A New Standard Polyamory Flag: The committee is forming up. Want to join?

The PolyamProud people continue their bold initiative to institute a new and better polyamory flag. As I posted a couple weeks ago, they plan to launch a new flag only when one design has gained a broad consensus in the interested poly community worldwide.

There's already much consensus that the old red, black & blue poly flag with its confusing letter pi (some math society?) is serving us poorly. It declares no recognizable message or meaning, and many say it looks dark and foreboding. When a volunteer drew it up in 1995 — deliberately making it obscure because so many people at the time were closeted — the then-small community adopted it by default. We've been stuck with it ever since.

People have offered up dozens of replacement polyamory flags over the years. Here are 25 of them.

So how might one really effective, popular design gain traction as the clear declaration to the world of our pride and identity in the 21st century? Like the rainbow Pride Flag became for all things LGBT?

The PolyamProud group intends to

1.  Recruit a large committee of graphic designers and poly activists from around the world, with maximum diversity across nationalities, orientations, identities and cultures;

2.   Ask the committee to create and/or select excellent designs, using known principles of effective flag design to convey our presence clearly and boldly with just the right mood and attitude, and then to narrow the designs to a list of finalists; 

3.  Hold a worldwide poly-community vote on the finalists this November;

4.  Announce the winning flag with maximum public fanfare on Polyamory Day, November 23;

5.  And then work to inspire poly activists, groups, bloggers, podcasters, other opinion leaders, as well as merchandise makers, to take it up and make it fly.

"Polyamory" here means the ideal of consensual, ethical non-monogamy with full knowledge, agreement, and mutual good will among all involved.

They've just announced that the committee is forming, and you're invited to nominate applicants, maybe yourself. Again, people outside North America and outside dominant cultural majorities are urged in particular to make nominations or to consider applying.

To help get this rolling, Sarah Flury and Kristian Einstman have put up an Instagram slide show. They write,

We’ve already begun the process of assembling a committee to represent us in choosing the designs for the new, official polyamorous pride flag.

We have a shortlist of candidates (a couple of whom you might recognize) but we really need your help to find leaders who you feel represent YOU.

Our website is currently under construction but will soon feature information about chosen committee members. We’ll announce [the site] when it’s up and running.

Important note: We (polyamproud) are NOT the committee, nor will we be represented on the committee.

From their Instagram slides about this:

 

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Folks get serious about a new and better polyamory flag

The old one

A year ago I published a screed titled The Polyamory Flag is a Grim, Confusing Failure. Let's Do Better. Repeating many other people, I said its colors are harsh and foreboding and its central letter pi only prompts a huh? (Some math or engineering society?) The flag "fails to declare for us, fails to inspire, fails to do a flag's job."  I posted some of the alternative flags that people have created, and gave some history of the early poly movement and its symbology.

That article struck a chord. It became my most-read post of the last 12 months, and its hit rate has been increasing. It's now averaging 500 new reads a week, mostly through Google searches for "polyamorous flag", "poly flag" and so on.

Dozens of people's new polyamory flags are floating around. A few have gained some traction. But no consensus has formed up around any design — one that will display poly presence, pride, and attitude with clarity and verve, in a way that both we and the world will instantly recognize.

Why do we need that? Look at the social power of the rainbow Pride Flag, which the LGBT world grabbed up almost from the moment Gilbert Baker created it in 1978. It did a great deal for the visibility and normalizing of LGBT, and it still does. 

And, look at the recent explosion of other new identity-pride flags: trans, ace, pan, genderfluid, bi, and more. These have won hearts in their communities and a lot of favorable mainstream-media notice for those identities (even for instance in the white-picket-fence Reader's Digest).

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Now folks are launching an initiative to see if the polyamory community is ready to coalesce around some new design that will stir us to make it our proud standard.

Sarah "Mack" Flury and Kristian Einstman, based in Chicago, are going about this project from the ground up, showing smarts about how such an effort might actually work in this disparate, independent-minded herd of cats we call the poly movement.

Their first goal, they say, is "to create a committee of some of the most influential voices in the community, networking worldwide." They explicitly want to keep this from becoming an American-centered project. "Our goal," says Einstman, "is to create a flag that is recognizable and representative worldwide.

"We have collectively formed @PolyamProud, a volunteer coalition dedicated to establishing a definitive and representative visual identity for the polyamorous community."

Click here to start PolyamProud's Instagram pitch

 

They hope to launch a worldwide discussion among all who want us to have "a definitive and representative visual identity," as Einstman tells us. The eventual committee may create and offer designs of its own guided by known principles of vexillology (flag study), and it may consider design entries by additional people. He continues,

We have no intention of trashing the old flag and its history and its role in getting us as far as we've gotten. But there is a real, pressing need in the community to have a single flag that serves us all well.

A flag is a way of proclaiming visibility, so that people who are not yet out can see where there is a place they can go, can see that there are other people like them. 

"We want to make it clear that we are not the committee and none of our team will be on it," says Einstman;

We’ll be releasing information about committee member qualifications on our site within the next month or so, but our main goals are to have the committee members represent a wide range of socioeconomic, racial, cultural, and non-monogamous backgrounds, as well as varied levels of education and areas of expertise.

Our plan is to present designs to a small committee of (no more than 12) representatives from polyamorous communities worldwide. The committee will review options and select two to four designs to be presented to the public for the final vote.

Flury and Einstman say they want to announce the winner of the public vote with full social-media fanfare on November 23rd, Polyamory Day. "We also want to get it into the hands of merchants" who manufacture flags, shirts, stickers, coffee mugs, all the usual stuff. They hope to recruit publicists who will build media interest as the day nears.

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Want to help make this happen? Do you have skills, expertise, or time & energy to contribute? Once again: @PolyamProud on Instagram. They're also on Twitter. Their GoFundMe.

Here are slides from an early presentation they've worked up.

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I'll keep reporting on the project as it advances.

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