Now it feels like we disappeared around 1980. What happened? Were we silenced? Did we stop talking? Did everyone get burnt out and give up? Did we just turn invisible?
What happened to us? Where did we go? Why weren’t they there for me when I needed them to be?
Where are they now? Some of them still have to be around. Talk to me. Tell us your story, our story, the story of those yet to come. Asexual StoryCorps, go forth and find them!
And perhaps the most important question: Can it happen again? Can we vanish and be forgotten yet again?
I’m afraid that I don’t really have any answers for you yet, but I decided to dig deep into some historical archives to see what I can find about asexual history. It’ll probably take me a few weeks to sort through everything that I’m finding, but I wanted to share one thing that I have found so far.
In November of 1979, the president of the Asexual Liberation Movement gave an interview that appeared in the Chula Vista Star News and several other newspapers. (I’m sorry that the archive linked to requires a subscription, but it’s the largest newspaper archive available.)
Obviously, the modern conceptualization of asexuality is slightly different than what he describes, but what really stands out is the fact that at the end of 1979, asexuals were out there advocating for themselves, fighting discrimination, organizing asexual-specific gathering places, and generally being hopeful about the future. But by the time AVEN is founded in 2001, there is an entire generation of asexuals coming of age who were totally unaware that asexuality as an identity pre-dates online communities.
In only 22 years, we went from an active community that apparently had asexual restaurants, bars, and motels in nearly every community in the country to being a group of lost and scattered young adults who were so disconnected from their history that they thought they were inventing the asexual community for the first time.
We still don’t know for sure what the catalyst for this change was, but it’s clear that this loss of knowledge has deeply hurt, and is still hurting, the asexual community.
So… Were asexuals the butt of a joke because they were so preposterous a thought that they couldn’t possibly exist, or so marginalized that it wouldn’t matter if they were offended?
So, I’m going to be a bit of a party pooper here, but Art Hoppe was a well known satirist, and this was a fictional parody article, not a real interview with a real person. This is a tricky issue issue in ace history, as a lot of references to asexuality in early sources are admitted parody or fall in an ambiguous area where it’s not clear if they are sincere or parody. That said, in cases like the first linked Village Voice article, the original parody received sincere responses, which itself is meaningful proof of the existence .
There are also other early articles that are not satire, including more sincere sources like letters to advice columns and occasional articles from psychologists/sociologists. These give an impression that is more in line with what shows up in research and personal testimony from older aces, which is that there have long been many people who ascribed to asexuality as a concept, but there doesn’t seem to have been much in the way of organized communities or consistency between researchers until the rise of later internet communities like HHA and AVEN.
Everyone’s finding articles. I want to find the people who were there. They’re not all dead yet. That Lesbian/Feminist Dialogues event was in 1972, so your mother or grandmother or awesome spinster great aunt might have gone or heard about it or ran in circles where these sorts of things discussed. Is anyone going that route?
If you are interested in talking to older aces who lived through these periods, the older aces forum on AVEN is definitely one place to start - there are pages and pages and pages of folks who have been around during the 70s and 80s talking about their experiences. As far as contacting specific people, or recoridng oral histories from older aces more generally, that requires more time than I have to dedicate to new projects but it would definitely be a great project for any students of history with a need for class projects. On another note not really related to the above, though, I want to iterate more clearly thay my impressions from both those conversations and the historical written record have not really implied any sort of “lost” golden era of organizing any sort of collapse or losses after the 80s, so I’d be careful about finding explanations for a shift that I’d argue may never have even happened in the way that was suggested above. Out of curiosity, besides the (satirical) art hope article, what in general do you see as the main evidence for a decline?
Yeah, I wouldn’t really call it a lost golden age, it doesn’t feel like it was anything close to what we have now. What I see are scattered shards of pottery that say “asexual” on them. The “Labels” photo, the “Asexual and Autoerotic Women” paper, Storms’ paper, the Village Voice letter writers, and so forth. They’re a signal that a civilization once existed, and that the people who lived there seem like they were a lot like us. I see them about to start building pyramids in the early 80s, and then…
…
And then in 1997, the Internet invents asexuality again, because it didn’t exist yet.
I guess to put it another way: Why wasn’t there a golden age? There were groups publishing pamphlets about it. There was a presentation about it at a conference that was important enough for Gloria Steinem to go to. There were academic papers that mention and don’t have to explain what it was or defend its existence. Why didn’t that grow and flourish? Why wasn’t it something that surfaced into the general consciousness when I could have used it in the mid-90s? It’s like the reset button was pressed and all that vanished, and people had to start over, and now we’re digging trenches to try to find an occasional glimpse of who was here before us.
Now, I admit that maybe there isn’t a discontinuity, that maybe I just haven’t seen the through-line, because I haven’t read the right page or heard the right story. Or maybe there really wasn’t anything there at all, that these pottery shards are misleading us all, and that’s not really what they meant by asexual, and that it wasn’t really a thing, and that we’re all just falling for a 40-50 year old joke because we want to believe.
Okay, so I haven’t found much dealing with asexuality in the time period between the late-70s and the mid-90s, especially as any sort of organized community, but there are a few mentions that pop up now and then.
