CHAPTER 11
WHERE ARE WE GOING, WHERE HAVE WE BEEN?
“HERE IS A LIST OF THINGS I like more than having sex,” begins poet and scholar Cameron Awkward-Rich in his slam poem “A Prude’s Manifesto”: “reading, lying flat on my back staring at the ceiling, [. . .] cheap whiskey, riding my bike away from parties.”
What about the joy in all of that? What about the pleasure and richness that can be found without sex—not as a consolation prize, but as equal to, or even greater in, its power?
Ace activists want to build a world where everyone can find their answers to these questions. We want to expand the potential for what pleasure can look like. If asexuality—which is often conceptualized as a lack—is negative space, we must consider that negative space can be more than an absent image, more than just not having sex. It can be an image in itself, an optical illusion where the picture flips back and forth. Two faces or a vase. A penguin or a man with hair. A woman’s face or a man playing the saxophone. The experiences of aces do more than outline the constrictive structures caused by compulsory sexuality. They can also reveal, or at least give permission to embrace, other forms of eroticism and other ways of living that may be just as fulfilling.
Gender studies scholar Ela Przybylo is the one who showed me Awkward-Rich’s poem, which she used herself in her book Asexual Erotics, an academic exploration of intimacy beyond the carnal. The word erotic today is interchangeable with sexual, but that was not always so. In Plato’s Symposium, “eros surfaces as a love for the good, a desire for immortality—a mytho-spiritual plane touching with but not bound to sexuality,” Przybylo writes. It was through the work of Freud that the erotic became bound to the sexual, but Freud himself admitted, and other scholars confirm, that “it is not easy to decide what is covered by the concept ‘sexual.’”2
Against Freud, Przybylo (and I and many others) offers Audre Lorde. In “Uses of the Erotic: The Erotic as Power,” Lorde defines eroticism as “the sharing of joy, whether physical, emotional, psychic, or intellectual.” The erotic is an inner resource, a vitality. It is a force that compels us to be close to each other, one that “forms a bridge between the sharers which can be the basis for understanding much of what is not shared between them and lessens the threat of their difference.”3 This energy—of connection, creative fulfillment, and self-expression—is not limited to the realm of sexuality, even though “we are taught to separate the erotic demand from the most vital areas of our lives other than sex.”4 It is a feeling that can suffuse many areas of life.
Such a definition of the erotic, as a profound force greater than the sexual, is crucial to how aces think about all that life has to offer, and Awkward-Rich’s poem is a powerful way to reclaim this different form of eros. Awkward-Rich’s list of “things I like more than having sex” is familiar to many aces. The twist is the lack of shame when elevating other activities. It is a manifesto, not an apology.
That acknowledgment of this possibility was slow to unfold for James, the programmer in Seattle. At first, realizing that he was ace caused a profound sense of loss. “I felt like there was a fairly central part of human existence that I really didn’t understand and wouldn’t participate in,” he says. “I’d like to have a life that works, so intuitively the most straightforward way would be to have a ‘normal’ life.”
A hole had opened up and he would need to fill it. “People feel that sex is so central to them, and it made me think, ‘What can I feel similarly about the way allo people feel about sex?” he says. “How can I find that feeling actively?” Cooking is one way. James will take a recipe and find its best form, making a dish like Swedish meatballs over and over until he arrives at “the perfectly optimal way.” The ability to be creative and fill that hole, to still live a life that he likes, has helped James become less attached to the importance of “normal.” Three years ago, he might have chosen to be allo if given the choice. He would not make that choice today.
Julie Sondra Decker, the writer, offers another perspective. “I prioritize other things in my life—I’m creative and active and connected in my community—but not as a reaction to ‘not having sex,’” she says. Her life has always been complete. When allo writers ask Julie for advice on creating ace characters, she warns them not to write the character “like a ‘typical’ person but without the sex part.” Aces aren’t a puzzle with a missing piece. Everyone is their own full puzzle.
Difference can be a gift. Being ace can mean less interpersonal drama and more freedom from social norms around relationships. It is an opportunity to focus more on other passions, to be less distracted by sexuality, to break the scripts, to choose your own adventure and your own values. Zii Miller, the trans man from Florida, jokes that while he might be missing out on a part of life that many cherish, everyone else is missing out on the joys of not spending time worrying about whether others are sexually or romantically interested. A different Zee—Zee Griffler from Colorado—says that asexuality gave them a “cheat code” through life, just like what Hunter’s friends said when they learned how easy it was for him to resist lust. To say so is an inversion of the common ace complaint that we are the ones who lack special knowledge. “Asexuality is just a different way of seeing on what terms we want to be with one another. It’s a way of getting very honest about how humans see each other and the different ways that we place value on relationships,” Zee says.
The lack of understanding around asexuality did create angst around romance and the question of how people could stay together. Asexuality also helped Zee build more intimate friendships, unburdened by the subtle expectation of sex. The path toward asexuality forced them to reject the idea that two people who were close should automatically try to date and have sex, as if that were a superior way of relating. The ace perspective offered a celebration of other types of intimacy. It fostered both the imagination and the will necessary to build a life on one’s own terms.
