Gay European flag

Last modified: 2008-02-03 by ivan sache
Keywords: gay | rainbow | stars: 2 (red) | stars: 2 (orange) | stars: 2 (yellow) | stars: 2 (green) | stars: 2 (blue) | stars: 2 (purple) | stars: 2 (pink) |
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Gay European flag - Image by Clare Dimyon, 21 April 2007

• Gay European flag

See also:

• European Union
• Sexual orientation flags
• Rainbow flag

Gay European flag

The Gay Europen flag is a standard European Union flag but with differently coloured stars:
- Red: 12 o'clock and 6 o'clock;
- Orange: 1 PM and 7 PM;
- Yellow: 2 PM and 8 PM;
- Green: 3 PM and 9 PM;
- Blue: 4 PM and 10 PM;
- Purple (or pink): 5 PM and 11 PM.

The rainbow colours are a symbol for Gay people of unity through diversity and that is an excellent symbol for Europe too.
It is also worth noting that the rainbow and Europe have another connotation within this flag that of a commemoration of those forced to wear coloured triangles (here represented by the stars) in the Concentration Camps including Gay people:
- Red: Communists;
- Orange: Gypsies;
- Yellow: Jews;
- Green: "Criminals";
- Blue: Slavs;
- Purple (and Pink): Jehovah's Witnesses and (Homosexuals).
Due to an accident of the flag making process, the purple stars actually became pink stars, which is kind of appropriate since the Jehovah's Witnesses are not very well disposed to Gay people.
The 12 stars become symbolic too because around there were around 12 million deaths in the Holocaust, six million of them Jews and more than five million of other groups. Each star stands for one million death.

This flag is used by Gay people within Europe to assert both Gay and European identity and as a sign of "solidarity" between Gays of the older European Union countries with those of the newly joined postcommunist states, whose legislation and custom and practice and law is not as advanced as say United Kingdom and Netherlands and Germany.

The flag was designed by a British lesbian in 2005 for use at a "wedding" between a British woman and a Polish woman on 30 April 2005, the first anniversary of Poland's accession to the European Union (and coincidentally the anniversary of Hitler's death). The flag was seen at a number of Gay Pride and European events since.

Clare Dimyon, 21 April 2007