From: Sam Damon <damon@dorsai.dorsai.org>
Date: Thu, 24 Mar 1994 02:57:35 -0500 (EST)

Someone recently asked about the origins of designating Lambda as a gay
symbol.  Here's what I found:

>From The Alyson Almanac ("Gay Symbols Throughout the Ages," pp 99-100):
"The Greek letter lambda was chosen by the Gay Activists Alliance in 1970 to
become a symbol of the gay movement.  Its original militant associations
have softened, and the symbol often appears on jewelry, as a sign that will
go unrecognized by the uninitiated.  the word has also been useful for
organizations such as Lambda Legal Defense and Education Fund, as a way of
expressing "lesbian and gay males" in a minimum of syllables."

>From The Big Gay Book ("What Do the Terms Mean?", pp 98-100):
"The Lambda was designated the symbol of gay liberation by the Gay Activists
Alliance of New York in 1970.  It was adopted as the international symbol of
gay liberation by the Gay Rights Congress in Edinburgh, Scotland, in 1974. 
The symbol was chosen because it stands for synergy -- the concept that the
whole is greater than its independent parts -- according to some sources,
or, according to others, because it is the letter "L" (for "Liberation") in
the Greek alphabet."

As you can see, its origins are somewhat ambiguous.  Most of these
explanations are post hoc, made up after the fact to be the most clever
story possible.  My favorite, which may or may not be true, is that lambda
is the symbol used in physics to represent wavelength.  Gays use it because
gays belong to a "different wavelength."