The Case for More Pride Emojis (or, Why the Elephant is an Ace Icon)

Transcript

Courtney: Hello everyone and welcome back. My name is Courtney. I’m here with my spouse Royce. Together we are The Ace Couple and we are wishing you a happy Pride Month. Today’s episode is a topic I have had in the back of my head to talk about for literally years at this point. But it was prompted recently once again by a text message that my mother sent me on June 1st. It reads, “Happy Pride Month!!” Three rainbow flag emojis. Parentheses. No ace flag emoji. With a sad emoticon frowny face.

Courtney: And although the fact that there is no ace flag emoji seems to be news to my wonderful ally of a mother, I happen to know a thing or two about why that is, so let’s talk about the case for why we should have more pride flag emojis, the history of attempts to get more pride flag emojis, and most importantly, why the elephant is a subtle yet powerfully important symbol of the ace community’s resilience in the face of adversity.

Courtney: To start off, however, we are unfortunately talking about technology, which is very outside of my realm of experience, so— luckily, my spouse, Royce, is a certified computer person, and I believe you’re going to explain, uh, to the luddites like me exactly what Unicode is.

Royce: Well, I don’t know that I have a certificate unless that’s what a college degree is equivalent to now. But—

Courtney: Degreed and credentialed computer person.

Royce: Unicode, or the Unicode Standard, is just an encoding standard. Computers work with numbers. We see letterforms or pictographs or whatever it is you want to call the written visualization of whatever languages you’re looking at. Unicode was created because when you don’t have a standard, people just do whatever they want. And when broad computer systems were created, when the internet was coming up, it became readily apparent that just letting everyone do whatever they want wasn’t going to work. And so we needed a way to render all written languages in a standard format.

Courtney: Yeah, ’cause I for sure remember the wild west days of texting. It was not uncommon that you would just get, like, a string of rectangles, ’cause whatever someone was trying to send you just didn’t translate on your phone.

Royce: A bunch of tofu, yeah.

Courtney: A bunch of tofu! I forgot that’s what they called it.

Royce: Yeah, basic systems for a long time, at least in America, used ASCII, and that is limited to the standard characters you see on your keyboard, basically, and some control characters. And so anything that you do not have supported would show as an unknown character, which is sometimes referred to as tofu.

Courtney: Tofu! I mean, I love me some tofu.

Royce: But anyway, the Unicode Standard is managed by a nonprofit out of California known as the Unicode Consortium. They do a lot of things in planning and approving these new standards, but what— the thing that they get in the news for often enough is what new emojis are being added this year.

Courtney: Yes.

Royce: Which, there are still companies or platforms that will have their own additional images that they use. The way that Unicode is constructed, there are basically sections of the full spectrum of numbers that it supports that are intentionally left blank so that systems can put their own characters in there. And, like, usually that works really well.

Royce: Um, there was a point in time a few jobs ago where we were using an, an icon font for a website where we were using a certain section of encoding to do site-specific images for our website instead of needing to, like, package a bunch of individual icons as images or, or whatever to use appropriately. And on a couple of odd devices here and there, we found that like, phone providers who had their own operating systems were also trying to use that exact same space. And so occasionally something wouldn’t work right and someone would pull up the application on a test phone and it’d be all like sports equipment where all of our icons were supposed to be.

Courtney: Oh no!

Royce: Like, this is supposed to be like a warning sign or a right arrow and it’d be like a soccer ball or— or a pair of cleats or something.

Courtney: That’s not the same thing!

Royce: But anyway, the reason why this is done is to try to standardize what is becoming a very common part of human language, because if you don’t do that, if, if everyone has their own values for different characters, then the emojis— like, different emojis are going to show on different devices, which completely changes the meaning. Yes, of what you’re looking at.

