#i support the gays!!! but can we have some nuance for aroace identities please

[livingasaghost]

okay one thing i wish queer people especially had more nuance about in media is that while i do think we need more canonically gay ships (and characters and plots etc etc) i also think there are so many Queer Ships specifically that are not being appreciated for being friendships. like it pisses me off that for whatever reason queer friendships (that are like...two steps removed from being queer partnerships they just don't kiss or have sex) do not get the same hype or appreciation as the romantic ships. and hell i don't even wanna use the phrase "romantic ships" to just describe partnerships. i think queer friendships are romantic as hell and a lot of people just do not care or recognize that!!! like this all comes back to society's erasure and ignorance of the aro/ace/aspec identities but it's so annoying because all of this queerness can and should coexist. it's a fine line between "okay this is clearly gay partnership subtext" and "this friendship is a little too queer to be hetero but idk if they'd actually fuck" - but just because two men are queerly best friends it doesn't mean that isn't just as relevant or important as two homo partners. i get that we need more explicit gay rep and i'm not denying how important and powerful and meaningful that is...but seeing a rise in really queer coded friendship content is actually such a great thing and i wish people would stop being so rude about it! like i get it you want your two blorbos to kiss! but counter argument: two blorbos learn each other intimately without sexual attraction and realize that being friends with another person is actually really powerful and life-changing and Queer in its own way!!!

but also in a much more real sense...my god disney, please just fucking make the gay lokius partnership canon i swear to god

[svartalfhild]

Today, for Ace Week, I’m going to talk about issues surrounding asexuality and relationships and my experiences in that area.  For me, that’s more of a Lack Thereof situation, though.  I also want to touch on some non-romantic types of relationships, like ace friendships and bi/ace solidarity.

Being a romantically inclined asexual is a fucking trip and a half, y’all.  I’m also demiromantic, so that adds a layer of difficulty and confusion to everything.  It’s hard to understand your own attraction to people, let alone explain it to others, when there’s so much nuance involved.

It seems like a pretty common experience for aces is the deep fear that no one will want you because you’re ace, or that an existing relationship will fall apart because of it.  I definitely feel that way most of the time.  Sure, there are lots of people out there who say that they’d date an ace, but I often wonder how many of them actually genuinely mean it.  Like when the cards are all on the table, are they going to really be fine with the idea still?  Sex seems so important to so many people that it’s become hard to imagine many allosexuals being entirely fine with the notion of a partner who’s not attracted to them in that way and may even be sex-repulsed. 

Aces are often told that they shouldn’t date people who aren’t also ace, because supposedly if you do that, you’re trapping them in an unfulfilling relationship.  Some people even go as far as to call it abusive, and that’s quite upsetting, especially when you internalize that idea and can’t shake the feeling that you can’t be with someone without hurting them.

On top of that, aces who are in relationships that are perceived as straight have to deal with the heavy challenges to their queerness.  Exclusionists love to bring out that “cishet aces” idea and claim that aces are just straight people who don’t like sex, which is all kinds of incorrect, but it’s how they rally other queer people behind the notion that aces don’t belong in the community.  Aces in the relationships perceived as straight get held up as proof of that bullshit.

Then there’s the aroaces who get pressured by society to engage in relationships, which is rough af.  I know less about that struggle, since I have romantic attraction, but I’m very aware that it exists, and society needs to be open to the idea that some people are fully content with living a sex and romance free life.

I’m personally most familiar with the struggles of feeling unwanted and unwelcome.  Being anxious and depressed all the time really does not help on that front and it sort of becomes an osmosis of bad feelings.  I’ve found it’s easier to fight back against feeling unwelcome, because there are plenty of people in the community who are willing to show you support and affirm that you belong.  Feeling unwanted, though.  That’s a more complicated and personal issue that can’t easily be resolved without first putting yourself in a very vulnerable position.

Sometimes finding comfort in solidarity between ace friends can be difficult, because the ace spectrum is so wide and varied that two ace people can share an identity but have fundamentally different perspectives on the ace experience that make it hard to connect in certain ways.  I’ve noticed, for example, that there’s often a difference in ace humor tastes between romantic and aromantic aces, which can lead to some awkwardness if the difference wasn’t anticipated.  It seems easiest for aces to connect when talking about experiences they’ve had facing society’s expectations.  That’s the same line of connection where bisexual solidarity with asexuals comes in, because both groups face heavy erasure and that “you’re either straight and looking for attention or gay and in denial” nastiness that gets pulled out all the time.

I guess my advice for allos who want to be supportive of aces in this area is that you should try to be aware that these are the sorts of things we face and that dating looks like a minefield to us a lot of the time.  If you’ve got feelings for an ace in your life, please be aware of the types anxieties aces are likely to have if you want to pursue that relationship.

[overelegantstranger]

I had a headache at the time I saw your original post so I didn't feel up to engaging with it much, but if/when you have the time and energy, please could you expand on your behaviour model of queerness? (feel free to answer privately or publicly, whichever you prefer)

Hey,yeah, so! First off, sorry this took me a little bit to get to; I wasn'toperating on full brain for a while there. Anyway, the idea of Queerness as aDiscrete Identity only really started to happen in the late 1800s, when EdwardCarpenter (a gay guy in a long-running relationship, incidentally) startedyelling about it. This is part of an attempt to assert queerness as a thingseparate from morals, as a part of one's identity and as something thatdeserves a struggle for rights same as any other demographic.

