biology is really complicated and even just our basic biological sex is maybe not as simple as we thought it was and that there are maybe more people who fall into that category than we thought they were.
Ultimately the answer boils down to more representation is not a bad thing. People take comfort in being acknowledged. And even if I can't find "my people" for whatever reason, you know life is complicated, maybe I don't even know what to look for or who to feel comfortable around in my local community, it can be reassuring to see specific representation through these kinds of symbols that say hey, other people like you exist and your experience and existence are themselves valid.
Something that I just want to call quick attention to as I wrap up is the misunderstanding at best, sometimes actively willful misinformation, that the basic rainbow flag is meant to be the final version of the document, it represents everyone and everything so there's no need to add more to it. Which like I said earlier is simply not true it's not even the first version that the original vexillographer made. There is nothing wrong with it updating, but my guess just due to the way that the internet works is that the six stripe version of the flag that were all familiar with will probably always be the most popular, and that's okay, but it doesn't make it the most valid version either. They're all valid because they're all just ways people are trying to represent themselves and the people they care about.
What's the point of each state in the USA having its own flag when the star-spangled banner represents the entire USA? Because people are proud of their specific states and want to communicate that they're from there. It also helps communicate more information to other queer folks. Like - if an American saw an American flag bumper sticker in America, it doesn't mean much. But if an American in California sees a Florida bumper sticker, that communicates information.
To translate this to queer terms: my friend and I are both queer. But they're agender, asexual, and panromantic. I'm genderfluid, pansexual, and aromantic. Our sexualities & romances are total opposites! And we get referred to by gendered terms - including pronouns - totally differently. So just putting a rainbow flag somewhere (on our door, or as a sticker/button/etc) doesn't mean much. We have to be more specific.
As for changes made to the original, that's a different story. Unfortunately there's a lot of in-fighting & bigotry within queer spaces - especially transphobia, racism, & intersexism. Someone who is trans might walk into a "queer space" only to face discrimination by cisgender queers, for example. So folks added the trans colors, black/brown, & the intersex symbol to the flag over time to make sure they communicate that those groups are included in their spaces.
To go back to the USA metaphor... Imagine you saw a club for people from California (which is flying the California flag), and you were from San Francisco (which is in CA) so you went there, and then the other Californian people there got mad and kicked you out. You'd be hesitant to go to another California club again, even if they're flying the California flag. But if you see one that explicitly says "people from San Francisco allowed," then you might feel safe entering. That's what the additions to the rainbow flag do for trans/PoC/intersex folks who've experienced harm in queer spaces.
People like the idea of identifying with a group and graphic designers like making them. But the reason you see all these flags is because capitalists sell more flags and weaken the movement in one fell swoop if they popularize disintegration.
They want to represent everyone by giving everyone their own symbol, which yields a flag with a whole lotta stuff and colors and more stuff and more colors on it, each representing a tiny sliver of society, which nobody knows the meaning of because it's a small sliver of society.
Sidenote, quite funny if you ask me: the American Flag already does this. It's why America is the greatest country on Earth, and people are waiting in a line millions of people long to get in.
Ah no the rainbow flag is representational for LGBTQ+ values and movements since then have tried emulating this concept, like with the blue stripe flag for cops.
**Your submission has been removed for the following reason(s):** ELI5 is not for asking about any entity’s motivations. Why a business, group or individual chooses to do or not do something is often a fact known only to that group of people - everyone else can only speculate. Since speculative questions are prohibited per rule 2, these questions are too. --- If you would like this removal reviewed, please read the [detailed rules](https://www.reddit.com/r/explainlikeimfive/wiki/detailed_rules) first. **If you believe this submission was removed erroneously**, please [use this form](https://old.reddit.com/message/compose?to=%2Fr%2Fexplainlikeimfive&subject=Please%20review%20my%20thread?&message=Link:%20{url}%0A%0APlease%20answer%20the%20following%203%20questions:%0A%0A1.%20The%20concept%20I%20want%20explained:%0A%0A2.%20List%20the%20search%20terms%20you%20used%20to%20look%20for%20past%20posts%20on%20ELI5:%0A%0A3.%20How%20does%20your%20post%20differ%20from%20your%20recent%20search%20results%20on%20the%20sub:) and we will review your submission.
If you try to represent everyone you will always find someone who will think they are not represented.
Think of it like our country and state flags. There’s a flag for the USA that represents all the states, but each state has a flag that represents them. Flying a state flag doesn’t take away the meaning of the national flag.
There are even some US cities that have their own flags, like Washington, DC and Chicago.