Courtney: Yeah, the point is, and I mean, we’ll get into the accessibility critique of using an excessive number of emojis as part of this conversation as well. But for the most part, if someone’s using an emoji, they are using it to communicate something. It’s not just pretty pictures. If it’s a face, that face is making a facial expression. There is a reason for it. If you need an arrow, you definitely don’t want to be seeing a soccer ball because that doesn’t help at all. And obviously there are various subcultural groups that can have their own images. I mean, I’m thinking like Discord, various Discord servers certainly have their own emojis. But if you try to like copy and paste off of there onto Twitter or Facebook or any of the mainstream social media platforms that is open and available to the public, or if you try to text it to someone, that’s not going to translate.

Courtney: So as of now, in terms of pride flags, the only pride flags recognized in Unicode are the original rainbow flag and the trans flag. But a lot of people in different segments of the queer community found that, that wasn’t quite enough, especially if they were trying to use social media as a means of Connecting with one another. Because what’s another use of emojis that has become increasingly more common over the years? Using it as a visual shorthand to convey various things about your identity in bios. Like Twitter bio, Facebook bio. You’re very character limited in those things, so if you want to have a very short, here’s who I am, here’s what this means, it’s very common for someone to put a rainbow flag if they are gay, a trans flag if they are trans, maybe one or both if they’re just allies and trying to visually show people that they are supportive of this community.

Courtney: And as with all resilient identity groups, people find creative ways to get around this, of course. That doesn’t mean it is without its shortcomings or that it is a perfect solution, but humans are gonna find ways to connect with one another, even virtually, even on social media. And so a very common fix for this that I identified years ago as someone who— let’s see, what year did I finally join Twitter? I don’t even wanna remember at this point. I would start to see, oh, this person in their bios is using the ace flag colors. But in hearts, so it would be like a black heart, a white heart, a purple heart. Uh-oh, we didn’t have a gray heart. So what did people start to do?

Courtney: In defiance of Unicode, people started using an elephant for the gray stripe in the ace pride flag. So what you started seeing was in bios or just in tweets to one another or in various places, you’d see black heart emoji, elephant emoji, white heart emoji, purple heart emoji. And it got to a point where in these groups of people who were doing this, some people did just start doing an elephant for shorthand. And I would see some, some more thoughtful and nuanced and some just silly and flippant, uh, posts about how like, yeah, I’m embracing the elephant. ’Look at this silly little guy. We love him. Thank you for doing the heavy lifting, ‘cause we not only don’t have our pride flag here, but we literally don’t even have enough colored hearts to make our flag.’ And for how small of a blip this was in ace history, I don’t necessarily expect the elephant to be an enduring symbol within the community. But I almost wanna propose that it becomes one. I like it.

Courtney: I have known— I mean, of course, you know, an elephant never forgets, good memory, uh, wisdom. So many cultures have very complex and nuanced metaphors for what an elephant represents, but one that I really like in this particular situation is that elephants are a symbol of removing obstacles. Big, large, powerful, gentle creature. The ability to literally move anything it needs to out of its path. And that is what this little elephant emoji is doing for our community when Unicode refuses to give us an ace pride flag. We send in the elephants.

Courtney: And I like the elephant— this, this is the one I saw most widely adopted. There were a few other people who tried to suggest some things. I don’t remember— how many trains does Unicode have? I feel like people were making a point about how this is how many different train emojis we have and we don’t have an ace pride flag.

Royce: Uh, I think I’m seeing 12.

Courtney: 12 trains. So I, I know some people were saying whether it’s the asexual flag or the aromantic flag or, you know, any of the others that don’t have flags— the bi flag does not have an emoji, lesbian flag, non-binary, uh, none of these do. I know some people were in defiance just using a train as like a place marker for any time they didn’t have the appropriate emoji to use. But I will put this link in the show notes on our website or the description box if you’re listening on YouTube, if you want to pop over and follow along with me. But there is a website called moreprideemojis.com.

