10 Facts You Never Knew About the Bisexual Flag

1. Yep, we have our own flag.

Who knew?

2. Michael Page designed the bisexual flag.

He noticed the majority of Bi+ people felt less connection to the rainbow Pride flag and wanted to create a flag with symbols all Bi+ people could rally around.

3. The color scheme is borrowed from another bi pride symbol.

Page used two overlapping triangles as a symbol of bisexuality and pride.

These biangles were designed by Liz Nania as she was helping to organize the first national bisexual contingent for the 1987 March on Washington, according to Los Angeles-based art historian Andrew Campbell, author of Queer x Design. He told Deezen that "they are a powerful expression of the cleverness of LGBTQ design. The design takes the triangle as a starting point. The pink triangle was used by the Nazis during world war two to mark male homosexuals. Lesbians were categorized with a black triangle with other 'asocials' such as sex workers and 'nonconformists.' Nania overlapped pink and blue triangles, each representative of a pole of the normative gender binary. The space of their overlap is a deep purple, made from the combination of pink and blue. This overlap communicates an inclusivity in terms of the potentially adored – playing with powerful LGBTQ symbology." Later, it became the foundation for a Page's Bi+ Pride flag.

4. The colors have meaning.

The top 40 percent of the flag is pink, the middle 20 percent is purple, and the bottom 40 percent is blue. The various colors represent attraction to multiple genders. The pink alludes to the pink triangles, which was later adopted by AIDS activist group ACT UP as a badge of solidarity and pride in the 1980s. The purple was an allusion to "purple menace" (or "lavender menace") another slang term for bi+ folks. And the blue was added both because it reflects multiple genders overlapping, but also, says bi+ activist Cynthia Connors, "because it makes the flag, and the original biangles the colors came from, a bit of a joke on the gender binary. And the Bi+ community has never been able to resist a pun or a joke."

5. It was unveiled on December 5, 1998.

Which makes it just over 24 years old.

6. It’s absolutely stunning.

Let your Bi+ flag fly.

7. This breaks it down quite beautifully

8. The bisexual flag is currently part of a meme format that is getting hot

9. The growth of bisexual awareness in memes is uplifting and full of hope

10. There isn't a Bi flag emoji — but there could be.

Currently, no bi flag is available in the Unicode, but that may not be the case forever. In 2020 Tanner Marino, an advocate and software engineer, proposed to the Unicode Consortium to request the creation of a bisexual flag. Sadly it was rejected, but he has kept the hope alive with his #MorePrideEmojis campaign. Want to help out? Sign the petition use the #BiFlagEmoji and post the above image.

What is the bisexual flag design?

Three horizontal bars with 2/5th colored pink, 1/5th purple, and 2/5th blue. It has a proportion of 3:5.