According to this article from the Philadelphia Daily News in August of 1979, actress Patricia Elliott actually came out as asexual on the Phil Donahue show.
Their description of “asexuality” sounds more like celibacy, but in most cases it generally seems like there wasn’t much of a distinction between the two concepts pre-AVEN. I did a quick search to see if I could find a clip from that episode of the Phil Donahue show, but I didn’t have much luck. Sadly, Patricia Elliott passed away in 2015, and not much is available on her personal life, so it’s hard to say whether she continued to identify as asexual later in life.
In April of 1986, a young man identifying as asexual wrote into an advice column asking for help finding asexual organizations. The columnist replied that she didn’t know of any groups and recommended that he pursue medication and/or therapy. This particular clip is from The Sentinel in Carlisle, Pennsylvania, but it was published in several other papers as well.
Then in March of 1993, this article appears in the Indiana Gazette and at least one other paper. It discusses a trend of “asexual marriages” noticed by Dr. Ruthellen Josselson while she was researching for her book “The Space Between Us.”
Again, it’s dealing more with celibacy than asexuality, but it’s very interesting because several of the people described would pretty clearly fall under the asexual label. I especially like this quote from Dr. Josselson: “There are some people for whom sex is just not a very important part of life. There are other things in the relationship that both people value, and sex just floats away.”
Dr. Josselson is still alive in case anyone wants to reach out to her.
And this is the one I’m most excited about! In September of 1993, this article was published in the Palm Beach Post discussing speculations of the sexuality of celebrities (especially Michael Jackson). It openly discusses asexuality as an orientation that’s often overlooked.
I hardly know what to say about this article because there’s just so much. It draws a clear distinction between asexuality, celibacy, and androgyny. It touches on the social pressures faced by asexuals. It even discusses the fact that people who show no interest in the opposite binary gender are often presumed to be gay because social norms dictate that everybody must like someone. This article is just a few months short of being 25 years old, but it almost feels like something written in the last couple years.
On the Phil Donohue story:
Here’s the “startling article” from the Village Voice. What’s startling about it is how disjointed and random it is. It’s like one of those jokey “Person on the Street” segments from a late night show, where they’re making things up and shoving microphones in people’s faces and asking ridiculous questions, except in this case, they’re shoving the microphone in the face of a Who’s Who of Disco Era NYC (Seriously, they even quote the co-owner of Studio 54). Then there’s also a weird mix of insulting the new mayor and insulting Close Encounters and even a bit of gay-shipping R2D2 and C3PO. So yeah. It’s weird.
Patricia Elliott also name-dropped in that “startling article”, in the same paragraph as Andy Warhol, Larry Flynt, and Yasser Arafat. It says that she “has discovered, through yoga and meditation, that she doesn’t have to do it.” The whole thing is weird… (Then there’s also the matter that this article called her “young”, when she would’ve been around 40. 40 ain’t old, but I don’t know if I’d call that young… So there’s a slight chance that it’s a different Patricia Elliott who just happened to share a name and a city with a Tony award winning Broadway star…)
On the Meg Whitcomb article:
Isn’t that basically the same thing Dr. Ruth said a few years ago…?
On the Indiana article:
Gotta order a copy of that book…
Then again, maybe not. That article is full of largely horrible people. The “Susan” story started out sounding a bit like what my one relationship was like, but then wow left turn to creepy town where “Susan” admits to raping her husband and no one seems to have a problem with that. And the other people: “I don’t talk to my wife”, “I’m angry with my wife because she was abused”, “I’m angry with my husband because he got sober”, “My marriage is so awful I have to be medicated”… And Josselson is all like “Yeah, that’s pretty normal”.
So yeah, I don’t think I want to see what that book has to say.
On the Michael Jackson article:
This article is just a few months short of being 25 years old, but it almost feels like something written in the last couple years.
s/David Souter|Janet Reno/Elena Kagan/g and yep.
Okay, I’ve found quite a bit more since yesterday, but I won’t really have time to add it for probably a couple days.
Some of the things I’ve found:
People writing to multiple advice columns describing no interest in sex/dating and the columnists replying with the asexual label
A TV listing showing that the Sally Jessy Raphael talk show was doing an episode called “Asexual People”
A personal ad placed by an asexual gay man looking for an asexual partner
Multiple articles that list asexuality as an orientation along with homosexuality, heterosexuality, and bisexuality
A reference to spinsters being asexual (specifically as a sexual orientation)
There’s more, but that’s what I remember off the top of my head.
Regarding Patricia Elliott, I’m thinking they were actually taking about the Tony-winning actress. I found a thread from the time of her death in which two people remarked about her asexuality, including one person who remembered her appearance on the Phil Donahue show. (Also she apparently frequently lied about her age, so the article writer probably thought that she was younger than she actually was.)
https://www.google.com/amp/s/www.datalounge.com/amp/thread/16209965-patricia-elliot-is-dead-to-me!!!!
This is likely the Sally Jessy episode mentioned: http://historicallyace.tumblr.com/post/175732719562/autismserenity-one-of-the-most
