Today is the start of #LGBTHistoryMonth in the UK so I am going to try to tweet a bit of history each day!

Today I want to talk about the ace community flags and their origins. (1/8)

The colours of the asexual flag are:
- black (for asexuality)
- grey (for grey-asexuality and demisexuality)
- white (allosexual partners and allies)
- purple (for community)

It was designed in the summer of 2010 by a user on Asexuality Visibility Education Network (AVEN) (2/8)

Before the flag existed, some aces would use the AVEN triangle or a half-filled heart. However:
- not all aces were associated with AVEN
- aromantic aces did not want to use the half-filled heart as it was for romantic aces (3/8)

The colours may have been chosen by the community before 2010.

Multiple designs were suggested including things like card symbols (cards are a symbol of the community) and the final design was chosen through polls on the AVEN forum. (4/8)

The gray-asexual flag was proposed in 2013 when Milith Risignuolo uploaded a design to Wikipedia under the title "Grey-A flag proposal". It was originally deleted, but then was shared by other people, see their page for more info: http://web.archive.org/web/20180210192310/https://avia-viridis.neocities.org/flags.html (5/8)

No one seems to know the origins of the demisexual flag. Someone on AVEN forums suggested that the triangle could mean a starting point (an analogy for having an emotional bond before they can experience sexual attraction to someone) (6/8)

There have been variations of the flag such as the biromantic asexual and panromantic asexual flags.

Other symbols of the community include: cake, dragons and playing cards. (7/8)

What is the flag and symbols of your community? Do you know the origins? Please share them below! (8/8)

The half filled heart didn't show up on one of the tweets so here it is again: (ignore the squares in the background)