#flagposting

this one pisses me off. this is the most boring flag i’ve ever seen. like i know it’s a mayflower and the six pointed star is for mass being the sixth state and it’s got the state colours and by every metric it WORKS but frankly? i don’t care. it’s just so boring and basic and i feel like very little thought went into it. massachusetts deserves better

strictly speaking this one is also fine? like there’s nothing wrong with it. i personally don’t like flags that are straight up just a drawing of a landscape, and something about the squiggly lines pisses me off, but that’s just me. objectively speaking, this is an okay design.

this is my favorite out of the bunch. the turkey feathers are an important symbol to the indigenous peoples of the region, and there are six of them because massachusetts is the sixth state. i just really like the way this one looks. i kind of wish it had the state colours (blue and yellow), but it has the harvard colours which is the next best thing. honestly no complaints about this one

so yeah, these are all Okay but i would prefer the red one by a mile

The gay (later LGBTQ+) pride flag was devised by Gilbert Baker in 1978, and first flown at the San Fransisco Gay Freedom Day parade on June 25th of the same year.

The flag originally had eight stripes of pink, red, orange, yellow, green, turquoise, indigo, and violet. These were assigned the symbolism of sex, life, healing, sunlight, nature, magic, serenity, and spirit, respectively.

The flag was partially inspired by the earlier Brotherhood flag. Designed in 1938, the Brotherhood flag symbolized peace amongst the world's races, and was popular in the counterculture of the 1960s.

The 1938 Brotherhood flag, intended to represent the human race. It has five horizontal stripes of red, white, brown, yellow and black.

The pink stripe was removed not long after the pride flag's inception due to a scarcity of pink fabric. In 1979, the turquoise and indigo stripes were consolidated into a single blue stripe, such that the number of stripes would be even, allowing for three-stripe banners to be displayed on both sides of the parade route. This is how we got the six-stripe variant most people are familiar with today:

In 2018, Portland artist Daniel Quasar created a variant of the six-stripe flag, known as the "Progress flag," that includes concentric chevrons of black, brown, pale blue, pink, and white. These colours symbolise transgender people and people of colour in the LGBTQ+ community. The black stripe also represents those who have been lost to AIDS. The chevron shape indicates forward movement, representing progress.

In 2021, Valentino Vecchietti of Intersex Equality Rights UK debuted an altered Progress flag which includes a yellow triangle containing a purple ring, a design taken from the intersex pride flag.

Left: The intersex-inclusive Progress pride flag. Right: The intersex pride flag, designed in 2013 by Australian activist Morgan Carpenter.

Both variants of the Progress flag, as well as the simple six-stripe version, continue to be widely used by the LGBTQ+ community.