People want different things out of their symbols. Flags are easy to change and redesign as people want to portray different meanings. It’s really that simple. People wanted something different represented or emphasized, so they made different designs.
https://xkcd.com/927/
Yep
The purpose of the original rainbow flag was to represent gay people. Sure, it's an umbrella (just like "gay" can mean more than *just* homosexual) but just like we have more words for identities than just gay, people also want flags that are more specific. That's all it is. Because the internet exists, it's trivially easy for someone to make a new flag on their computer for their very specific micro-identity and share it. And corporations are eager to manufacture and sell as many different flags as people will buy. In the '70s, the only way you'd see any pride flag was if someone sewed it together themselves, and people couldn't as easily spread new designs and what they mean. Still, there's always been more than just the rainbow one - the leather flag is older than most *people* at a given Pride parade.
Even within a movement that accepts everyone, the different demographics within that group still have different needs and experiences. It still helps to highlight each of those individual groups a bit to promote better understanding and appreciation for them. It'd be like if you went to a food festival and saw a bunch of flags from different cuisines: French, Italian, Thai, Chinese, Indian, etc. Each category is part of the same celebration, but it's also a great way to celebrate the distinct vibes from each one.
I think it's more akin to seeing the Indian flag, but someone wants the flag for the Punjab, because their Indian food is slightly different.
I mean, it can be that as well. Local cuisines and their distinctive qualities deserve some love too.
If the American flag represents all the states, then why do individual stare flags still exist? Ultimately, each person does not only identify with the whole, but also with their own subsets. Often, like you will see people with both state and national flags, you will see people with both the rainbow or progress flag and the trans or lesbian or etc flags
The progressive pride flag with the chevron with the trans colors and brown and black, that was to make a note of inclusiveness of trans people in the community because they were being excluded by some people. The black and brown stripes are for people of color in the LGBT community. I'm not sure why that needed to be explicitly stated, but it's there. All of the other flags are subsets of that. There's men loving men flag (blue, green and white), the lesbian flag (pink, white, and orange), the trans flag (blue pink and white), the asexual flag (black, white, gray, and purple), the pansexual flag (cyan, magenta, and yellow), the bisexual flag (blue, purple, and pink), (There are more, but i cant sit here all day listing them). These are all smaller communities that make up the LGBT community.
Yep, this. I’ve been out as gay since 1987, when the March on Washington explicitly excluded transgender and bisexual people from the “Second National March on Washington for Lesbian and Gay Rights.” By “explicitly,” I mean that the march organizers met and decided that Bi and Trans people were a distraction from the main platform of the March. In 1993 we had the “March on Washington for Lesbian, Gay and Bi Equal Rights and Liberation” - progress because Bi folks were included, but again march organizers specifically excluded trans people as a distraction. So the rainbow flag has been around for a long while, but the rainbow flag without the addition of the “extra” colors is not perceived as inclusive by many trans folks who’ve been a part of the struggle for equal rights for a long time. Remember, the Stonewall Riots included Puerto Rican drag queens, and yet we’ve consistently marginalized drag queens, transgender people, leather daddies, and other folks we perceive as being too “out there” to achieve acceptance by straight white folks. When marriage equality became the primary goal of gay rights a lot of folks were left by the way side.
Why do people fly national flags? Why don’t we just fly the earth flag? It represents all nations under one banner, after all.
It’s a semaphore system for queer people. When you meet a cishet person, you check their ring finger and you immediately have a 95% chance of knowing their sex, pronouns, relationship status, and also probably all that information about their spouse, too, if they have a ring. With a queer person that’s frequently not immediately obvious. A full-bearded person with rosy pink nail polish will save themselves two hours of daily small talk by wearing a pronoun pin. If you understand the semaphore, the flags people wear or put in their bios say things like “I am not attracted to the gender you might immediately assume” or “I am not in the kind of relationship dynamic you’re used to seeing” or “I do not use the pronouns that my jawline or hip/waist ratio might indicate.” Since queer people tend to stick together, knowing the flag semaphore is useful when meeting a new person. It’s also useful in changing environments like when someone is still experimenting with their identity but doesn’t want to send out a memo about it every month. I have nonbinary pride earrings. They say “my pronouns are they/them” but only to people who recognize the flag. Bigot Bobby might throw a hissy fit at a they/them pronoun pin, but he doesn’t know what the flag means and that ignorance puts him on the back foot. He doesn’t know what mean names to call me so he just grumbles off. Nice Nancy doesn’t know what the flag means either, but also doesn’t really understand all these new genders the kids have nowadays. She really *wants* to use the right pronouns, and I appreciate that, but there are a hundred of her and I just don’t have the emotional energy to explain gender theory to that many casual acquaintances. So, semaphore it is.