Courtney: And on this website, they do specifically note that there are 29— 29— different clock emojis. 29 clocks and 2 pride flags. So let me give you one example that during our brief stint on Twitter I was quite vocal about. There are severe shortcomings to using the colored hearts for flags. Even if I say, you know what, I’m gonna play along, I love this elephant, I’m going to adopt and claim it, there are other identity markers that actually made for not only confusion with knowing who you’re interacting with, but in some cases downright hostility. Example being: purple heart emoji, white heart emoji, green heart emoji.

Courtney: Just for your own personal little thought experiment, what is the first thing you think of when you see those three hearts together? What I think it should be is genderqueer. Those are the colors of the genderqueer pride flag. However, especially on Twitter during the period of time we were on Twitter, there were two other things it could mean that were in, you know, direct opposition to one another. Since we do not have an ace flag or an aro flag, there were a good number of Aroaces that I knew who use these three colors to try to merge the two flags, y’know, the purple from the ace flag, the green from the aro flag. Both flags have white. Again, we don’t have, y’know, a gray heart to incorporate. So there were some people who used it to blend aro and ace identities.

Courtney: This was of course not universal. There is an Aroace flag that uses blues and yellows. Some people really love it. I know a good number of people who have never adopted that flag and prefer to use ace aro. Side by side, um, or merged into one another. So there were people in our direct community who were using these hearts to mean aceness and aro-ness. And even if it was an ace or aro, genderqueer people, absolutely, you’re part of the broader queer family for sure. But that became very dangerous very quickly because of the TERFs.

Courtney: Terfs started using these exact three heart emojis as their dog whistle because they were saying, we are reclaiming these colors because these were suffragette colors. And indeed, if you do search for suffragette colors, you will often see purple, white, and green ribbons. This was more commonly associated with a British suffragette group, which also might clue you in as to why that particular group of TERFs were using these colors.

Courtney: So, yeah, imagine my surprise on Twitter when, based on who we follow and who were following us, my first assumption when I saw those was, this is an Aroace person. Secondary assumption: maybe it is a genderqueer person who is allo. And all of a sudden, people with these three hearts in their bios were coming in saying the most vile, vicious, transphobic, acephobic, just horrendously hateful things to us and our followers. I was deeply confused about what was going on. So I had to do a little digging to find out exactly what was going on, and that is what that was. And at the time we were pointing this out to people, there were plenty of Aroaces, there were plenty of genderqueer folks who had fortunately at that point not been harassed by these TERF groups using these quote suffragette colors.

Courtney: Uh, so it was really unfortunate to sort of be the bearer of bad news to tell people like, if you use these colors that have meaningful identity importance to you, we now need to actually do our research on who are you, what are you saying, what does your profile look like, are you a member of our community, or are you the people who are attacking us in our community. It created a deeply hostile environment, and unfortunately, like, that wasn’t even the only official suffragette color. There were different suffragette movements regionally. We live in Kansas, for instance, and the Kansas suffragettes used yellow because we’re all about sunflowers over here. I know I’ve seen, uh, American suffragette flags that use like purple, gold, and white instead of the green, and there would still be a pitfall to using those colors if you’re trying to identify with the suffragettes, uh, because now I’m wondering, are you a suffragette-branded TERF, or are you a fan of the Minnesota Vikings? You know, there are plenty of sports teams that have various colors too, that I’m sure— I’ve never been on sports Twitter, but I’m sure people use different colored emojis to represent their sports.

Courtney: So the wonderful folks at More Pride Emojis very clearly identified an issue and tried to— spur on a movement of not only getting more discussion around the need for more pride emojis, to get a hashtag to drive engagement, but also to actually apply to Unicode for more pride emojis, to start a petition to get more people to sign on to tell them the necessity of this. So in 2020, these folks did make formal proposals for an ace flag and a bi flag. Both of these proposals were unfortunately rejected. But these folks didn’t give up. They had every intention of continuing this conversation, getting more people on board, trying to submit a new proposal.

