Beginning in the 1960s, the term was reappropriated by Japanese gay media: notably with the 1961 anthology Ba-ra-kei: Ordeal by Roses, a collection of semi-nude photographs of homosexual writer Yukio Mishima by photographer Eikoh Hosoe, and later with Barazoku ( 薔薇族, lit. The term bara ( 薔薇), ' rose' in Japanese, has historically been used in Japan as a pejorative for men who love men, roughly equivalent to the English language term ' pansy'. Roses have been associated with male love in both ancient Greece and modern Japan. The gay rights organization Lambda Legal and the American Lambda Literary Foundation derive their names from this symbol. The lambda became associated with Gay Liberation, and in December 1974, it was officially declared the international symbol for gay and lesbian rights by the International Gay Rights Congress in Edinburgh, Scotland. The alliance's literature states that Doerr chose the symbol specifically for its denotative meaning in the context of chemistry and physics: 'a complete exchange of energy–that moment or span of time witness to absolute activity'. In 1970, graphic designer Tom Doerr selected the lower-case Greek letter lambda (λ) to be the symbol of the New York chapter of the Gay Activists Alliance. The combined male-female symbol (⚦) is used to represent androgyne or transgender people and when additionally combined with the female (♀) and male (♂) symbols (⚧) it indicates gender inclusivity, though it is also used as a transgender symbol.

These symbols first appeared in the 1970s. Two interlocking female symbols (⚢) represent a lesbian or the lesbian community, and two interlocking male symbols (⚣) a gay male or the gay male community. Following Linnaeus, biologists use the planetary symbol for Venus to represent the female sex, and the planetary symbol for Mars to represent the male sex. The female and male gender symbols are derived from the astronomical symbols for the planets Venus and Mars respectively. Lesbian and gay interlocked gender sex symbols

Rhinoceros shirts