Cecilia Miller is a lesbian love warrior and educator fighting for queer justice and ensuring every shade of the rainbow shines bright & bold!
While many of us are now familiar with the famous rainbow flag, there are also other LGBQT+ flags that each represent the different sex, sexuality, attraction, and gender diversities within our fabulous community.
Even if most queer people identify with the rainbow flag itself, many also desire to fly their own particular flag alongside it. Because, y’all, representation is crucial!
One such flag is the Butch Lesbian Flag – a flag you might already have seen flown at any number of pride festivals around the world, from Barcelona to Puerto Vallarta…and everywhere in between!
In lesbian culture, the word ‘butch’ indicates a woman whose gender expression and traits present as typically ‘masculine’. Being butch is about playing with and questioning traditional binary male and female gender roles and expressions.
Tumbler user Dorian—rutherford produced the first butch lesbian pride flag in 2016 using shades of blues and purple. The flag was created for lesbians who do not identify with the lipstick lesbian flag, which has strong feminine overtones. The original tumbler post was removed; however, it later reappeared on deviantart.com.
Butchspace, a tumbler user, devised a new form of the butch flag in 2017 to symbolize butch pride using shades of orange. Both butch lesbian flag versions are still gaining popularity in the community – and much like the lesbian pride flags, there is no clear preferred option.
People have speculated that the blue signifies masculinity, the purple represents lesbian and woman-identified folks, and the white represents people across the gender and sexuality spectrums more widely, despite the fact that the artist never clearly stated the significance of the colors. A similar explanation and problem exist for the orange butch flag.
As both butch lesbian flags are in almost equal use, we simply suggest flying the version that you most like.
