Aromantic & Asexual Representation in Children’s Books

Transcript Transcribed by Laura M.

Courtney: Hello, everyone, and welcome back. My name is Courtney. I am here with my spouse, Royce. And together we are The Ace Couple. And although today’s episode, I think, is probably gonna be pretty darn short, it’s no less important than our other episodes about media representation. Obviously, we often talk about asexual and/or aromantic representation in the media, but most often this is in the form of TV shows and books, specifically Young Adult novels, I think, is probably where we’re able to get the most in terms of book representation. But very rarely do we get to see or discuss instances of media representation in young children’s media, picture books, actual kids books, and not geared towards teenage young adults kind of genre. In fact, I think probably the youngest, demographically speaking, that we’ve talked about was probably A-Okay. Because that was very much a middle grade graphic novel.

Courtney: And of course, the younger you get, the less in-depth you’re going to get, so we aren’t really able to apply the same kind of criticism that we do for our average media for young children’s books and media. But I want to give it a try anyway. Because recently I’ve noticed a couple of interesting things. First of all, I used to spend a lot of time in the picture book section of bookstores because I had children in my life, friends’ kids who were of that age, and I loved buying picture books for birthdays, Christmases, things like that. But this was years ago, and a lot of those kids are not that age and demographic anymore. So it’s been a very long time, actually, since I’ve been in that section of a bookstore. Which if I had to guess there was probably a bit of a bell curve where after I was spending most of my time shopping for books there, there were probably more queer kids picture books that were popping up. And I imagine it’s dipping down now a little bit.

Courtney: So I kind of wish I might have popped in sort of before this latest swing of book bans and moral panic popped in, because I may have seen more. Now, to put in context, the idea for this episode came because I was visiting my friends down at Moc Bod, which is a queer store, really cool coalition here in Kansas City. If you’re local or ever visit the area or within a tri-state area, definitely recommend checking them out. But they are not a bookstore. You can get a lot of cool services there from queer artists and business owners, you can get massages, tattoos, get your hair done, and you can buy from a variety of queer artists and different genres. And then like stickers, buttons, greeting cards. And they just so happened to have two picture books geared towards a young demographic there. So not a bookstore, but they are a queer store.

Courtney: And I just happened to pick up this book called Under One Rainbow by Chris Ayala-Kronos with pictures by Sol Salinas. And just before I even cracked the book open, just turning over to the back cover, immediately saw a very prominent Aromantic Pride flag. And I was like, “Oh! That surprises and delights me. I’m gonna buy it.” And so I did. And this book is very colorful, it’s very much geared towards young children, not a ton of words per page, just talking about the general happy communal vibe of a Pride parade and all of the colors and all of the flags that you’ll get. And on the page talking about being on the way to Pride, there’s a page that says, “Some bike, others roll. We walk and skip.” And on this page, we have three people walking or skipping. One has a Progress Flag tied around their neck like a cape, as you often see at Pride, one’s wearing a Trans Flag button. And then we have three people doing varying types of rolling.

Courtney: We have someone on a bike holding a Rainbow Flag, someone on roller skates, and then we have a really cool looking wheelchair user here holding an Aromantic Pride flag with dyed green hair and wearing dark sunglasses. And this is in fact the same person and same flag color scheme that we see depicted on the back cover. So this is a really, really interesting way to think about and conceptualize representation because there aren’t really orientations that get named at all in this book. There isn’t a page that’s like, “Some are gay, others are trans, while others are–” Like, there, there isn’t that. It’s just talking about, look at all these people going to the Pride parade. Look at all these people having fun here. And sort of a really brilliant page about how if there’s an unexpected rain cloud, if it becomes shady and gray, if it’s raining, we’ll all help each other out until the sun comes up again.

Courtney: And of course, reading this as a queer adult, it’s like, “Oh, this isn’t just about Pride, is it?” This is about just weathering the storms together that come and go within our community to varying degrees of severity, which I think a lot of good and effective children’s books say more than they’re literally saying for that reason so that people of different ages can glean different things from them. So in a very Pride Flag based form of representation, I would say this is probably about as much as we can ask for because the Aromantic Flag gets about the same amount of screen time as like the Lesbian Flag.

Royce: Screen time in a picture book?

Courtney: Screen time in a picture book. I bet there are some iPad kids out there that– [laughs] are starting to use screen time more broadly than actual screens.

Royce: Yeah, it’s just weird that that has become the common term, and I can’t even think of what the appropriate– I guess, you could just say attention or content or something.

