For those of you remember my Hawai'ian Pride collection from last summer, here's the first of three special treats! And this one's extra special, because it also doubles as an Autistic Pride Day picture! (Autistic Pride Day was 10 days ago, on the 18th, but my tradition is to post every holiday picture 10 days late so that I can spend the holiday actually celebrating it.)

I cleverly incorporated symbols of the autism spectrum in this picture--despite the fact that it has a little bit of every color in there, the main colors are green, red and blue, the official Autistic Pride colors. The tall dragon, who was designed after a strelitzia flower, has a long, rain-bow tail twisted in the shape of an infinity symbol--a reference to the rain-bow infinity symbol, which is used to represent the infinite diversity of not just the autism spectrum, but the brain itself.

Although in the case of this collection of pictures, it carries a second meaning--the infinite diversity of love, gender and sexuality. I specifically designed these two reptiles to not look too male or female--in fact, you can interpret them any way you want to! What really matters in the end is that they're still just two autistic lovers, embracing one another as they use the power of romance to try and drown out the crowd and the noise, and that they perfectly embody the idea that no matter what gender, color, size, species or anything else you are, love is love. Is love is love is love is. Love. Is love. OK, I'll stop now.

All this talk about diversity has reminded me of this cool article that I found while doing my research to make this series. It explains how a great number of species in the animal kingdom have completely different concepts of gender and sexuality from the "burly male and dainty female" stereotype:

http://www.bbc.com/…/20160624-we-have-the-wrong-idea-about-…

And I'm of the belief that humans don't fall into that stereotype either. We're so advanced and complex compared to most other animals that I totally think our brains are capable of going beyond that clock-work system that "the birds and the bees" use (and we already have!). And I hope that in the future, the whole world will see that.