Ace Week Orlando lands Oct 25 through 31, 2026, and we want to say the quiet thing first: a gay bar is not only about hooking up. Anthem, Downtown Orlando’s LGBTQ+ bar and venue at 100 N Orange Ave, runs on music, food, karaoke, drag, dancing, and the ordinary pleasure of being in a room where nobody has to explain themselves. Asexual and aromantic people belong in that room, and Ace Week is a decent excuse to say so out loud instead of assuming everyone already knows.
What Ace Week is
It started in 2010 as Asexual Awareness Week, organized by ace community members who noticed that the letter A kept getting dropped or explained away as standing for “ally.” It is now known simply as Ace Week, and it runs the last full week of October. The purpose has stayed consistent: visibility, education, and community for people whose experience of attraction does not match the default script.
The vocabulary, briefly
Asexual describes someone who experiences little or no sexual attraction. Aromantic describes someone who experiences little or no romantic attraction. Those are two separate axes, which is the single most useful idea in the whole conversation. Someone can be aromantic and not asexual, asexual and not aromantic, or both. Splitting the two apart explains a lot of experiences that otherwise get filed under “something is wrong with me.”
Around those words sits a range of self-descriptions: demisexual, gray-ace, and others, all of them chosen by the people using them. Ace and aro people date, marry, raise kids, stay single by preference, have sex, do not have sex. The label describes attraction, not behavior, and definitely not personality.
Why nightlife gets awkward
Queer nightlife grew up as a sexual liberation project, for good historical reasons. Bars were where people found each other when finding each other was criminalized. That inheritance is worth honoring. It also means the default assumption in a lot of rooms is that everyone came looking for someone, and an ace person walking in gets read as either shy, closeted, or lying.
The fix is not a separate ace-only night. The fix is a bar with enough going on that showing up for the music, the food, or your friends is an obvious and unremarkable reason to be there.
What that looks like on a given night
- Happy hour starts daily at 3 PM, which is a much easier entry point than a packed midnight dance floor.
- There is a real kitchen, so “let’s get food” is a complete plan and nobody has to pretend otherwise.
- Encore Mondays and Spotlight Tuesday are both free and start at 8 PM, built around performance rather than pickup.
- Rewind Wednesdays runs throwbacks, with Karaoke with Ken T. on the second and fourth Wednesdays from 8 PM. Singing badly in public is a legitimate love language.
- Thursday brings free Latin dance lessons at 8:30 PM before Latin Night Vol 2 with DJ Jery. Learning a step is a reason to be on the floor that has nothing to do with anyone’s number.
- Ace Week ends on Saturday Oct 31 with Halloween Night with DJ Jesús Montañez, and a costume is its own kind of armor.
Small things that make a room work
If you want to be good company to ace and aro friends this week, the bar is low and it is mostly about not narrating other people’s lives. Skip the “you just haven’t met the right person” line. Do not treat someone’s disinterest as a challenge or a diagnosis. Let a no be a no the first time. Invite the friend who does not drink or does not dance, because there is a kitchen and a stage and plenty of reasons to be here. And if someone tells you they are ace, the correct response is roughly the same energy as being told they are left-handed.
Anthem is at 100 N Orange Ave, corner of Orange and Washington, with garages and lots a block or two away and LYMMO running free through downtown. Ace Week runs Oct 25 to 31 and the door does not ask why you came. Our kitchen page and the downtown Halloween guide cover the week’s other half, and the events calendar has the full list.