Being asexual can provide these powerful new perspectives, but the frameworks have limited power when they are still so hidden. Learning about and claiming asexuality can be transformative, but the world won’t be a safe and positive place for aces—or for anyone—until compulsory sexuality itself is dismantled. We do not dismantle compulsory sexuality by waiting for each person to catch up and then starting over again. We do it by fighting for structural change.
Fighting compulsory sexuality does not mean that everything must be desexualized but rather that the rights of the other side must be prioritized too. It means, as Wake Forest scholar Kristina Gupta writes, “challenging the unearned privileges that accrue to sexual people and sexual relationships and . . . eliminating discrimination against nonsexual people and nonsexual relationships.”5 It means resisting pharmaceutical companies that sell desire drugs by using the language of sickness. Creating more books and movies with diverse ace characters and themes. Teaching therapists and doctors not to assume that a lack of sexual attraction is a sickness (while also not holding ableist beliefs about sickness). Getting rid of amatonormativity in marriage law. Asexuality should be discussed in sex education, which can be as simple as teaching students that never developing sexual attraction is fine. The ace perspective on consent must be a universal concern.
Ace activism has been growing over the past decade. The first Asexual Awareness Week took place in 2010, organized by Sacramento-based activist Sara Beth Brooks. Sara Beth had been engaged in her early twenties but knew she didn’t want to have sex with her then-fiancé, a situation that landed her in therapy and taking hormones to increase her sex drive. The hormones didn’t work. One night, while googling ways of ending a wedding ceremony without kissing (“Maybe we could fist-bump?”), she came across AVEN and stayed up all night reading and crying. It changed her life.
Sara Beth, who had come out as bisexual as a teenager, was already involved in LGBTQ+ activism and had organized marches against California’s antigay marriage legislation. Reaching out to other sexual minorities seemed to be a natural extension of this work. It was also a practical matter of sharing resources with ace kids who had nothing but a website.
Partnering with other LGBTQ+ communities, which had more experts and brick-and-mortar buildings, could bring support to ace kids too.
Today, Brian Langevin, executive director of the nonprofit Asexual Outreach, coordinates a national network of local ace and aro community groups and provides resources and trainings to schools and LGBTQ+ organizations. Langevin also developed the Ace Inclusion Guide for High Schools, a tool for teachers, student leaders, sex educators, and other school staff. Meanwhile, Sebastian Maguire—legislative director for New York City councilmember Daniel Dromm and one of the only out asexual people in politics—helped pass legislation that adds asexuality as a protected category in the city’s human rights law and includes asexuality as an option on survey forms.
Despite this progress, compulsory sexuality is not a ubiquitous term and there is more to do, both inside and outside the community. The ace community needs to be more welcoming to people of color and disabled aces and anyone who does not have a gold star. Diversity of ace experience is a strength, and diversity of other types of experience and identity will only be more so. Reaching out to older aces, and thinking more about issues that older aces might face, is another way to enrich the community and the lives of people who may benefit. Older people are more likely to be unaware of asexuality entirely, and even the ones who do identify as ace frequently feel like they don’t belong in either the online or offline groups.
In the world at large, “asexual in the biological term is still more well-known,” says Sara Beth, who thinks that aces are waiting for what she calls “an Ellen moment” or “a Laverne moment.” Aces need someone people already know and love—a celebrity—to champion the cause, she says. Then activism can move beyond the basics of ace 101 and toward the more ambitious projects of changing society to be better for all. Until then, many victories will be more personal.
For as long as he can remember, AVEN founder David Jay has been surrounded by kids. Two years old when his sister was born, David couldn’t yet read, so he memorized books that adults read to him and then “read” them to her. Being the oldest of twelve cousins on one side and third-oldest of twenty-four cousins on the other meant that family events always featured him taking care of “mobs of babies.”
One day, shortly after college, David was riding Bay Area public transit when he saw an ad for queer-friendly adoption services. He was hit with this knowledge that he wanted to have kids, but had no idea how to get there.” It was difficult to imagine aging, and life itself, without kids. It was equally difficult to imagine how he would have them.
The problem was never how kids are made. The problem was that David didn’t know how to enter a relationship committed enough to support the lifelong project of child-rearing. A teenager when he started AVEN in the early 2000s, David was quickly marked as the poster boy and the face of asexuality, and his choices have long provided a template for younger aces. Like it or not, he is the closest thing many have to an elder who helps lead the way—but all this time he was, of course, also navigating his own life too, without an elder of his own. As he, and the ace community, grew older, each new stage brought new questions, this time no longer about the basics of sexual attraction but about parenting and family life.
