#polyamous flag

[demon-from-your-dreams]

Finished a new pride skull, this time the new polyamous flag and Tuatara skull.

A Tuatara is a reptile native to New Zealand, looking similar to a lizard despite being the only living relative of a distinct lineage.

They are listed as least concern according to the IUCN.

Polyamory is the practice of having, or desiring multiple romantic and/or sexual parteners, at the same time, with consent of all involved individuals.

[polyamorousmood]

Okay, apparently some people don't know this and that's not gonna do on my blog. So as we used to say on this hellsite,

sit down and shut up because I'm about to learn you a thing

This:

is the ORIGINAL polyamory pride flag. Jim Evans created it in 1995 in fucking MS Paint. Not using hearts was an intentional choice to: avoid stepping on the leather pride flag's toes, allow people to use it without immediately outing themselves to those not in the know, and be easily input into MS Paint. The infinity heart symbol did not exist at the time and certainly wasn't available in MS motherfucking Paint. The color symbolism is blue for honesty, red for love, black⚫ in solidarity for those that cannot be out to the world at large, and gold for the high value of each relationship. sources (x, x)

There are valid complaints that people want a pride flag that does advertise what they are, and that this design is hard on the eyes. However. Many polyamorous people still use this flag to represent themselves, most of them 35+ years old. As a personal favor to me, please do not say you hate this flag. Say the colors are too bright till you're blue in the face, sure. But to openly hate this flag is to disparage your predecessors and denounce your history.

The earliest polyamory pride flag to incorporate the infinity heart symbol that I could find actually made its debut on tumblr in 2016. The infinity heart was established as a polyamory pride symbol by this time. ratlab-art intentionally kept the original color symbolism, while using hues generally considered a little more pleasant to look at.

This one, obviously, set the precedent for numerous other iterations of the same idea -- tweaking the colors, swapping the pi for the infinity heart. I will not be posting all of them, because I doubt I could track them all down anyway. The icon I currently use on this blog is one such iteration. But this one uniquely puts the black stripe in the middle, which does make for a nice contrast with the gold.

and of course

This is the "new poly flag" designed by Red Howell for the polyamproud online vote, which took place in 2022. They call it the "tricolor polyamory pride flag" (presumably, not to distinguish it from the other established flags, but to distinguish it only from the others that were in their run-off) Its symbolism is as follows: the triangle ▶️points forward for progress and is off-center to represent the non-traditional nature of polyamory, white⚪ represents possibility, blue for honestly, magenta for love, purple for unity in the community, gold for perseverance, and obviously the heart for love.

It has garnered controversy, because they kind of... openly disparaged every previous polyamory flag and claim theirs is the one true poly flag. They do still say you can use any flag you like, but the whole vote was predicated on the assumption that no one wanted the existing designs, and no pre-existing designs were included in the vote. And that it was bad to have variants of the same flag, even though you see that with many pride flags, including the rainbow flag. Many old school polyams still don't know this design, let alone that there was a single vote years ago, which they missed. However. This flag has quickly become a popular design, especially among the younger generation. So if you would be so kind, please do not say you hate this flag. Say you're frustrated with how the process of choosing it happened, by all means. But to openly hate this flag is to disparage the next generation and sever yourself from new directions in the community.

finally,

A couple of honorable mentions made by Em Essex in 2019 and Molly Colleen Bennett Wilvich in 2020, respectively. They don't get full write-ups, but they're an additional couple of the more unique (without being downright obscure) flag designs.

Go forth with pride and knowledge,

[starnosedmoles]

a few lgbtq+ flags i color picked from these bugs!🏳️‍⚧️🐞❤️🪲🏳️‍🌈

[green-enby]

Don't mind me, I saw a similar attempt at an "uimate progress pride flag" a long time ago on Reddit and I wanted to see if I could do better. I left this project dormant for many months but I came back to it and finished it just now.

I call it:

The X Progress Pride Flag!

Disclaimer: it's just for funsies, I don't expect anyone to fly this or anything! I'm very well aware that it's an eyesore haha.

