When we started collecting Pride flags for the Quests & Queers patch line, something stood out to us: the field guides that exist are incomplete, many of them did not cite sources (let alone primary sources), creator credit was not always given, and the information about them wasn’t standardized for easy reference. Our aim is to be a better reference.
Shoutout to Clare Bayley’s “A field guide to Pride flags” project, which is the most comprehensive I found, and was an invaluable starting point. They also cover most of the BDSM flags, which our guide doesn’t aim to at the moment.
We collected our first attempt into a zine called “A Brief History of Pride Flags.” It included publicly available information on the Pride flags we had products for at the the time. It’s still available for purchase here, and sales help fund this project. But that’s just the beginning. We wanted a guide accessible to as many people as possible, updated as we found more information, contextualized multiple ways to help teach queer history, and citing as many primary sources as possible.
We have a grander ambition as well: track down the flag creators and interview them about the creation of their flags. So many of these flags were posted to Tumblr and Twitter by semi-anonymous people. Tracking down the original posts was already difficult. If we don’t find these folks now, we’re going to lose our history. We’ll lose what these flags meant, why they were created, and the people who created them. Queer history has been literally burned many times before to silence us and our stories. Preserving our history is an act of defiance and Pride.
This is an ambitious project. Web hosting and site building tools aren’t cheap. Gathering information, designing useful ways to explore it, and making it accessible all take time. Your support would really help.
If you have information you’d like to contribute, please send us an email through the contact form. Comments are disabled because every similar project I’ve seen with comments includes harassment, and I have no interest in providing a space for that.
