I wrote this at the end of Ace Week in 2025. I’ve added a few more links within the post for clarity.
I spent the past week sharing other people’s asexuality-related posts, videos, and articles for Ace Week. While Ace Week is technically over now, I’m here all year, sooo… I thought I’d write about how I got here.
Teenage me assumed I was straight because I had only ever been interested in boys. I supported friends in their orientation journeys and I was pretty open despite my black & white upbringing peppered in homophobia, so I assumed whatever I felt that didn’t match what other people claimed they felt was just a matter of age, time, experience. The reality was that for all the openness, jokes, or theoretical interest, I wasn’t sexually interested in anyone. I had short, fleeting crushes but nothing stuck around long enough to do anything about and I didn’t really want to bother with it knowing I wouldn’t care anymore in a few hours or days.
Had I had the language, including everything I know now about the split-attraction model, I would have had a strong inkling that I was asexual, graysexual, or demisexual by 15-16. But I didn’t have the language. The options were straight or gay. Anyone bisexual was just performing or going through a phase on the way to gay. People readily asked “who’s the man” at people in not-straight-enough relationships. I personally heard commentary about becoming a nun or growing up to be an old maid in a house full of cats all of the time. Then, when I did date – fully on my own terms – I was perceived as doing it wrong. One must perform heterosexuality one very specific, narrow way or else! I wish I’d had a book, an infographic, a website, a pamphlet, something to throw at these people. Instead, I was socially isolated, treated like an asshole or a child for making decisions about how I wanted to exist and behave according to my own terms, and picked at or joked about. By the time I actually needed people to talk to to help me process relationships not going well, I didn’t have a support system.
Around 18 or 19 I somehow landed on the word asexual online. The words were still lacking, and whatever I read was a sex-repulsed, partially oblivious aroace experience. While I related to some of the social experiences these people had, I wasn’t that. I regularly joked about sex and didn’t mind the subject in an intellectual or artistic way. I knew when people were flirting with me. I felt love. I guess I wasn’t asexual, then? I guess I was straight with a nonexistent libido? Maybe I was still just young and inexperienced?
I came back to the term around age 22 after a bad relationship where, without evidence or cause, I was repeatedly accused of an imminent future where I would cheat on him. I wasn’t sexually compelled by anyone at all. Why the fuck would I cheat? As that ended, I realized whatever experience of sexuality I had was separate of a target. Literally asexuality. I still put down “straight” on forms. The one time I was directly asked about my orientation, I said I was “99%” sure I was straight. Nope. I was not sure. I was tripped up and assuming straight because I had had crushes on and relationships with boys/men and some limited and fleeting amount of sexual interest. The language just wasn’t there for me.
In the following decade as Tumblr came to exist and Youtube channels like Sexplanations popped up, I periodically read more about orientation and came across the idea that romantic and sexual orientation were separate and that everything was a spectrum, not a binary. Then I started seeing microlabels pop up. Maybe I was one of those? Well, didn’t matter, it was obvious enough I had asexual leanings by now, and privately acknowledging that I fell somewhere on that spectrum was fine since, for all intents and purposes, I had straight-ish behavior.
At about 37 I began to refresh my sexual education in general and go on a journey. It was important that I not be silent, complicit, appear to just go with the flow, or live in a state of apathy or ignorance or with an attitude of “well, it’ll all work out because it always does”. This is how we ended up here (speaking politically). I picked a battle. That brought me close to people in the sex industry and ideas I didn’t even know I’d held were challenged. I realized my orientation fell in the gray area of multiple spectrums. Maybe the microlabels were indeed valuable after all. Was I graysexual…?
Not long after that I had another terrible experience with a presumably straight man. This was eventually followed up by more, with assumptions of behavior purely based on gender put upon me, ignoring me for me and not asking even the most basic questions because all women are/do x and are just there to live in service to men at their whim. Personality? Nuance?! Never! Women go in the woman box. There’s no need for further information. At best sometimes there’s a few more boxes for tokenized behavior or fetishized interests.
I reflect back now and it’s obvious I’ve always been ace to me and should be obvious to anyone who’s known me long enough to consider it, but with frustrating shit like this, it seems that advocacy is still important. Why not me be the advocate? Why do I still allow space for “must be straight” to exist? I don’t give a fuck what some ignorant, hateful billionaire thinks, but it matters when it pushes people back in the closet, prevents growth, stomps on rights, or hinders basic human courtesy. If that’s what someone sees from people in power, why would they think to do any different? At this point with the intentional political exclusion of anything past LG with further intention to do away with gay marriage, probably I should stop the “must be straight” trail of thought when I see it happening.
In reality, my family are religious types where straight relationships in service to child-rearing are held as the pinnacle of existing. I’m already dismissed and ignored for discarding all of that. The chosen friends I’ve had, when I’ve been acknowledged, I’ve been seen as a man-hater or fetishized, or they’ve made attempts to push me back into amatonormativity (aka “you’d be happier if you dated”). I was looked down at as lying by one doctor, pathologized by another, and told in so many words my future was in service to my family (aka breed or else) by a third. My orientation isn’t something people readily see, I live in one of the safest places possible, I’ve lost whatever give-a-shit I had when I was younger, and yet I still just don’t feel safe throwing it out there as a matter of identity. If I go with ace without further description, folks without education make assumptions just the same as they had when I was a teenager. It seems apparent enough that with the amount of resources there are online now that someone making broad, ridiculous assumptions is probably not a person for me anyway, as I’m definitely not interested in people I consider too stupid or too arrogant to even consider googling something. But I more worry about controlling worldview people, people who think everyone who doesn’t think exactly like them requires forced change or derision.
I think back and wish I’d grown up knowing that asexuality was possible, that romantic and sexual (and emotional and sensual and physical and intellectual and and and) attraction could be separate things. I wish it hadn’t been all binary all the time. I wish I’d had the words and information there when I was wondering why I wasn’t feeling what my peers supposedly were. I wish I hadn’t viewed sexuality narrowly connected to romance and monogamy, that some adult or authority figure or peer would have listened to me and explained that I could love multiple people at once in many different ways and I didn’t have to date or have sex with anyone if I didn’t want to, that I was the authority on what I felt, what I wanted to do with my time, and who I wanted to spend my time with, AND I deserved respect. I wish I’d had transparent examples that weren’t literally aliens or robots. I wish I’d known someone else who was ace, especially if they’d also skipped the whole religious brainwashing train. I wish, even after I knew the word asexuality and otherwise had clues that I wasn’t straight, I didn’t feel an adherence to being seen as straight.
But here we are. And now, once again seeing the importance of discussing this at least some of the time, I’m making the effort.
Some of the links I posted during Ace Week:
https://www.reddit.com/r/Asexual
https://www.reddit.com/r/asexuality/
https://www.reddit.com/r/Greysexuality/
https://www.reddit.com/r/demisexuality/
https://fuckyeahasexual.tumblr.com/
https://gray-ace-space.tumblr.com/
8 Things Being Asexual Has Taught Me
Being Not Straight
Letters to an Asexual #3
Debunking Asexual and Aromantic Myths
Asexual: A Love Story
Four Things About Sex and Romance that are Bulls%$t