Courtney: And so what did Unicode do in response to this? Well, in 2022, they outright stated no more flag emojis of any kind. We are no longer even accepting proposals for new flags. Done. Over with. They posted on their blog, which again, I will link this, uh, side by side with more pride emojis. In a post entitled “The Past and Future of Flag Emoji” with the devastating subtitle “Emoji Flags Are Dead, Long Live Emoji Flags.” And what they ended up doing was lumping in country flags and pride flags into the same category of flags. And their main argument for no longer accepting proposals for flags is because of the amount of work that goes into making especially country flags, and the fact that— a majority of the country flags that they have are some of their least used emojis. Period.

Courtney: And they identified as this is a problem. They say today the largest emoji category is flags. There are over 200 flags, but there are over 5,000 geographically recognized regions that are also, quote, “valid.” And they go on to explain what they mean by “valid.” Unicode holds that they are not the arbiters of what a valid country is, what a valid region is. They don’t want to litigate that. They don’t want to be the one to decide. So they do talk a little bit about their methodology for which groups they defer to. You can read up about that on your own if you would like. Links in the usual places.

Courtney: And while it does make sense that in terms of country flags, I would think the natural trend would be countries that are more heavily populated are going to have that flag used more often, some countries just don’t have that many people. That does not mean they don’t deserve to have a flag, but it seems really obvious to me why there are some country flags that are really low on use compared to other emojis. It seems to me like this is not the same concern for queer pride flags. Although they say, you know, how are flag emoji used? Flags are very specific in what they mean, and they don’t represent concepts used multiple times a day or even multiple times a year.

Royce: Country flags, no.

Courtney: And they even mention the heavy use of hearts in bios, and they even say, yeah, we know you’re gonna be disappointed in this. After all, flags often serve as a rallying cry to be seen, heard, recognized, and understood. So they’re like, what are we doing about it? They’re like, well, we see people do this, and they, they show three examples of using hearts to be encompassing of flag colors. They show bisexuality, a pink sparkly heart, a blue heart, and a purple heart, and they’re like, this means bisexual— sexuality. Then they show a blue and a yellow or a gold heart, I suppose, that says “Go Mets.” Then they have a red heart, a black heart, and a green heart, and they say this means pan-Africanism.

Courtney: They say the more emoji can operate as building blocks, the more versatile, fluid, and useful they become. Rather than relying on Unicode to add new emoji for every concept under the sun, the citizens of the world have proven to be infinitely creative and fluid, often using existing emoji like the colored hearts. And they have an example that says, “Hi, I’m bi!” Pink heart, blue heart, purple heart. So they know people are doing this. And they go on to say that hearts are some of the most used emojis. And yet they don’t equate that— maybe it’s because so many people are using these hearts as a stand-in for the thing they actually want to visually identify.

Courtney: So they said, “No, you don’t get your queer pride flags. You’re not going to get your genderfluid pride flag. You’re not gonna get your bisexual pride flag. What we’re gonna do is give you more hearts. We’re gonna give you the gray heart at last.” At this point, I don’t want your damn gray heart. I’ll stick to my elephant. Thank you. I don’t want your consolation gray heart Unicode.

Courtney: But in addition to the gray heart, they’re also including a light blue heart and a pink heart. So they even have a Q&A at the end of this that says, why don’t we have asexual, bisexual, pansexual, and non-binary pride flags? But then they lump it in with, well, if these have flags, surely there’s room for the Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander flags. And this is their entire response to this question for “why don’t we have these flags?” They say, before diving into the facts of why these flags are not part of the Universal Character Set, we want to first take a moment to consider what people mean when they ask these questions and what Unicode means when they decline these flag proposals. Because this question is not one we take lightly. In the course of world history, groups have used flags as a rallying cry to be seen, heard, recognized, and understood. In the Unicode Consortium’s mission to digitize the world’s languages, improve communication online, and achieve meaningful interoperability between platforms, the requests for flags have become a lightning rod for these rallying cries. When people ask for a new flag emoji, we recognize that the underlying request is about more than simply a new emoji. And when we say we aren’t adding more flags, we are only saying changing the Unicode standard is not an effective mechanism for this recognition.