I also know that the rainbow flag already covered every identity, but the newer Progress Pride flag was made to shine a light on the trans, intersex and QPOC communities that were (and still are) being targeted in a particularly strong way, even within the queer community itself. That's the sentiment that inspired me to make this.

My stylistic decisions into the making of this flag were also influenced by what I feel were the most prominent (inner)discriminations that certain queer identities experience. Some of them have simply stayed stuck in the background because on top of that, they are invisibilized and as such there is little research on what they face.

(But it was also just a challenge to see how many flags I could fit onto the rainbow lmao.)

Anyway: can yoy guess what every bit of this monstrosity means? It's basically a riddle lmao.

Here's the image description, which doubles as an explanation:

The background is the regular rainbow flag—six horizontal stripes, from top to bottom: red, orange, yellow, green, blue, purple.

This doubles as a symbol for gay and lesbian people. I did not include their specific flags because LG people have been using this one for decades as their specific identity flag, especially gay men, although I'm well aware that being gay or lesbian can be much more complex than just homo attraction (e.g. lesbian as a gender identity) and that having a flag just for them matters. However, in the making of this flag, I had to weigh out which identities are more vulnerable to their fights being left in the dust by the movement, and I felt that gays and lesbians are basically never excluded from the conversation and therefore "including them" explicitly wasn't really a priority.

Over the background, there is a chevron on each of the 4 sides, pointing towards the center, which leave the rainbow flag taking the shape of an X.

Each chevron contains diagonal stripes parallel to its borders, and is split into two halves; top with bottom, for the side chevrons, and left with right, for the top and bottom chevrons.

Let's start from the left chevron, which overall stands for the a-spec community:

The top half represents the asexual flag through the first four colours, and the asensual flag through the orange stripe, while the yellow stripe stands for both the aplatonic flag and the first half of the queerplatonic attraction/relationship flag—six stripes, from top to bottom: black, gray, white, purple, orange, yellow.

The bottom half represents the aromantic flag, while the very first stripe stands for the other half of the queerplatonic flag, and for the (a)aesthetic attraction flag—six stripes, from top to bottom: pink, green, light green, white, gray, black.

Here's the aplatonic flag I used (I know it's not the most common), and the queerplatonic flag, for reference:

And here's the asensual flag—I actually picked the shade of orange from the demisensual flag, because it was too light:

Sadly I couldn't find a way to represent alterous attraction or the analterous flag (I personally use it almost interchangeably with queerplatonic but ymmv).

Moving onto the right side chevron, directly influenced by the original intersex-inclusive Progress Pride flag, and therefore standing for AIDS awareness, QPOC, the trans umbrella, and the intersex community:

The top half represents QPOC, and the trans and agender flags—six stripes, from top to bottom: black, brown, white, light green, baby blue, light pink.

The bottom half represents the non-binary and intersex flags—four stripes, from top to bottom: yellow, white, purple, black. The yellow stripe has triple the thickness as the other stripes, and inside of it there is a purple ring.

Of course, the black stands for both QPOC and AIDS awareness.

(For those wondering why I explicitly included agender even though it's technically included under the non-binary umbrella: many agender people see their identity as separate from it since the experience of having no sense of gender can feel different from having a non-binary gender. Many, in fact, see themselves more as being under the a-spec umbrella.)

Now, the top chevron, standing for fluid identities and the label "queer":

The left side represents the abro- orientation flag, and the last stripe is one half of the queer chevron—six stripes, from top to bottom: green, light green, white, light red, red, dark lavander.

The right side represents the genderfluid flag, and the last stripe is the other half of the queer chevron—six stripes, from top to bottom: pink, white, purple, black, blue, light lavander.

I felt the need to explicitly include genderfluid, even though, again, non-binary technically covers for it, because I've seen fluidphobia even from staticly-gendered non-binary people, so perhaps it is not as implicit as it should be. Same for abro within the m-spec community.

And here's the "queer chevron" I'm referring to, for those who've never seen it:

The V shape is also a direct reference to the way this flag looks.

