I think it’s important to make a distinction between people criticizing others for saying a character’s queer identity “doesn’t add anything to the story” (i.e. impacts the plot or story development, which I agree with, queerness does not have to be a plot point in order to be worthy of inclusion) and people saying “this character is said to be [x] identity in the book and that one moment of labeling is literally all the representation of that person as a queer person there is.”
I still get annoyed when authors will have a character say they’re ace or aro in the text and it never comes up again or is relevant to anything about their lives, particularly because so few people even now know what asexuality or aromanticism even is, much less personally know anyone who IDs that way, and already authors are acting like if they label a character ace or aro in the book but don’t actually do anything with it, they’re contributing towards expanding diverse representation in fiction, which is such a simplistic and shortsighted thought-process, not to mention incredibly aggravating.
As an aro-ace person, I feel like unfortunately, the it’s actually a pretty realistic representation that the aro-ace orientation won’t come up in daily life in an obvious way, unless you are explaining your orientation to people? It’s like you don’t like papayas, you don’t go to the papaya market, and most people eat papayas at home in private anyways. You won’t even think about papayas yourself unless there is one in front of you, so other people never realize you don’t like papayas...
If I’m understanding what you wrote correctly, it sounds like being aro-ace is something that doesn’t come up for you as something that impacts or affects your day-to-day life (positively, negatively, or neutrally), and so it doesn’t feel out of place for characters in books to be labeled as aro and/or ace and not have any further mention or exploration of that. That’s totally fine! But it’s the complete opposite of my experience.
While it’s true it’s not something I tend to bring up in conversation frequently, that’s mostly because having to explain myself to people who don’t share my identity, or make one-off comments that are going to get forgotten or ignored because people won’t get or appreciate what I’m saying, is not something I feel like doing. When I lived with an aro friend of mine, we’d talk or make jokes or do the verbal equivalent of shitpost about it all the time, and while I haven’t done so in a while, I’ve also talked about it at length with other ace/aro friends of mine, particularly in the context of media and fandom.
(That’s another thing – we’re at the stage in fiction where we can have only one ace and/or aro character at a time, despite the fact I know and am friends with plenty of other (mainly ace) people, socially and even professionally.)
Otherwise though, my being aro and gray-ace impacts my life constantly. It intersects with my dreams and plans for the future with no romantic prospects (what kind of living situation do I want, will I ever achieve it, who are the people I will build a life with and what will that look like), my varying comfort levels around people in romantic partnerships depending on who they are and how I know them, my relationship to gender (or lack thereof), my reactions to the media I consume and enjoy, my body, my experiences and relationship with the larger queer community, and a whole bunch else. Hell, it even materially affects my life (e.g. remaining unmarried = no chance of those sweet tax benefits married folks get).
Sex/sexual relationships and romance/romantic relationships are incredibly loaded assumed-universal expectations with an enormous amount of cultural/societal/religious/etc. meaning and import imbued within those ideas and realities that are impossible to ignore. Unlike papayas, I can’t actually avoid the existence of sex and romance, because those narratives and assumptions and expectations are everywhere and affect everything. Even if I don’t engage in sex or romance, I’m gonna have some kind of relationship to them, whether I like it or not.
That’s what I meant when I say that authors labelling characters ace and/or aro and doing nothing beyond that is inadequate. Even if a character isn’t sexually attracted and/or romantically attracted to people and doesn’t engage in any sexy activities and/or date for those reasons, it’s reasonable to expect that their being on the outside of assumed-universal, “human” phenomenons is going to affect how that character sees themselves, relates to their friends and peers and family members, their own expectations and those of others about what they want, etc.
And that’s what I want to see in fiction. I want to see ace and/or aro characters written with, for lack of a better word, consequences for that specific character to be such in an allosexual, alloromantic world, and the thoughts that character has and the choices that character makes as a result, thoughts and choices they might not have had if they weren’t ace and/or aro but still inhabited the same world.
(This is for realistic fiction, I have different desires for SFF, where creating societies and species with different understandings of and relationships to gender and sexuality is already relatively normalized, so it theoretically shouldn’t be too much of a leap to incorporate lack of sexual and romantic attraction into that schema, but again without writing it off entirely as “oh that’s just normal here” and going no further, because that continues to defeat the purpose.)