Royce: So to go back to our earlier comparison, what they’re saying is they feel it is more important for you to combine some characters on a screen that are read as black heart, gray heart, white heart, purple heart, rather than having a single character that says asexuality or asexual flag. That’s too big of a step. But you can individually specify train, metro, light rail, train station, tram, tram car, steam locomotive, railway car, mountain railway, monorail, high-speed train, high-speed train with a bullet nose. That is more important for our day-to-day communication.

Courtney: Uh-huh. Which, that is really the heart of the issue here, because I would also like to, uh, reintroduce here the readability on screen readers too. Like, that is literally how if someone were reading a tweet on a screen reader, it would not necessarily read as, “this is the ace pride flag,” because they will literally be hearing black heart, gray heart, white heart, purple heart.

Royce: And what they’re saying from a translation standpoint, that we don’t want to do— we don’t think it is our job to do this labor, so combining Unicode characters into better meanings is, you know, what people are going to do and what people are encouraged to do. What they’re basically saying is that every platform that renders Unicode characters now has a linguistic obligation to basically take these character sets and combine them into something with a greater meaning to show to screen readers, which kind of sounds like we’re no longer standardizing language.

Courtney: Well, that’s the thing. When they say our goal is to digitize the world’s languages— even with a queer subgroup that is as arguably small as asexuality is, asexuality as an identity does transcend countries. The number of asexual people in this world are far greater than the population of many countries. And if they’re trying to enshrine in images something that has a universal meaning, something like a pride flag is truly one of the most obvious things I can think of. If I see a profile of someone who is communicating in a language that I don’t speak, but I see an asexual pride flag there, I know exactly what that means. But in the cases of the genderqueer flag and the TERFs trying to claim they’re using these colors because it was suffragette colors or Aroace people who have neither of their two flags and are trying to find a way to combine both of them. Now that’s muddying the waters for shorthand communication even amongst people who are speaking the same language.

Courtney: In my bubble on Twitter here, I— surely all of the TERFs who are primarily UK-based were all speaking English. So were most of the Aroaces or the genderqueer folks using those same colors, but I see those colors now in those heart arrangements, and my blood pressure spikes a little bit because now I don’t know who I’m talking to. Is this literally a friend or an enemy? It could be either one. And I would like to think that if I do see, you know, black, gray, white, purple hearts in that order, of course my first association is definitely going to be asexual pride flag. This is what I know these colors to mean. Surely if I see someone using an elephant instead of a gray heart, since they added it, I’ll not only know that they were ace, but they were around for these conversations about more pride emojis.

Courtney: But is there a possibility that in another region, in another country, in another niche community that I am not familiar with, that these colors could have a different meaning? Of course that’s a possibility. I have seen that happen with other pride flags. Which does also seem to me— because another argument that they make specifically about pride flags, because for as much as their argument is, look at all these flags that just aren’t getting used very much, the rainbow flag is one of the most popular emojis used in Twitter bios. And it is even more popular than the American flag. This is directly from a paper which Unicode has itself cited called “Emoji and Self-Identity in Twitter Bios.” So that argument really doesn’t hold up in this situation.

Courtney: But they also make a statement, uh, which I also quite reject. Because it does seem to me— I don’t know who are on this committee, who are on the board of this nonprofit. I don’t know if there are any queer people in the room when these decisions are being made, or what their other backgrounds might be. But they say, well, pride flags change too much. They’re like, by, by the time we add a pride flag, they’re just gonna go and redesign another one multiple times. So we’re not gonna do that over and over again, which seems untrue to begin with because the rainbow flag that they added— yes, it was designed in 1979. Yes, in more recent years, more and more people have adopted the progress flag, which includes black, brown, blue, and pink stripes. But that doesn’t mean that the rainbow flag has gone away or that that flag itself was redesigned.

Courtney: And in fact, at the very least, with a rainbow flag and a trans flag, if someone wanted to provide some visual language to represent a lot of things that the progress flag is intended to do, you could probably do the pride flag and trans flag side by side. And that at the very least is still only two emojis. To try to get the same idea across.

