Hi hello, I've gone through your whole blog and it's fantastic! Now for my question, which is actually a general...wondering? Have you heard or seen sources for why the AVEN founder, David Jay, is apparently homophobic/misogynist/AntiSemitic? Myself and other Ace Twitter people are looking, but so far all we've found is normal queer growing pains and people making stuff up. I saw that you intended to look into AVEN eventually, so I thought maybe you'd have info?
I’m not planning on doing a post on AVEN any more at this point, because I’m so far removed from that drama and that website that at this point it just feels silly, but yeah, we can talk about David Jay. That might as well be how I start my day.
Let’s start with the fact that these arguments, regardless of any truth to them, are always being made in bad faith. The argument is never “David Jay is a bad person and shouldn’t be in charge of AVEN (aside: is he actually in charge of anything any more? He’s not listed on the moderation team at AVEN any more), and you probably shouldn’t use him as a source of information about asexuality,” it’s always “David Jay is a bad person, and therefore asexuality is bad, and therefore all asexual people are bad.” One of those, given reasonable evidence (take note of that disclaimer, it’ll be relevant later), is a reasonable argument. One of those isn’t.
With that said, let’s break down the arguments under the cut.
If they’re saying “David Jay is homophobic!” what they most likely mean is “David Jay made a joke on an AVEN thread once that involved a slur that I don’t think he has the right to use!” Here’s the thread, which is a shitshow all the way down to be honest, but is peak 2003 Internet. User AVENguy is David Jay, and posts in the thread about changing a university LGBTQ+ group’s acronym to include the word f*g. Given that no such university group has any web presence at all, ever, that I can find (and in particular, Wesleyan University, which is the school Jay attended, seems to generally use queer for its services and student groups), I’m reasonably confident that is is meant to be a joke poking fun at the length of the extended acronym, which you’d think exclusionists would love given how much they love chopping that acronym off at the knees in defiance of all history and logic. Now, I’m not saying that it’s a joke in good taste. But it smells like a joke to me, and doesn’t get treated as one in the court of Internet opinion.
Whether Jay actually has the right to use that particular slur is, to my mind, up for debate as he has had relationships with men (I believe he’s currently in a committed polyamorous relationship with a man and a woman?). I don’t know whether he IDs as bi in addition to ace, although I know people on Tumblr have made that claim. I’ve never seen a source one way or the other. I don’t know whether he’s attracted to men. I do know that I’m 100% not interested in interrogating what words he does and does not have permission to use based on a detailed history of his relationships.
If they’re saying “David Jay is a misogynist!” what they most likely mean is “David Jay has had sex and didn’t enjoy it, and the way he talks about it in interviews is uncomfortable.” See this interview for an example of this. What statements like this get interpreted into is the classic exclusionist line of “asexual people are being manipulative if they have sex”. The way Jay talks about sex is definitely not the way that someone who isn’t ace would expect to talk about sex. It’s not the way that I talk about sex, as an asexual person. But I’m not uncomfortable in a “this man is definitely treating these women badly” way, I’m uncomfortable in a “oh boy, you were obviously making some choices here that weren’t great for you” way. YMMV.
I’ve also heard allegations that Jay was “documenting his sex life with his ex-wife on AVEN.” Given that 1) Jay has never been married, 2) I don’t have enough search terms to go on to find the threads in question, and 3) I definitely don’t remember seeing something like that back in the day when I was actually active on AVEN, I’m inclined to discount that, but it’s an argument that’s out there.
If they’re saying “David Jay is antisemitic!” what they most likely mean is “I don’t like the AVEN logo.” This is honestly one I’d never heard before, and I’m not confident that this is right. If David Jay has actually said or done something that is antisemitic, though, I’m not able to find reference to it. So I’m guessing it stems from something like this, in which an anon is calling out the AVEN logo as antisemitic (under the assumption that is is based on the pink triangle). AVEN’s triangle gradient logo is based on the Kinsey scale (see here for an example of this diagram in use). It is a reconfiguration of the Storms Model. The fact that it is the same shape as the pink triangle is coincidental.
I feel like there could also be a connection to the AVEN mod drama of 2015-2016 - at the time, AVEN’s forums had rules that were enforced in such a way that peoples’ threads would get locked for pointing out that something someone else had said was bigoted (under “personal attacks” rules IIRC). I don’t remember whether there were specific incidences around that rule with antisemitic hate speech, but it is possible. Striking this part because I’ve managed to pull up some of the old references to the mod drama (see here for some details) which was actually older than I remembered it being, and am not finding any references to antisemitism accusations. So it’s probably just the triangle, which again, has no connection to the pink triangle. Two things can be the same shape without being based off each other.
So there you have it. These are the crimes of which David Jay has been accused. I find the evidence to be specious and open to interpretation at best, and flat-out lies at worst. You can, of course, make your own judgement calls.
My personal opinion is that I don’t really like the guy, but I will defend to the death the facts that he is not the be-all and end-all of asexuality, and he probably doesn’t deserve all of the vitriol that is slung at him.