(Also when I made that comment about the one line thing, I had in mind how I’ve mostly seen it used for secondary characters, not protagonists, which in some ways is even more insulting because then authors have the “excuse” of going “well, I didn’t have room to do more than that, or that wasn’t my focus, or I was worried about shoehorning their identity in”, in which case I’d rather they just not write that sentence and leave the reader to assume the characters are straight, in all senses of the word.)
I don’t know if I’ve ever said this in words on here before, but I really, really am not a fan of the way “gay” has been so commonly adapted over the past several years as a synonym for “queer”. I get there are many reasons why people do it, and I don’t begrudge individual people their choice in doing so. But that’s not an option I’ve ever felt OK using for myself, because it always feels like a lie, because gayness has never* had anything to do with how I experience queerness.
I’ve felt alienated from the queer community at large for almost as long as I’ve identified as queer, for not being gay in any way. And what the above only does is further convince me that there is no place for me, because I don’t exist, and even if I do exist, I don’t actually matter.
Someone saying they’re a part of the ace community and then going on to say that was probably more about their personal life than people wanted to know is everything I hate about how there’s an assumption (on both sides) that someone saying “I’m ace” is a disclosure about their sex life. Which...no. When I say I’m gray-ace, I have told you jack shit about my sex life.
The problem with when I attempt to mention or discuss my sexuality in conversation with other people is I frequently feel like I have to contextualize the mention of it with my relationship to sex itself, which is different from how I do/don’t experience attraction. The way asexuality is characterized talked about on a general level as “being uninterested in sex” is misleading, because lack of interest in sex, either the abstract act or concept, or the engaging in it thereof, is separate from lack of attraction to people. So if I say in conversation I’m gray-ace, I worry people will get the wrong impression of what my “interest”, i.e. my relationship to sex, actually is.
The idea that prompted this post - “I have a lot of feelings and opinions about sex and how people/characters have it for someone who’s gray-ace” - is a random thought just passed through my mind but felt incorrect the more I sat with it - just because I’m gray-ace doesn’t mean that it automatically follows that sex is something I can’t or wouldn’t enjoy thinking about. The interest in the subject (provided it’s in a form I enjoy engaging with) is informed by, but functionally separate from the extent to which I experience sexual attraction. And it occurs to me this is a distinction that I haven’t seen made very often (if at all), because “relationship towards/interest in or around sex” and “who you are/aren’t sexually attracted to and to what extent” are frequently considered either irrevocably intertwined or one and the same.
On Facebook I made my usual National Coming Out Day post. I like to do it as a reminder to people who know, an FYI to people who don’t, and to provide updates if anything relevant has changed in the interim.
The main change this year, which was very recent (as in, I only made this decision two days ago while I was talking with my therapist), is to switch from using ace-spectrum as my sexual orientation word to gray-asexual (or gray-ace).
I didn’t expand upon why I was making the change on FB, but I feel like doing it here - possibly to brag and feel proud about how I figured some shit out, but considering I’m about to get personal, it’s also because some of the things I realized that led to this decision are pretty important to me and hopefully maybe could be helpful for someone(s) else. Cliche as this next bit is, if one person reads this and is like “I relate to some or all of what you wrote”, it will have been worth it to write and post it.
When I was 21, I’d spent three years IDing as ace and heteroromantic, after spending all of middle school and high school not IDing as anything because nothing fit and generally feeling like a freak for not feeling like I was straight or gay or bi or basically anything. That year, I became sexually attracted to someone for the first time in my life, and I freaked the fuck out. Both because it was happening at all, and because it was a guy I was attracted to. I’d spent enough time in online queer spaces already to know that, as a heteroromantic ace, I was barely considered queer to begin with, that there was no meaningful difference between me and a straight person because I wasn’t same-gender attracted and because I didn’t experience homophobia. Now here I was, attracted to guy, and I felt like I’d been faking having a queer identity this entire time, that I really was a straight person all along (never mind that, then and now, when I try to mentally see myself as straight I mentally cannot do it, it makes me feel vile and like I’m hurting myself). I’ve been battling this shame for years, that most of the times I’ve been sexually interested in a person or a fictional character, they’ve been male. Even after I came out as trans and stopped thinking of myself as female, I continued to feel shame, because I am and am still routinely read as, an AFAB individual, so it didn’t feel like it counted when it came to whether I was “straight” or not.