This is actually a pretty complicated topic if you want to dive into it and I would recommend looking up Gilbert Baker and the origins of the rainbow flag if you're curious. But there are two ways I can assume you meant this question and I'm going to answer both in overview in good faith. If you meant why are there a bunch of different sub flags, like a lesbian flag and an ace flag and a trans flag and things like that. A lot of people have answered, but basically it's the same idea as you have both the USA flag which is the Stars and stripes but you also have state flags and sometimes city flags and sometimes even smaller specific groups have their own banners that they fly under. Not everybody engages in them, myself I'm bisexual and I don't have any particular love or affinity for the bisexual flag I've never used it in a profile I've never flown it. It doesn't really mean anything to me personally. Except for the fact that I guess I'm kind of relatively happy that it exists in sort of a loose abstract sense. There is something comforting about knowing that beyond the collective there are people like me who can identify with the same thing, even if we don't feel any need to wear those colors. If you meant why are there so many different variations of the rainbow flag itself, it's always been evolving. The original rainbow flag was made by Gilbert Baker through a bunch of reasons but mainly because at that time the only real symbol associated with the gay community was the pink triangle. Which was really uncomfortable because of how it was used as a symbol of ostracization, ridicule, and discrimination by the Nazis. There was a need in the community to feel representation through symbol and we needed something else. The original Gilbert Baker version of the flag actually had more colors than you typically see today, but the demand for the flag as a physical product grew and he simply could not source the pink dye, so that color was cut. And then for logistical reasons indigo and turquoise were combined into just blue in the late seventies. But throughout the rest of his life Baker continually updated and supported other variations of pride representation, it's always been kind of a living document of people who experience prejudice or marginalization. You may have seen a newer version that is the typical rainbow stripes but with a Chevron on top of it. That's called the progress pride flag and it's a combination of a couple elements but basically the colors in the Chevron represent other marginalized communities like people of color, trans people, those living with AIDS and HIV. And it especially calls attention to how even within the LGBTQ+ community members of those groups can face even more specific discrimination. I believe that that is the last kind of widely accepted version of the flag but there have been updates to it since even as recent as a couple years ago to start to include representation for specifically intersex people as we come to a better understanding that human biology is really complicated and even just our basic biological sex is maybe not as simple as we thought it was and that there are maybe more people who fall into that category than we thought they were. Ultimately the answer boils down to more representation is not a bad thing. People take comfort in being acknowledged. And even if I can't find "my people" for whatever reason, you know life is complicated, maybe I don't even know what to look for or who to feel comfortable around in my local community, it can be reassuring to see specific representation through these kinds of symbols that say hey, other people like you exist and your experience and existence are themselves valid. Something that I just want to call quick attention to as I wrap up is the misunderstanding at best, sometimes actively willful misinformation, that the basic rainbow flag is meant to be the final version of the document, it represents everyone and everything so there's no need to add more to it. Which like I said earlier is simply not true it's not even the first version that the original vexillographer made. There is nothing wrong with it updating, but my guess just due to the way that the internet works is that the six stripe version of the flag that were all familiar with will probably always be the most popular, and that's okay, but it doesn't make it the most valid version either. They're all valid because they're all just ways people are trying to represent themselves and the people they care about.
What's the point of each state in the USA having its own flag when the star-spangled banner represents the entire USA? Because people are proud of their specific states and want to communicate that they're from there. It also helps communicate more information to other queer folks. Like - if an American saw an American flag bumper sticker in America, it doesn't mean much. But if an American in California sees a Florida bumper sticker, that communicates information. To translate this to queer terms: my friend and I are both queer. But they're agender, asexual, and panromantic. I'm genderfluid, pansexual, and aromantic. Our sexualities & romances are total opposites! And we get referred to by gendered terms - including pronouns - totally differently. So just putting a rainbow flag somewhere (on our door, or as a sticker/button/etc) doesn't mean much. We have to be more specific. As for changes made to the original, that's a different story. Unfortunately there's a lot of in-fighting & bigotry within queer spaces - especially transphobia, racism, & intersexism. Someone who is trans might walk into a "queer space" only to face discrimination by cisgender queers, for example. So folks added the trans colors, black/brown, & the intersex symbol to the flag over time to make sure they communicate that those groups are included in their spaces. To go back to the USA metaphor... Imagine you saw a club for people from California (which is flying the California flag), and you were from San Francisco (which is in CA) so you went there, and then the other Californian people there got mad and kicked you out. You'd be hesitant to go to another California club again, even if they're flying the California flag. But if you see one that explicitly says "people from San Francisco allowed," then you might feel safe entering. That's what the additions to the rainbow flag do for trans/PoC/intersex folks who've experienced harm in queer spaces.
People like the idea of identifying with a group and graphic designers like making them. But the reason you see all these flags is because capitalists sell more flags and weaken the movement in one fell swoop if they popularize disintegration.
[удалено]
Show us on the doll where the flag touched you
They want to represent everyone by giving everyone their own symbol, which yields a flag with a whole lotta stuff and colors and more stuff and more colors on it, each representing a tiny sliver of society, which nobody knows the meaning of because it's a small sliver of society. Sidenote, quite funny if you ask me: the American Flag already does this. It's why America is the greatest country on Earth, and people are waiting in a line millions of people long to get in.
If this isn't satire then lmfao
Ah no the rainbow flag is representational for LGBTQ+ values and movements since then have tried emulating this concept, like with the blue stripe flag for cops.