LGBTQ symbols


Over the course of its history, the LGBTQ community has adopted certain symbols for self-identification to demonstrate unity, pride, shared values, and allegiance to one another. These symbols communicate ideas, concepts, and identity both within their communities and to mainstream culture. The two symbols most recognized internationally are the pink triangle and the rainbow flag.

Letters and glyphs

Gender symbols

The female and male gender symbols are derived from the astronomical symbols for the planets Venus and Mars respectively. Following Linnaeus, biologists use the planetary symbol for Venus to represent the female sex, and the planetary symbol for Mars to represent the male sex.
Two interlocking female symbols represent a lesbian or the lesbian community, and two interlocking male symbols a gay male or the gay male community. These symbols first appeared in the 1970s.
The combined male-female symbol is used to represent androgyne or transgender people; when additionally combined with the female and male symbols it indicates gender inclusivity, though it is also used as a transgender symbol.

Lambda

In 1970, graphic designer Tom Doerr selected the lower-case Greek letter lambda to be the symbol of the New York chapter of the Gay Activists Alliance. The alliance's literature states that Doerr chose the symbol specifically for its denotative meaning in the context of chemistry and physics: "a complete exchange of energy–that moment or span of time witness to absolute activity".
The lambda became associated with gay liberation, and in December 1974, it was officially declared the international symbol for gay and lesbian rights by the International Gay Rights Congress in Edinburgh, Scotland. The gay rights organization Lambda Legal and the American Lambda Literary Foundation derive their names from this symbol.

Plants

The color lavender and the eponymous plant are symbols of LGBTQ identity. This has led to the naming of terms such as the "Lavender Scare" and "lavender marriage".
In 19th-century England, green indicated homosexual affiliations, as popularized by homosexual author Oscar Wilde, who often wore a green carnation on his lapel, and used with the book The Green Carnation and Noël Coward's song, "We All Wear a Green Carnation" in his operetta, Bitter Sweet. According to some interpretations, American poet Walt Whitman used the sweet flag plant to represent homoerotic male love because of its phallic connotations.
The term, "rose" in Japanese, has historically been used in Japan as a pejorative for men who love men, roughly equivalent to the English language term "pansy". Beginning in the 1960s, the term was reappropriated by Japanese gay media: notably with the 1961 anthology, a collection of semi-nude photographs of homosexual writer Yukio Mishima by photographer Eikoh Hosoe, and later with in 1971, the first commercially produced gay magazine in Asia. The use of the rose as a prominent symbol of love between males is supposedly derived from the Greek myth of King Laius having affairs with boys under rose trees. Since the 2000s, bara has been used by non-Japanese audience as an umbrella term to describe a wide variety of Japanese and non-Japanese gay media featuring love and sex between masculine men. The rose is also the sacred flower of Eros, the Greek god of love and sex, and patron of love between men. Eros was responsible for the first rose to sprout on Earth, followed by every flower and herb. Roses are a symbol of pederasty in ancient Greece: handsome boys were metaphorically called roses by their male admirers in homoerotic poems such as those by Solon, Straton, Meleager, Rhianus, and Philostratos.
As opposed to the red rose and its association with romantic affection, giving someone a yellow rose is symbolic of platonic love. Because of this, yellow roses have also become popular as symbols of aromantic people.
Violets and their color became a special code used by lesbians and bisexual women. The symbolism of the flower derives from several fragments of poems by Sappho in which she describes a lover wearing garlands or a crown with violets. In 1926, the play La Prisonnière by Édouard Bourdet used a bouquet of violets to signify lesbian love. When the play became subject to censorship, many Parisian lesbians wore violets to demonstrate solidarity with its lesbian subject matter.
White lilies have been used since the Romantic era of Japanese literature to symbolize beauty and purity in women, and are a de facto symbol of the yuri genre, which describes the portrayal of intimate love, sex, or emotional connections between women. The term Yurizoku was coined in 1976 by Ito Bungaku, editor of the gay men's magazine Barazoku, to refer to his female readers. While not all those women were lesbians, and it is unclear whether this was the first instance of the term yuri in this context, an association of yuri with lesbianism subsequently developed. In Korea and China, "lily" is used as a semantic loan from the Japanese usage to describe female-female romance media, where each use the direct translation of the term – baekhap in Korea and bǎihé in China.
In 1999, Michael Page established the use of the trillium flower as a symbol of bisexuality. This was a pun, as scientists had used the term "bisexual" to refer to the flower because such flowers have both male and female reproductive organs.
Sexual fluidity and abrosexuality—terms that refer to a changing sexual orientation that cannot always be consistently described—are represented by the watermelon. Because it is composed primarily of water, the watermelon symbolizes a sexuality that is fluid.
Because the word "orchid" comes from the Greek word for testicle, and the orchiectomy is a common surgery performed on intersex infants –especially those with androgen insensitivity syndrome– the orchid flower is a symbol of being intersex and of opposition to non-consensual genital surgery.
In 2022, oranges became popular with trans and nonbinary people starting in March with the release of the episode "This Is Happening" of LGBTQ-themed pirate comedy series Our Flag Means Death; oranges are a significant motif in the episode, in particular when nonbinary pirate Jim Jimenez is revealed to have grown up on an orange grove. Then in April, Twitter user Antonia Terrazas tweeted a photo of an Old Navy shirt with oranges on a navy blue background with the caption, "Hot Transmasc Summer collection just dropped at Old Navy", causing the shirt to go viral. The phenomena converged when Ortiz purchased the shirt and posted a TikTok of them wearing it with matching boxer shorts.