Then there was the fact that I was feeling sexual attraction at all. I hadn’t realized it, but part of me was relieved during the time I felt like I was firmly ace that I wasn’t interested in having sex, because it meant I didn’t have to deal with all the complicated personal/interpersonal/societal crap and reckoning that comes along with being a sexual person in a Puritan-originated country - if I wasn’t going to have sex or engage in a sexual relationship, why bother? And then I became sexually attracted to this guy, and I wanted to have a sexual relationship with him, and suddenly I had to deal with all the toxic shit I’d arrogantly ignored because I assumed it’d never be applicable to me - namely the (horror!) reality of seeing myself as a sexual person and that not being a bad thing. That, as a female person then, as an agender person now, it wasn’t and isn’t a bad thing that I’m a sexual person, in whatever way that’s true for me.
I ended up experiencing shame on two fronts - the shame of feeling like I was a fake/pretending queer, and the shame of being a sexual person in a world that tells people, particularly women/women-adjacent/used-to-be-women-and-still-have-some-history-with-that-identity people, that being a sexual person is intrinsically wrong. These two things, combined with how the story ended up playing out with me and this person (and additional shame on my part of how that story played out), saw me a year or two later with a Gordian knot of issues surrounding my sexuality and relationship to sex that I could not untangle on my own and have been living with for years. I’ve only just started making progress at starting to untangle it (thanks, therapy!)
As all this was going down, I stopped using “asexual” as my label and adopted “ace-spectrum”. At the time I wanted to emphasize that I was somewhere on a spectrum and it wasn’t clear where I was, but that I was on it. But I also wanted to emphasize the “ace” part, first and foremost. That I was still an ace person of some kind, even if it wasn’t as clear-cut as before. That I was still “more queer than not”, and that ace-ness was an important lens through which I had and continued to filter and process and understand the world and people around me and myself.
Recently the label has been growing uncomfortable and I’ve been sensing its limitations for me. I’ve been struggling with feeling like I have to justify the times when I’m a sexual person (in whatever way that means to me) with the times I’m not (such as how I go about my life 98% of the time never seeing or interacting with anyone through a sexual lens and not feeling the inclination to). I’ve been left feeling like I’m alternating between “allosexual” and “asexual”, and like there’s something wrong with me - that I’m “less queer” - the times I’m “allosexual” - also again, because the people/characters involved are men.
And this week, I came to the decision that I’m done trying to justify myself to myself and feel shame about who I am and what I experience, whether because of ideology, politics, or the reality of what does or doesn’t go on in my brain and/or my pants.
I’m switching to IDing as gray-asexual because the term, now, encompasses mixture that is my experience of ace-ness and allo-ness - not a one or the other thing, or a half-on-half-off thing, but something where the two inform and intersect and coalesce together into the final form that is my sexuality. By identifying as gray-ace, it feels like I’m not longer fighting or hiding or justifying the parts of myself I’ve been fighting, hiding, and justifying for years out of shame and fear of censure.
I’m sorry, but I’m going to continue calling bullshit on a database of ace and aro characters that refuses to include Clariel because ~the fact that the Clariel became the undead antagonist was partially influenced by her ace and aro~ness~ but does include a short story about an ace women who works for a company that sells sex robots, and a sleazy guy orders a sex robot that looks exactly like the woman, and later the woman ends up having sex with the sex robot and concludes “Yep, still asexual!”
And of fucking course the database doesn’t list whether the stories are written by actual ace and/or aro people so for all I know 99.5 percent of that database is stories written by allo people!!! Such representation and inclusion and diversity!!!!!!
So last weekend I told my parents I was using “they” pronouns and asked them to use them as well. And just now my dad called me asking whether it was ok, if it came up in conversation or became relevant, to explain to my pronouns and gender/sexuality/identity stuff to people. I already knew my dad was a lovely person, but I never dreamed he would be so wonderful about listening to me when I told him these things about me and being respectful about it.
