(not) Unifying the Bi & Pan Pride Flags

28th of december 2023

1. the basics

The three colors of the bi flag are relativly close to each other on the color spectrum and the colors are not as saturated as they could be. This makes the flag feel cozy and relaxing. The pan flag is the opposite. The colors are very bright, saturated and almost as far apart as possible. In the following graph you can see distances between the colors. The color spectrum only shows hues and not saturation or brightness.

Going foward i call the colors of the flags bi top, bi middle and bi bottom. I don't want to define the names of the shades and it might be funny out of context.

The bi flag has differently sized stripes, which works visually, because the three colors are close enough to each other, that bi middle feels like a gradient between the outer colors. The same does not true for the pan colors. The bi middle of however is not "the color between the other two". There are a lot of differen ways to "average", or find a "middle" between colors. Here are a few.

2. the symbolism

bi flag:

The pink color represents sexual attraction to the same sex only (gay and lesbian), the blue represents sexual attraction to the opposite sex only (straight) and the resultant overlap color purple represents sexual attraction to both sexes (bi). The key to understanding the symbolism in the Bi Pride Flag is to know that the purple pixels of color blend unnoticeably into both the pink and blue, just as in the 'real world' where bi people blend unnoticeably into both the gay/lesbian and straight communities. - The History of the Bi Pride Flag Michael Page

pan flag:

The pan flag colors represent female, non-binary and male people or attraction to female, non-binary and male people. If you want to distance yourself from the gender binary you probably like the pan flag more.

So the pan flag represents female, non-binary and male attraction/people equally. Something the proposed flag changes. And of course the part that would shrink is for non-binary attraction/people. That is... not good.

3. my interpretation

I have another interpretation of the pan flag, which i like way more. I have always seen the pan flag as doing the same thing as the rainbow pride flag; both represent the color spectrum or rainbow. The rainbow pride flag does this literal and explicit, as it is a rainbow, reduced to a few colors. If you squint at the rainbow pride flag you see a rainbow.

However you can't see a rainbow with the pan flag. But, the pan flag has got almost all the tools you need to create the color spectrum or a rainbow. This is because the pan flag colors are close to cyan, magenta and yellow (CMY).

CMY are the common primaries for subtractive color models. Subtractive color models work like this:

We assume a white canvas. When applying yellow paint, the painted spot will be more yellow and darker than the rest. When we paint with magenta on the yellow spot, the spot will become red and is darker than yellow was. Adding magenta will make the spot black.

This is the principle. You have white and filter out (subtract) wavelengths, by applying a combination of CMY, until you get the color you want. This color can be any color. You can also adjust how much each color (CMY) gets added to the canvas. Printers use CMYK, the K is black and is used for practical reasons, but is theoretically not nedded. The other color model, the additive color model, is used by displays for example.

The pan flag colors are not able to create every color, but i think the similarities are enough to justify this head-canoned symbolism. I actually am uncertain what "the symbolism" is; if the colors, you can create, stand for attraction or people or something else. And at this point is the pan flag the most ambiguous flag ever anyway.

Now we go back to the proposed pan flag. It has the stripe proportions of the bi flag, that is 2/5ths, 1/5th and 2/5ths. This makes the new outer stripes each 1.2 times taller and the middle one 0.6 times as tall. If we say the height of the stripes is equal to the maximum amount CMY, we can't create every color anymore. So the proposed pan flag is also incompatible with this symbolism.

I used this to change the colors:

convert image.png -colorspace CMYK -channel C -evaluate multiply 1.20 -channel M -evaluate multiply 1.20 -channel Y -evaluate multiply 0.60 +channel -colorspace sRGB out.png

4. conclusion

The bi and pan flag represent the same overarching group, but they have very different approches. To converge the two is not going to work without straying from the original intents. The only way i see, that wouldn't nessesarly do that, would be adding new things to both flags. like a dragon, idk :)

I am not against changes and i would be very happy to present you my proposal for a pride flag, but i don't have any good ideas.

Maybe the goal to unify (all) pride flags is foolish. After all, the pride flags exist to highlight the differences of queer groups. If every queer group, despite showing their differences, support every other, is there a reason to spell it out on the flags?

It would be nice if you could look at any pride flag and immediately know, due to similarities, which group the flag is related to. And it would look neat if there were recurrent visuals in all pride flags. But i think you can already tell if a flag is a pride flag. No other flags have such wild colors. Besides that, you can manage to remember them. There aren't that many of them.

So, the next time i see a pride flag that i don't know, i should simply ask what it represents.

5. appendix

Let's see how things would look like when we use the pan colors instead of CMY as primaries.

It's actually a nice filter. Filter being the key word. I should have tried making a LUT, but i didn't notice and made the following instead... it is slow.

#!/bin/sh
# convert CMY primaries to Pan colors

[ "$#" -ne 1 ] && echo "usage: $0 <image>" && exit

# seperate into CMY primaries into images
convert "$1" -colorspace CMY -separate separate_CMY_%d.png

# colorize the images with the primary colors
convert separate_CMY_0.png -colorspace CMY +level-colors "#21b1ff", -negate separate_CMY_0.png
convert separate_CMY_1.png -colorspace CMY +level-colors "#ff218c", -negate separate_CMY_1.png
convert separate_CMY_2.png -colorspace CMY +level-colors "#ffd800", -negate separate_CMY_2.png

# combine the images
convert separate_CMY_0.png -compose multiply separate_CMY_1.png -composite separate_CMY_2.png -composite -set colorspace sRGB comb.png
		

idk why anyone would read all of this. i planned to make this website since a few weeks, but then i saw the video and it didn't get out of my head. i didn't want the videos to be months old when i get this site up. so i made the website alongside the writing. this is not how i wanted to do it and neither does it look like i wanted it to, but i will slowly work on it. however this page might keep the look