Courtney: As much page real estate. But yeah, the fascinating thing is, and like, I still bought it mostly because have we ever gotten a disabled wheelchair user aromantic also Person of Color representation anywhere? I don’t think so. Not one that I have come across yet. So the disabled, racially ambiguous, a-spec activist in me who has had my hair this color many years ago, once upon a time, is like, “Heck yeah. Love it. Awesome.” Is it the deepest, most nuanced representation in the world? No, but the medium it’s in it, can’t really be, because that’s not the point of the book. But when the words aren’t stating orientations, but Pride flags are a common feature, like in a picture book, this is the representation. But I do find it a little unusual. That there were not any Asexual Pride flags in the book at all. In fact, I kind of want to count up all of the flags we have here. So on the back cover, we have: Aromantic and Lesbian flag. Front cover, we have: two Trans flags, a Bi flag and a Progress flag.

Courtney: Flipping through the book, I see an Intersex inclusive Progress flag, another Progress flag, a Non-Binary flag. Another Progress, another Non-Binary, another Trans. Another Intersex-inclusive Progress, another Trans. Aromantic flag, Progress flag, Trans flag, Rainbow flag. Non-binary flag, Intersex-inclusive Progress, Lesbian, Non-Binary, Intersex-inclusive Progress, Progress flag, Lesbian flag, Non-Binary flag, Progress flag, Non-Binary flag, Progress flag. Progress flag, Trans flag, Progress flag, the end. So that’s kind of a lot of Non-Binary flags, I think. Because that I have seen it get more and more common at Pride over the years as just an identity, a flag that people use in general. But the flack– the flackt. The flack that they [laughs] have a handful of lesbian flags, but not the Gay men flags is interesting. The fact that they have an Aromantic flag but not an Asexual flag is interesting.

Royce: Yeah, it’s abnormal for– in a case where only one a-spec identity is shown that it would be aro instead of ace.

Courtney: That’s what I thought! That’s what I thought. And yet this got me wondering what other children’s picture books depict a variety of Pride flags and what Pride flags are those represented? So after I bought this book at Moc Bod, at the risk of going a little overboard and just checking like every small independent bookstore in the area – because they all have little children’s book sections or a variety of them do – I didn’t really have the time or the energy to do that. Especially when, like, it’s December. So do some of these bookstores maybe tend to stock more Pride-related books in June? Probably at least some of them, at least sort of the very queer-friendly local ones, maybe do order some extra Pride books during that month for a display or something. But even though I prefer to shop at local bookstores, the biggest picture book section in any bookstore near me that I could think of is the Barnes & Noble.

Courtney: So I got to wondering, if I pop over to Barnes & Noble today and scan through the entire children’s book section, how many other queer books am I gonna find? And am I gonna find any other Aromantic flags? And will I find any Asexual flags? And I was fully prepared to find a book on the shelf that may be like this was about a Pride parade that had an Asexual flag but not an Aromantic one. And yet, I did not. So at Barnes & Noble, which another part of this experiment is just like, what could the average person just find if they tried to go out into their city and look for a children’s picture book right now? Some cities or towns have better local bookstores than others, some are a little more explicitly queer-friendly than others, but at the end of the day, most people are gonna have a Barnes & Noble. What can you find if you just go in there?

Courtney: So I found four explicitly queer children’s picture books in our local Barnes & Noble early in the month of December, which is surely not nothing, but it’s also not very many. Again, I don’t know if Barnes & Noble is going to be ordering more around Pride Month or not, but the fact that the non-bookstore had two books and Barnes & Noble, that is a bookstore, only had four does kind of tell me that they probably aren’t going too far out of their way to stock an abundance of queer focused children’s books. But of those four books that I found in the Barnes & Noble, two of them were very much This Is What Pride Looks Like and had a bunch of Pride flags. Or this is specifically about going to a Pride parade. So that means we have six books total that I was able to find locally in a day. Half of them revolve around the concept of Pride, Pride Festival, Pride Parade, lots of flags depicted, right?

Courtney: Two of the six books, one third, had Aromantic flags present. Only one had an Asexual flag, which I find fascinating. At Barnes & Noble, the only book I bought there of the four, was Grandad’s Pride by Harry Woodgate. And it says right on the front cover it is a Stonewall Book Award honoree. And on the back cover, we see two Progress flags, two Intersex inclusive Progress flags, a Bi flag, and an Asexual Pride flag. And so I was like, “All right, give me it!” And when I saw that Asexual flag on the back cover paralleling the Aromantic flag on the back color that I saw on Under the Rainbow. I was fully expecting that there wouldn’t also be Aromantic flags in here. But inside I actually found two Aromantic flags and one Asexual flag. Now this book is really sweet. It’s probably geared towards a slightly older child than the first book is because there are just more words per page. It’s a little bit longer, a little bit more is going on.