Royce: Also, some country in the world changes their flag about every year on average.

Courtney: Yes, country flags change a lot, but what is their answer to that? They outsource the appearance of flag emojis. They even say their own word, Unicode does not specify the appearance of flag emoji. It is the responsibility of font designers to update their fonts as politics change. That was their answer to country flags that change. So why then could they not do exactly the same thing with international pride organizations?

Royce: I see what you’re saying. The thing that you’re reading, where does it say that they outsource? Because at the end of the day, usually technology platform companies are responsible for rendering their own icons. So that would be, you know, Apple, Microsoft, Google, your major phone developers. Sites might use specific emojis if they want to, to like override the system default.

Courtney: Well, yeah, I suppose they don’t have— you’re, you’re right, you’re right there. They don’t have like committees they’re going to, to consult on country flags, but it does say font designers. Yeah, so whoever these font designers are.

Royce: So the Unicode standard just says this code point equals this icon, and that’s it. It’s, it’s the name and the standard, um, identifier.

Courtney: That does still say to me that the font designers could gain the same type of consultation as needed, but it seems like they’re saying the way this looks isn’t our problem, don’t blame us if something’s wrong, but because we think pride flags change too much, we’re not gonna add any. It’s a weird argument. And it feels very, um— even though the flags in question that were petitioned that they’re specifically citing, right, in their own FAQ, they cite the asexual pride flag, they cite the bisexual pride flag. It doesn’t seem like there is a large overwhelming conversation directly with Unicode about getting, like, the very —nich, like, micro-label pride flags, even though some of them are getting more and more visual recognition, especially in queer spaces.

Courtney: I can see their desire to start with the most widely recognized ones. But the argument of “oh, the flag’s just gonna change, it’s just gonna get redesigned,” feels very— we don’t feel like these flags are legitimate. We don’t feel— like, they aren’t going so far as to say we don’t think these communities are legitimate, but they’re like, we don’t think these flags are legitimate, which I would hope with something like the asexual pride flag, at the time it was petitioned to Unicode, it had a decade-long history. Now we have over 15 years history with the asexual pride flag, and it is an internationally recognized symbol that is gaining more and more recognition. We have now seen the ace pride flag on highly acclaimed television shows. We have seen them in pride marches.

Royce: Did you say there was one hanging in the Stonewall Inn?

Courtney: Yes, like, when I was at the Stonewall Inn just a little over a year ago in Stonewall, there was an asexual pride flag in there. Yes, there was. That was such a weird weekend for me because I remember getting a particular piece of hate mail in our inbox. Uh, someone who was saying something about, you know, “Aces don’t even belong at Pride. Aces aren’t part of the queer community.” And I was literally at Stonewall, and not only did they have the ace flag on the wall, they had a little blurb about the history of the ace pride flag. So I’m like literally at Stonewall being like, “yep, well—” our flag is right here, right now.

Courtney: Someone at the Stonewall National Monument Visitor Center right next door, when I went the next day, even recognized me and started talking about ace-related things. And listen, having a flag is never going to be the end-all be-all of a shared community experience. It’s never going to mean that we universally have the— rights and respect that we deserve. But from a solidarity standpoint, from an international, cross-cultural, multilingual attempt to have some kind of shared communication around this identity, a recognizable identity flag is very important to a lot of people. Now, More Pride Emojis actually wrote an article in response to Unicode shutting down any and all opportunities for more flags. And they cite that around 1% of the world population is ace.

Courtney: A lot of people do think that perhaps that is lower than it ought to be. That is an often cited number. Although certain studies have— I’ve seen it go 1 to 4%. There’s always a little wiggle room there, but even at a 1% assumption, they cite “a common estimate of the prevalence of asexual people would indicate that there are at least 79 million aces in the world.” That’s more than the population of the UK and France, and just shy of the population of Germany. All of which have country flags that see above median use.