“At that point,” David says, meaning his early twenties, “all of my relationships were being supplanted by romantic and sexual relationships when they came along.” Many friends who discussed plans of long-term partnership would quickly abandon those promises, falling easily into the amatonormative script that Elizabeth Brake criticizes. David, who is “somewhat aromantic,” was left “very aware that I wanted to be able to have relationships that were stable and that I could rely on, and that my relationships functionally weren’t that.” If relationships alone were such a challenge, parenting felt unreachable. Fostering and adoption were options and David was willing to be a single parent, but first he wanted to try finding people with whom to raise a child.
When David’s friends Avary and Zeke married in 2014, they asked him to play a role similar to that of an officiant. David had met Avary, a nonprofit founder, at a social impact conference four years earilier. Both were obsessed with the question of how to build better communities and had long talks about what that work might look like. Through her, David came to know Zeke, an expert in energy and climate science, someone who started diving into public climate data sets for fun and wound up at the forefront of the field. “I felt so much professional and intellectual alignment with them,” David says of this thoughtful pair.
Though David moved to New York from San Francisco, where he had met Avary and Zeke, the three remained close, and he ended up flying back a few times a year to visit. During one visit in 2015, Avary and Zeke told David that they were thinking about starting a family. “We really want people to be involved,” they told him, “and we want you to be involved most of all.”
It was to be an unconventional plan: a cohabitating, co-parenting arrangement with three people. David was not part of Avary and Zeke’s marriage, but he would be part of their family—a parent just as equally, and legally too, because three-parent adoption is legal in California. On New Year’s Day in 2017, Avary learned that she was pregnant.
That May, David moved back to California and in with Avary and Zeke. He attended the birthing classes and was in the delivery room when Octavia, or Tavi for short, was born in August. All four live in a beautiful home near San Francisco’s Panhandle Park, with a lush, plant-filled backyard. When I visited in early 2018, David showed me a collection of photos he’s taken of his daughter: one every month, with Tavi in the same position, posed next to a Cornelius, a stuffed narwhal she’s had since birth. In the family room, Tavi (who calls Zeke Daddy and David Dada) stumbles from Avary to David, who picks her up and puts her on his shoulders.
Life is different now, but on the whole, parenthood for David feels easier and more flexible than he expected. Avary, Zeke, and David share their calendars and have a weekly planning meeting that David calls “20 percent checking in and appreciating one another and 80 percent logistics” about cooking, childcare, and cleanup. Having a third person to shoulder the work of child-rearing is convenient, and explicit planning makes childcare more equal than arrangements between straight binary parents, which can often slide, undiscussed, into gendered roles and unequal division of labor.
Now, David often hears from people interested in alternative parenting, whether because they’re single or poly or want to raise kids with someone regardless of romantic or sexual attraction. Many aces reach out to him too. “There are a lot of people who had strong feelings but didn’t see a path to it, and a lot of people who wanted to be parents but didn’t talk about it,” David says. “It’s not a new conversation by any means, but I think it’s new as a conversation in our community.”
These early years building up the ace movement taught David to break the script and explode the frame. All his life, unable to follow the typical routes, David had taught himself to be creative and find other options. He wanted connection but didn’t care about sex. He wanted children but didn’t want a traditional relationship. He got a version of all of it anyway.
Adrienne Rich wrote that compulsory heterosexuality rendered lesbian possibility invisible. It made lesbian possibility “an engulfed continent that rises frequently to view from time to time only to become submerged again.” It will take courage for straight feminists to question the natural state of heterosexuality, but Rich promises that the rewards will be great: “A freeing-up of thinking, the exploring of new paths, the shattering of another great silence, new clarity in personal relationships.”6
These are also the rewards of working toward ace liberation, because compulsory anything is the opposite of freedom. Ace liberation is a complicated term. Asexuality is not inherently politically progressive. Not everyone who is asexual identifies as politically progressive, and that does not make their asexuality any less legitimate. But the goals of the ace movement are progressive, and the potential of the ace movement is greater than aces being more visible in the culture and more important than aces proving that, except for this one thing, we’re just like everyone else. As CJ Chasin, the activist, has said, aces push the envelope. Once it is okay for aces to never have sex, it becomes more acceptable for everyone else who isn’t ace too. Ace liberation will help everyone.
It comes in rejecting sexual and romantic normalcy in favor of carefully considered sexual and romantic ethics. The meaning of sex is always changing and the history of sexuality is complex. Compulsory sexuality and asexuality have changed across time and place; they can, and will, change again. The goal, at least to me, is that one day neither the DSM criteria nor asexuality-as-identity will be necessary. It will be easy to say yes or no or maybe—to sexuality, to romantic relationships—without coercion, without further justification, without needing a community to validate that answer. Sexual variety will be a given and social scripts will be weakened; sex will be decommodified.
The goal of ace liberation is simply the goal of true sexual and romantic freedom for everyone. A society that is welcoming to aces can never be compatible with rape culture; with misogyny, racism, ableism, homophobia, and transphobia; with current hierarchies of romance and friendship; and with contractual notions of consent. It is a society that respects choice and highlights the pleasure that can be found everywhere in our lives. I believe that all this is possible.