Royce: The art style also looks a little more detailed, maybe a little– I don’t know if realistic is the right word.

Courtney: Realistic is definitely not the right word, but there’s more happening in the background on a lot of these.

Royce: I’m just looking at the textures and perspective on objects in the environment, like furniture.

Courtney: Well, there’s more of a story here. Because the first one was just like, “We’re going to a Pride parade. This is what we see. This is what it’s like.” This one is a young girl going to her grandad’s house and is playing pirates in the attic and looking through boxes and finds his old Pride flag. And this kid is like, “This is going to be a perfect sale for our ship.” And grandad comes in and is like, “Oh, you found my old Pride flag.” And she’s like, “Grandad, what’s Pride?” And so he tells her and she’s like, “That sounds awesome. Actually, let’s make a new Pride. Why haven’t we done that in a while? Let’s do this.” And so they sort of plan a Pride parade. And it talks– Sort of, it shows these memories where this girl, Millie is like, “Oh, you know, when Grandad and Gramps were younger, they used to go to lots of Pride parades. And here’s where they marched. Here’s where they danced. Here’s, you know, the legislation that they fought for.”

Courtney: So it does actually, like, allude to the very political origins of Pride in a way that I think a lot of children’s books don’t even go that far into. But you see this in the form of, like, visual tableaus, but you can read the signs that they’re carrying. Like someone in a leather harness carrying a flag that says: lesbian and gay pride ’85, and lesbian and gays support the miners, and liberation now, asking for AIDS research. So there’s just so much going on visually, not even now when they’re planning the parade, but also going back sort of these memories and as he’s telling her what the Prides he went to used to be like. And there are just some very interesting things about this that in some ways do feel very representative of the history of Pride in terms that can be understood in the context of a children’s book.

Courtney: We also have, you know, this grandfather who is, like, grieving his deceased partner and memories with him. But we’ve also got a baker who’s helping making a Pride flag who is just very casually referred to with they/them pronouns. And it’s really just a couple of pages in the grand scheme of, “Here are all the things we’re getting done to prepare for Pride.” But it just says like, oh yeah, you know, they work at the bakery, we’re making a rainbow cake, and they explain to us what all the different colors of each layer means. And I think that really nonchalant use of they/them pronouns is really cool. Pretty much anytime I run into it, usually in books, I feel like most of the time in TV, if there’s a non-binary character who uses they/them pronouns, there’s at least like a little bit of a try to teach the audience what’s going on here. Maybe that’ll be getting a little bit better, but especially when we’re dealing with kids, like, kids just take in new information so easily and go like, “Okay.” So I like seeing things like that.

Courtney: But here is the thing. We have named characters in this book as opposed to the first one. So therefore, the only actual named characters that we really get a focus on are Grandad, the deceased Gramps, Temmie, the Baker, and then of course the kids who are helping set up the parade. So that does in some ways, and I’m sure very unintentionally, because the point of these when you’re, you know, adding a bunch of different Pride flags, you’re trying to be inclusive, you’re trying to have as many communities as possible, but that also means, yes, you have a couple of Aromantic flags on the page and you have an Asexual flag on the page, but now you do not have any named characters that are even alluded to having those identities. As opposed to the first book, there aren’t any named characters at all that are main focus points or main characters. It’s just, “Here’s what a pride parade looks like and look at all the flags, wow.”

Royce: And so in that instance, the concept of a background character doesn’t really exist.

Courtney: Yes.

Royce: Because there aren’t any forefront characters.

Courtney: Yes. Although there is, you know, there’s a little bit of a give and a little bit of a take. So I can’t say that it’s inherently a bad negative thing because this is a more fleshed out story for a slightly older child with a slightly longer attention span. So they are two slightly different demographics. But this book also just in the background has more diverse diversity of flags and in some ways people depicted than the first book. And I’ll point out the good and the bad of that. So I brushed over the flags that we saw in the first book. In this one right on front and back cover, we’ve got like three Intersex-inclusive Pride Progress flags– Which like, by the way, where are they all getting these? I tried really hard to find a full size Intersex-inclusive Progress flag. I tried really hard actually.