This can also stand to represent all queer attractions not otherwise explicitly included, e.g. mono attractions like trixic, toric, feminamoric, viramoric… literally anything. Plus those who identify as genderqueer but not non-binary can refer to this!

And finally, the bottom chevron—probably the most cryptic of the four. It overall stands for plurian identities, using colours from the polyamorous, multigender, and multi-spectrum orientation (aka m-spec) flags:

The left side represents the polyamorous flag for the first three colours, and the multigender flag for the last three—six stripes, from top to bottom: blue, hot pink, dark purple, orange, blue, dark blue.

The right side represents the m-spec flag, combining the colours from the bi, omni, pan, and ply flags—six stripes, from top to bottom: pink, purple, dark purple, yellow, green, blue.

Here's the polyamorous and multigender flags I used for reference, for those who've never seen them:

(The latter isn't that widely spread, as it is mostly used as an umbrella term to talk about identities like bigender, trigender, polygender, and pangender, and not that often as a personal identification term.)

For m-spec, the pink and blue I used are a combination of the shades used for them in the bi, pan, ply, and omni flags. Ply would also cover every other m-spec attraction that excluded some genders (such as neptunic and uranic).

It was inspired by this m-spec flag (on the left), but I also added the dark purple stripe from the omni flag (on the right):

That's all! Hope this entertained you, and feel free to tell me what you think.

[mr-weirdo-mcgee]

Polyamarous lesboy

Polyamarous Turigirl

polyamarous bi lesbian

polyamarous bi gay

polyamarous pan gay

polyamarous pan lesbian.

[polyamzeal]

[art-b-y-eden]

I'm a big fan of polyam Jim, Olu and Archie (and Zheng??) and I really hope they continue it in s3!!

[hemlockpill]

POLYAMOROUS AROMANTIC ALLOSEXUAL FLAGS (polyam aroallo)

ID in ALT

Aromantic versions of my two favorite polyamory flags

using this <2 symbol

my own adapted version of the polyamory infinity heart that uses the <2

without symbol, feel free to edit your own! (credit appreciated but not needed)

links below cut

Left side white arrow polyam flag reference: https://www.discoveringpolyamory.com/blog/celebrating-the-new-polyamory-pride-flag

All horizontal line polyam flag reference: https://polyamorytoday.com/polyamory-facts/polyamorous-flag-symbols/

<2 symbol meaning: https://www.reddit.com/r/aromantic/comments/14c8oyc/what_does_2_mean/?rdt=43451 (best i can find. if someone has an op coining post lmk)

<2 i used: https://www.tumblr.com/hemlockpill/767569005092519936?source=share

[smallmothwindchimes]

Jade doodle page.

[starflungwaddledee]

Who wins starstruck or a aroace guy

both of them, because she's also aroace just like me!

actually while i'm at it, here's the little animation i was working on for pride month but never got around to posting!

in my self indulgent aroace worldbuilding i like to imagine that labels for orientations and genders are just kind of... not that much of a thing on popstar, because it doesn't matter at all to anyone. nobody has ever cared about stuff like who or how you love, and 90% of them are picking their own pronouns anyway.

that said, it's still nice to have a little self representation here on our primitive earth internet, where this kind of thing very much does need to exist and we deserve to be proud of it!

[demon-from-your-dreams]

Working on my next pride skull peice, this time the new polyamous flag and a Tuatara skull.

My original pride skulls are all on my Instagram, just haven't had time to post them here

[polillamielera]

and sometimes there's so much love to give and receive.

[hinge]

Hinge presents an anthology of love stories almost never told. Read more on https://no-ordinary-love.co

[gifdog]

polyamorous flag blinkies

[wrenflags]

Sapphic Polyamory flag

Alt text: two pink stripes on top and bottom and one white stripe in the middle with a purple heart and infinity symbol in the middle.

(end of alt text)

[rancid-men-stimboards]

Polyam pride flag (1995) stimboard

X X X - X π X - X X X

[thebeesbox]

Day 25 of Drawing Pride Flags as Foxes: Polyamorous Pride Flag

[hinge]

Hinge presents an anthology of love stories almost never told. Read more on https://no-ordinary-love.co