Excerpt from Ace Voices: What it Means to Be Asexual, Aromantic, Demi or Grey-Ace (Eris Young, 21st December 2022, Jessica Kingsley Publishers, Trade Paperback $24.95)
I’m queer. And because I’m writing it, this book is a queer book. I’ve been going to pride marches since I was in my teens, and I wore a suit to my high school prom, even before I knew what “trans” meant. For as long as I’ve had a concept of “sexual orientation”, even if I didn’t quite know what that orientation was, I have never thought of myself as “straight”.
I bring this up because my asexual and grey-aromantic identity is not a gap, an unticked box, something missing from my orientation. Instead, it’s a fundamental part of my queerness, a constitutive part of what makes me queer, as much as my nonbinary, trans gender. For most of my life, queer spaces are those in which I’ve learned about and been able to express myself most truly.
I was somewhat surprised to find that the vast majority of the people I spoke to told me they considered themselves queer or part of the LGBT(QIA+) community, by virtue of being ace, aro, demi or grey-a. I wasn’t surprised because I didn’t think we belonged, but because we are generally invisible, even or especially within the queer community. Even if they hadn’t, the very preponderance Ace Voices 86 of people I spoke to who described themselves as queer and gay and trans and a-spec, shows us that the queer and a-spec communities are very closely intertwined indeed.
The strongest overarching impression I got of my interviewees’ own relationships with, and experiences moving within, the LGBTQ+ community was that, while some people had not personally felt welcome or comfortable there, no one thought that a-spec people were not or could not be part of it. Looking at the 160 people who answered my google form to register interest in the book, even without looking at the a-spec specific labels, there’s a cornucopia of terms for describing sexuality, romantic orientation and ways of experiencing love and attraction: queer, pansexual, lesbian, homoromantic, gay-oriented, panromantic, bisexual, demibisexual, biromantic, panplatonic seeking queerplatonic relationships. A huge number of people, nearly 20 per cent, also selected the option “not entirely sure/figuring out” in the “orientation” field. In contrast, only 3 of the 160 described themselves as heteroromantic, and not one person described themself as “straight” or “heterosexual”.
Out of the people I spoke to in more depth, over half described themselves as “queer”, as well as or in place of a more specific word like “demisexual” or “panromantic”. Like the people who preferred “ace” or “a-spec” over a more specific word, lots of people said that “queer” felt more comfortable for them than more specific labels. A number also said that, outside the a-spec community (where people might not know what “demisexual” or “quoiromantic” means, or who might be less receptive to the idea of an a-spec identity than to a more widely understood LGBTQ+ label), they would default to “queer” when asked about their orientation.
“Queer” is a very useful word here: for someone whose experience of attraction, desire and sexuality might be ambiguous, A-spec and the LGBTQ+ Community 87 undecided, in progress or wilfully un-articulated, “queer” offers a huge amount of space to play around in. It offers a way of articulating our experience without – as IJ described it – “dissecting it”. This sense of kinship with specifically queer experience isn’t a coincidence: over and over it struck me, while looking at the words of my interviewees, that the categories of sexuality, romantic orientation and even gender are not sharp or discrete but rather porous.
There was huge overlap and bleed between the different ways in which one could “be” queer, and the people who shared their experiences with me were themselves aware of this: as CF puts it, “there is an intersectional character to many a-spec people that deepens the connection between the two communities”. A great many of the people I spoke to – and I myself – were only able to find out they were a-spec in the first place because of the LGBTQ+ community, having gained access to the language of the ace spectrum in a larger context of LGBTQ+ identities and sexual diversity education. Conventional sex education takes as a given that pupils will both want sex and form heterosexual couples – these two behaviours go hand in hand in the world of sex ed (and heteronormativity), and deviation from this norm in any way is rarely acknowledged. This alone creates a basic commonality of experience between any young person whose sexuality and experience of desire and attraction do not match up with that of their peers or what their teachers expect from them.
For many people, this sense of alienation or outsiderhood extends beyond adolescence, and leads to an abiding and inextricable intertwining between a-spec identity and a wider sense of queerness. As LH puts it, “I think most a-spec people consider themselves LGBT+. At least the ones I know… And they often started, like me, by just feeling non-straight, zeroing in on asexuality later.”
Ace Voices is available from Amazon and Bookshop.
Read Eris Young’s guest post “How Writing a Book Brought My Closer to My Partner.”