Courtney: Not that I’m gonna give the children’s book guff for being unrealistic, but there are not this many actually printed, manufactured, purchasable, Intersex-inclusive Progress flags. If they were this readily available, I would have one now, and I literally tried. So we have several Progress flags, both Intersex-inclusive and not. We’ve got right from the cover a Bi flag, a Lesbian flag, a Trans flag, a couple of them, but also a Pan flag, which I don’t recall seeing in the first book. And mind you, like every even queer adult who might be flipping through this or buying it for someone or reading it for a kid is going to have different frames of references in terms of what these flags mean. Me just flipping through here, I think I’m going to be a little better than average at identifying what the flags are. More so than you for sure. You’d recognize some of the more common ones.

Royce: Oh yeah, flag design is one of those things. It goes, I guess in this case in the eyeballs and straight out. I was about to say in one ear and out the other. [Courtney laughs] There are some types of information that I can stare at and I can just feel myself not committing to memory, and flags are one of those. And the color blindness doesn’t help

Courtney: No, the color blindness doesn’t help. And you have ranted before, as you should, some of the flags that are just really difficult to look at for you.

Royce: Yeah, I mean some colors vibrate and I think that I feel that more viscerally than some people do.

Courtney: So it doesn’t matter how much screen time these flags have in the book, it’s gonna go in one ear and out the other. [chuckles] So going back to these flags, I’m gonna point out not only flags, but really realistic signs that feel very much like, yes, this is a realistic depiction of Pride. So I do see a Non-Binary flag. We have some No Hate signs, like the No H-8, which I have absolutely seen. We do have a few people dressed in leather, which, like, yeah, you are gonna see that if you go to a Pride. And that is something that a lot of people have raised a moral panic concern about. But look at it here. Very innocuous and innocent in the context of a children’s book. There are ways to present these ideas. I mentioned the political signs. We have Repeal Paragraph 175, Happy Christopher Street Day. We’ve got drag performers specifically depicted and named as being drag. Let’s see, I’ve already mentioned Pan. We’ve also got a Polyamorous flag, Rainbow flags, more Lesbian, more Progress flags.

Courtney: We’ve got someone with a tattoo that I know a lot of people who have a lot of Trans and/or Non-Binary friends who have some variation of this tattoo that’s like a mixture of, like, the male and female symbols done in a very artistic way. And that’s just like, I see that on the arm of someone in this, and it’s like, yeah, I’ve got friends with tattoos like that. Absolutely. We do have disabled people depicted. We have someone walking with a cane. We have someone who is a wheelchair user. My one little gripe is that those people are not depicted with Pride flags. They are just out on the street as this Pride is getting prepared. So to me that is different and slightly less obvious and impactful as the first book where we have a disabled aromantic character. Because the wheelchair user is holding an Aromantic flag.

Courtney: There’s an obvious explanation for that, which is that person is aromantic, whereas these disabled characters just seem to be existing in the background as– I mean, a lot of children’s book illustrators will try to do that, just a diversity of people in the background. Which is a good thing and they should, but it’s not quite the same as being like, “Hey, we’ve got a disabled ace character, we’ve got a disabled aro character.” So this is the page where we have the Aromantic flag, some Pan and Bi flags, Rainbow flags, Non-Binary flag. One thing I did actually have to look up, because if this was purple, I thought it was going to be a Grey-ace flag, like with the purple, gray, white. But it is not purple, it is very much light blue. And I was like, what is that flag? I’ve seen some flags with those colors before that I could kind of identify, but not exactly in that arrangement.

Courtney: And when I looked it up, I found a Tumblr post from 2016 on the Pride Color schemes, entitled Gray Analterous: Gray-A, being between a- and allo- (asexual/aromantic etc. and allosexual/alloromantic etc.) feeling attraction rarely, vaguely, or weakly. And there are three versions of this flag all using some degree of blue, gray, white, and maybe a black. And the second one is the flag I’m looking at in this children’s book. So it’s blue, gray, white, gray, blue. This one says: “Designed by me,” so I guess whoever runs this Tumblr blog. This is a very small post. It has four reblogs and 15 likes. So that one is like not a widely adopted flag, which I would love to talk to the illustrator of this book and just ask, what Pride flag did you think you were drawing? And why did you include that one?

Courtney: Because sad as it may be to say, I would assume that they didn’t pick this one flag amongst three options on an obscure Tumblr post from 2016 and say, “That’s the one I like, I’m gonna draw that one.” Unless for some reason they had some sort of personal connection to this flag, and maybe this is the obscure flag of their choice, they’re like, “Well, you know, screw it, I’m gonna put this in a page, you can’t stop me.” In which case more power to you. But I’ve got a sneaking suspicion that there was probably a more common flag that they were thinking of and maybe just colored it incorrectly or something. Because if these stripes were purple instead of blue, it would be the Gray-asexual flag, which I still would consider to be an obscure flag compared to the Ace and Aro flags themselves. And even the Demi flags, I would say, are more common than the ones I’ve seen in the Gray spectrum.

