Īnimals that lovers gave as gifts to their beloved also became symbols of pederastic love, such as hares, roosters, deer, felines and oxen, as a metaphor for sexual pursuits. Roses are a symbol of pederasty in ancient Greece: handsome boys were metaphorically called roses by their male admirers in homoerotic poems such as those by Solon, Straton, Meleager, Rhianus, and Philostratos. Eros was responsible for the first rose to sprout on Earth, followed by every flower and herb. The rose is also the sacred flower of Eros, the Greek god of love and sex, and patron of love between men. Since the 2000s, bara has been used by non-Japanese audience as an umbrella term to describe a wide variety of Japanese and non-Japanese gay media featuring love and sex between masculine men. The use of the rose as a prominent symbol of love between males is supposedly derived from the Greek myth of King Laius having affairs with boys under rose trees.

'rose tribe') in 1971, the first commercially produced gay magazine in Asia. 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

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