These colors represent important ideas connected to this flag and community.
History
The Leather Pride Flag was designed by Tony DeBlase and first displayed at the 1989 Mr. Leather Contest in Chicago. The flag consists of five horizontal stripes—black, red, white, blue, and black—with a red heart symbol positioned over the center stripes. DeBlase intentionally left the flag open to interpretation, encouraging each person to ascribe their own meaning to the colors and shapes. According to Stacey, Ms. National Leather Association International 1996, the red heart represents love within the community, the white stripe symbolizes the purity achieved through open, honest, and consensual expression, black represents leather, and blue represents denim—both materials commonly worn and eroticized in BDSM and leather communities. This lighter-blue variant was created for use in smaller formats such as userboxes, as the colors appear darker when scaled down. The flag was quickly adopted as a symbol for practitioners of sadomasochism, leather fetishists, and the broader BDSM community, becoming one of the primary symbols of leather pride worldwide.