Courtney: And certainly in terms of– Like, I already had the overly picky note about the Intersex flag– Intersex inclusive flag being so prominent in these books when you really can’t find and buy them that easily. I’m gonna say the same is true for these much more obscure flags that are created and proposed on Tumblr and not necessarily widely adopted by a huge in-person community of people who are going to these Pride parades. So I don’t know what this flag was originally meant to be. Maybe there’s something I’m not even privy to. But there’s no doubt that it’s obscure when you google the colors and Pride flag and you can kind of only find one source for it. And it’s a really old social media post. But regardless of what the intention was, or if it landed the way they intended or not, I can at least tell that they’re trying to pull in some of the lesser known flags.

Courtney: Like we also weren’t getting Polyamory flags in the first book, or even the Pansexual flag for that matter. Some more signs that we have are things like ‘queer, disabled, fabulous’, ‘LGB with the T’, ‘Break the cistem’, the C-I-S-T-E-M. Oh wait, I didn’t even see this the first time I flipped through, but now I’m looking at it again, I do have a Demisexual flag here. That was actually something I was gonna say because I have fully seen more physical demisexual and even demiromantic flags at Pride than I have seen of this blue, gray and white one that may or may not be alluding to a lesser known A-spec flag. So two children’s books, different levels of complexity, different quantities of flags. And I’m sure, especially considering of these six children’s books I found, three of them were very Pride flag heavy. I’m sure there are other children’s books out there that have imagery like this and representation like this.

Courtney: So this is not trying to be an exhaustive “These are the only books for kids with ace and aro representation to them.” Because this is more about just like, what is mainstream enough that you can walk into a bookstore and potentially find this? And it does surprise me that in our situation, we have more books with Aromantic flags than Asexual ones. That is interesting to me. The second book does have Asexual and Aromantic flags, and I did find that Demi flag, so that gives a little bit of at least background nod toward the nuances of the spectrum. And Pride Flags are, you know, a bit of a double-edged sword when it comes to representation, because on paper, literally on paper in the children’s book, you can throw a lot of them at the wall and just be like, “Look at all these flags in the background. Look at all these people we’re showing and including.”

Courtney: But I think that only works and is meaningful if the Pride flags are the method of representation. Like this first book especially, Under One Rainbow, the Pride flags are the diversity. They are the representation. And as well as the people who are holding them, the identities themselves are not named, so that is what it is. Now, if we had like a TV show with a whole cast, like an ensemble cast of fleshed out queer characters, and none of them were ace or aro, but we saw one person in the background, like with an Asexual Pride flag button or something, I wouldn’t be like, “Wow, look at the representation!” Because that is not the medium, that is not the intended method of showing representation. Because when it’s done that way, I think just including a little Pride flag in the background is kind of cheap. But that’s why the medium and the demographic really matters, I think.

Courtney: I think it is wonderful that there are children’s books that have so many Pride flags available for the kids that that would be really helpful to or the kids who have family members that this is a really helpful method of introducing these ideas to them. Heck, even if they don’t know what it means, if a random kid who, like, lives on our street and walks by our house during Pride Month sees this flag on the back cover of a picture book, they’d be like, “I’ve seen that before!” So that, I think, is all we have time for today. Definitely let us know if you come across any other children’s picture books that depict Ace and/or Aro Pride flags, because there was still, mind you, a third Pride flag based book that did not have either that I picked up. So there are absolutely some of those out there, too. Ideally, we’ll have both, but I’d at least like to see one or the other in more books. If this is a common theme for Pride themed children’s books.

Courtney: But that is going to bring us to today’s featured MarketplACE vendor: Ceres Artwork, an asexual artist selling manga inspired artwork. You can commission this artist on Ko-fi. Links as always are going to be in the show notes on our website as well as the description box on YouTube. The artist is based in Brazil and focused on characters and fashion design with a gothic and dark inclination. And I know we have several of you in the audience with similar inclinations. And even if you are not currently in the market for commissioned artwork, you can always just send them a tip directly on Ko-fi. It is always appreciated because we love supporting our awesome community of ace artists. And it is the holiday season! So maybe a few of you out there are feeling generous. As always, thank you all so much for being here and we will talk to you all next time.