Animals

Animals that lovers gave as gifts to their beloved also became symbols of pederastic love, such as hares, roosters, deer, felines and oxen, as a metaphor for sexual pursuits.

Blåhaj

The IKEA plush toy shark Blåhaj is commonly associated with LGBTQ culture, in particular the transgender community, in part due to being colored similarly to a transgender pride flag. Early origins of this are traced back to around 2020 and in 2021, when IKEA ran an ad-campaign to support same-sex marriage in Switzerland featuring the shark alongside other plush toys.
In response to this popularity, IKEA Canada hosted a giveaway in November 2022, offering transgender people a special edition Blåhaj in the colors of a transgender pride flag, with the winner's name embroidered on its fin.

Lavender rhinoceros

Daniel Thaxton and Bernie Toale created a lavender rhinoceros symbol for a public ad campaign to increase visibility for gay people in Boston helmed by Gay Media Action-Advertising; Toale said they chose a rhinoceros because "it is a much maligned and misunderstood animal" and that it was lavender because that is a mix of pink and blue, making it a symbolic merger of the feminine and masculine.. However, in May 1974, Metro Transit Advertising said its lawyers could not "determine eligibility of the public service rate" for the lavender rhinoceros ads, which tripled the cost of the ad campaign. Gay Media Action challenged this but were unsuccessful. The lavender rhinoceros symbol was seen on signs, pins, and t-shirts at the Boston Pride Parade later in 1974, and a life-sized papier-mâché lavender rhinoceros was part of the parade. Money was raised for the ads, and they began running on the Massachusetts Bay Transportation Authority's Green Line by December 3, 1974, and ran there until February 1975. The lavender rhinoceros continued as a symbol of the gay community, appearing at the 1976 Boston Pride Parade and on a flag that was raised at Boston City Hall in 1987.
Outside of Boston, Theatre Rhinoceros, located in San Francisco, and founded in 1977, based its name on this symbol. Theatre Rhinoceros, also called Theatre Rhino, or The Rhino, is a gay and lesbian theatre. It claims to be the world's longest-running professional queer theatre company. An online bookstore focused on LGBTQ authors and books called "The Lavender Rhino" launched in 2023.

Unicorn

s have become a symbol of LGBTQ culture due to earlier associations between the animal and rainbows being extended to the rainbow flag created in 1978 by Gilbert Baker. Scholars have also traced a connection between Peter S. Beagle's 1968 novel The Last Unicorn and the unicorn's evolution as an LGBTQ symbol, pointing to a number of queer and transgender responses to it, including a gay bar named The Last Unicorn in the 1980s.
Alice Fisher of The Guardian wrote in 2017, "The unicorn has also done its bit for the LGBT community in the last century... Rainbows and unicorns are so intrinsically linked that it's unsurprising that the magic creature started to appear on T-shirts and banners at Gay Pride around the world, with slogans such as 'Gender is Imaginary' or 'Totally Straight' emblazoned under sparkling rainbow unicorns."
Gay Star News said in 2018 that unicorns are the "gay, LGBTI and queer icons of our time".