In 1989 Tony DeBlase, a Chicago designer, editor, and publisher, made a flag. Nine equal horizontal stripes: black and royal blue alternating from the top and from the bottom, white through the center, and a large red heart in the upper left. He made it for the twentieth anniversary of Stonewall. Leather men and women were already more visible in pride parades, and he wanted a banner as plain and readable as the rainbow one, something that named gear, an SM leaning, and leather fellowship instead of being folded into a generic gay symbol. He showed the draft at International Mr. Leather on 28 May 1989 and expected people to change it. Most of them kept the original. More than thirty years on, it still has not had a major redesign. It is the flag you see most often in leather, and in the wider kink, fetish, and BDSM scenes.
DeBlase would not give the colors a fixed official meaning. He left the reading to whoever was looking. Later community glosses include black for leather, blue for denim or loyalty, white for clean intent or for the gap between extremes, and the heart for love and the family you choose. Because there is no official key, no faction could throw the flag out as heresy. In June 1989 a leather contingent carried it in the Portland, Oregon pride parade. That was its first pride march. In 1990 IML put the design on the winner’s sash. In 1991 Melbourne Leather Men became the first club known to take pieces of the flag into its club colors. On 12 December 2000, NLA Florida read a leather-flag pledge at a holiday party. The cadence copies a civic oath, and it puts SSC — safe, sane, and consensual — into public speech.
The flag got harder to miss. On 30 September 2007, at the 24th Folsom Street Fair, the official poster by FredAlert set a leather pride flag on the table in a restaging of Leonardo’s Last Supper, with LGBT and BDSM community figures around it, including Sister Roma. People argued over whether that was celebration, blasphemy, or too much exposure. In 2010 DeBlase entered the Leather Hall of Fame. The flag is everywhere in gay men’s leather spaces, and it is not a gay men’s exclusive. Women’s leather, pansexual kink clubs, rubber-adjacent mixes, and mixed play parties recognize the heart and the stripes too. In 2019 Berlin’s Schwules Museum said the flag marked a turn from semi-secret signals such as hanky codes toward being visible in gay life and in ordinary public life. It came out of the losses of the AIDS years and out of expanding pride politics. A merch company did not invent it as a lifestyle logo.
The cloth is also sitting in specific places. One of the three original flags DeBlase assembled is at the Leather Archives & Museum, which also holds his papers. Since 1998, Twin Cities Pride in Minnesota has used a leather pride flag about a block long, roughly 75 by 50 feet, running curb to curb. The first of those giant flags was given to the museum in 2008. In San Francisco, after Kink.com bought the Armory in 2006, the studio flew the flag on the roof and used that shot in video intros. The flag is all through SOMA’s Leather and LGBTQ Cultural District. The South of Market Leather History Alley opened in 2017 with metal bootprints for DeBlase and other local people. Since 2023 a 20 by 30 foot flag has hung about 80 feet up over Eagle Plaza, next to the San Francisco Eagle.
DeBlase treated the design as protected under U.S. law and the Berne Convention. Once a work is fixed in a tangible form, the copyright exists. Registration is not what creates that protection. It only changes how far enforcement can go. People still make variants. On 18 September 1990 Clive Platman gave DeBlase an Australian version with the Southern Cross added. On 11 October 1991 the opening of Living in Leather unveiled a Canadian version with red maple leaves on the white stripe. Leather & Grace, a group founded in 2011, put a flaming chalice together with the leather stripes. The BDSM rights flag by Master Tanos in the U.K. borrows the leather-pride striping loosely and includes an emblem drawn so it is not the same as Steve Quagmyr’s copyrighted emblem. Its claim is that people whose relationships include consensual BDSM should have ordinary human rights, and should not be discriminated against for that.