Courtney: Further evidence, the second most popular emoji flag after the US flag is the rainbow flag. The rainbow flag is also one of the few flags to gain usage between 2019 and 2021, according to Unicode’s own statistics. So one can only hope that someday, somehow Unicode will reverse course on this decision. I think all of their concerns are— either completely unfounded or easily assuaged with the right implementation policies. I think at a time where, as we spoke to recently, ace people in the US feel less acceptance today than we did last year, when we are living under a fascist government who is actively stripping away the rights of the broader queer community.

Courtney: And with an internet culture that is overwhelmingly anglophone, where English speakers have tremendous reach and privilege to talk about these communities, these experiences, where we need more representation from aces in all countries, aces who speak all languages, who have a variety of intersectional experiences that don’t get the same reach that English-speaking aces in the US get, that the UK get, adding the ace pride flag to Unicode isn’t going to solve these issues. No. There’s a lot of additional work that needs to be done. But if the Unicode Consortium’s mission is truly, as they say, to digitize the world’s languages and improve communication online, where unfortunately a vast majority of the ace community— is relegated to these online spaces, then truly giving us more pride flags is such an obvious positive. And truly the least they can do.

Courtney: But until then, or maybe thereafter, I will still forever see the elephant emoji as a beautiful little petty symbol —of ace pride and resilience. And with that, and with all of our talk of flags, today’s featured marketplace vendor is one that perhaps you have heard of already. We are giving a shout-out to Rainy Day Paperback Exchange. Now I have mentioned before that this ace-owned bookstore is where I have gone to purchase a variety of ace-related books. Now, I have to give them another shout-out because silly me did not think to look in their shop inventory when I was lamenting about how difficult it was for me to find the intersex-inclusive progress flag.

Courtney: I don’t know what episode I was talking about this on, but I have seen so many of these flags hung up at local businesses local bookstores, local queer spaces, miscellaneous gift shops, and every time I see one hanging on the wall, I ask, “do you sell those?” And they always tell me no. They only have the standard progress flag with the white triangle instead of the yellow one with the purple circle. And I always ask, “Where did you get it?” And they say, “Well, I think we ordered it online.” And just could not for the life of me find one. And so it is Rainy Day Paperback Exchange to the rescue. They not only have a large intersex-inclusive progress flag that I have recently ordered, but they have a variety of other flags. They have small ones that you can, you know, hold in a single hand, or they have the full-size ones. You can get an asexual flag, you can get a bisexual flag, you can get a non-binary flag, you can get all the flags here that you cannot get in your emoji bank.

Courtney: So I’m delighted to have finally found a large intersex inclusive flag, especially from a bookstore owned by a member of our community. They are based in Bethel, Connecticut, so if anyone is anywhere near there, please drop in, tell them hello, support them. If this Pride Month, you just need yourself a new flag, and don’t necessarily have a local source, go on and order that as well. They have a lot of options. And they say here that their money goes towards supporting Bethel, Connecticut Pride, who run the LGBTQ events in the surrounding areas. So all for a very good cause. It also looks like they have just really great events. They have a queer book club the third weekend of every month. They have a time to pop in in person, but they also have online chats via Discord. And they even have a plant swap the second Saturday of each month.

Courtney: I so wish we had a business like this here where we live. I love a good plant swap. I’ve actually been, uh, working with some of my local friends who do a lot of direct action work in and around the metro area. And one component of this new project we’ve recently started is a totally free swap, skill share, uh, plant propagation. It is a beautiful thing. Two things that can really bring a community together. I’ll say on a large scale, on an international, on an online kind of a scale, we’ll say pride flags. In a personal, local, intimate community situation, it’s gardening. It’s plants. So, as always, links to find Rainy Day Paperback Exchange are gonna be in the show notes on our website, in the description box if you’re listening on YouTube, And if you are popping in to order your own pride flag, maybe check out their pride books as well. If you just search ‘ace’ or ‘asexual,’ you’ll see a variety of books that they stock. So, as always, thank you all so much for being here, and we will talk to you all next time.