I agree withthis, just in case anyone watching this thinks I want queer folks to end uplike Oscar Wilde and Simeon Solomon. I don't. But, nevertheless, in my personalopinion we lost something, as queer people, when the identity-centered approachCarpenter started took hold. The thing about identity centered approaches isthat they more easily create an us/them dynamic. Queer people become discreteunits that Straight Society can dismiss as a "them", when before - asDeborah Lutz puts it in my favourite ever book ever, "if people discoveredsuch things as sodomy existed, they might try it for themselves". StraightSociety is, by and large (but not Fully) "safe" from that anxietynow.

You're either "Gay", or you're"Straight"; you're a "them" or an "us". Thisforms an essential bracketing off of experience, because identities areactually much slippier. The lines between trans identity and gay identity areincredibly slippy, for example. Carpenter himself articulates gay male identityas having a "woman's soul". Trans and gay identities are very closelywound together; to be gay, in the late 1800s and early 1900s, is to begenderqueer.

This got separated out; I'm not sure what came first, greaterunderstanding of transness or respectability politics, but nevertheless, to adegree, identity politics allowed this distinction to happen because it hadlaid down a framework in which there could be uses and thems with regard to sexuality and non-cis gender experiences. Once"them" became a discrete class rather than just an immoral version of"us", it could be further distinguished and shifted, by both the inand out groups. I am not sure of quite the dynamics at play here but queernessgot stripped of its aspects until the only difference between the"us" and the "them" was the gender of the person you hadsex with. This was your identity, now; this was a Category you could exist in.It gained some nuances (Carpenter suggests all queer men are effeminate andarty) and lost others (your gender wasn't inherently slippery, any more). Butbecause of that slimlining of the categories, lots of people found themselveswithout category. Due to the new framework, we make identity after identity.That's fine. I have no problem with that. But categories come with measuringdevices, and all out-groups measure you for "fitness".

I've lost my thread. Anyway, you start with two distinctcategories. "Gay" and "Straight". "Gay" lost itsgenderqueerness quite early, if I recall, though I'm not sure of the actualdynamics. "Bi" immediately troubles this bracket, because you can'tfit bi folk into either. They don't measure up to the requirements of thecategories. This is why, in my opinion, a lot of biphobic folks will fall backon behavioural models. They'll use your behaviour to try and figure out whereyou fall. Rightly, a lot of bi people have fought against this and establishedfor themselves their own box.

Mainstream queer history is the constant creationof boxes. I don't necessarily disagree with this; I certainly see the impulse.But boxes necessitate measuring yourself. You have to always be enough to fitin the box, even if you made it for yourself. You're always seperated, even ifyou share a line with another person's box. Everything you do is measuredagainst the box. If your identity changes or your understanding of yourselfdevelops, you have to change the dimensions of your box (generally impossible,because we don't have personal control over many of the boxes. Boxes can changeshape if enough inhabitants decide it needs to change, but most of the time wejust move boxes).

This is an exhausting process because it requires you watchyourself at all times, to measure every aspect every time it changes. This is,in my opinion, especially exhausting because of the lines we've put up aboutnot claiming words unless you fit this box or that box, not talking about thisissue if you're not a Known Inhabitant of Box 54 And You Can Prove It. Likebringing an electric bill to prove your address, you have to present yourexperiences to prove your box-membership. So we become constantly aware and onedge; constantly waiting to whip out a ruler and measure, to prove to ourselvesor others that we belong.

Another aspect of identity models is that the act ofboxing isolates one part of your identity from another. Your gender is hangingaround in one box, while your sexuality throws a ball against the wall ofanother, and never the twain shall meet. What happens if you feel those aspectsare intertwined? What if, as I have seen often, you feel more a man whenattracted to men and more a woman when attracted to women? What if you feel youfit the definition of cis woman but your attraction to women makes you feeldistanced from womanhood in some way? What if you're aroace and a woman but youfeel isolated from the "woman" box because so many of your fellowinhabitants are allo? Do you make a new box to hold All of you or do you justcontend with living with your identities boxed apart?

Constant measuring is stressful and painful and confusingand I reject the lot of it. I reject the idea that my identity can be boxed.I open myself to the idea that my orientation and gender do not have to be pegson which my identity hangs; I open myself out to the possibility that none ofit fucking well matters. I am queer, and that's it. All the little pieces of itdon't matter. There's nothing to measure, nothing to live up to; I'm queerbecause I reject "straight" norms, and that's it. I'm not going toreplace it with another set of norms just so that I can wave my electric billin front of a REG.  What I do is moreimportant to me than whether I could fit this identity or that identity. How Ibehave is more important to me than proving I belong.

I could call myselfa polysensual, polyalterous gray-ace, aromantic androgyne; I could chase categories until every aspectof me is defined. Those categories, however, because every spare corner isfilled up with gatekeepers and discoursers, require things of you.

Polysensualrequires you to evaluate what you want from people and who you want it from,and not only what you would do butyour gut responses, the hypotheticals, the maybes. Polyalterous requires you,even though the very word is meant to mean a slipperiness between friendshipand romance, to make sure you can’t tellthe difference. Aroace requires you, again, to understand distinctions youmay not even be able to read. It requires you to measure every incident of attractionagainst a measure you don’t understand and feel constantly like someone’s goingto look through your list of attractions and make sure you count as aromantic,as ace.

Does the single time I felt sexual attraction to some celebrity discountme? Was I really talking myself into this crush or that crush? The time Iwanted a male classmate to look at me, to be impressed with me, to hold my handand kiss me – is that a romantic crush? Was that alterous, because of the timea bit later when I was dating a roommate and I felt full of glass? Androgynerequires you to examine your whole life, to evaluate yourself against girlnessand boyness and every time you tip away from one or towards another or away fromthe system entire, you find yourself lost and confused and remeasuring, but everytime you measure the ruler has changed dimensions.

I chose other words, but those too leave you dogged by the feelingthat you’re not enough, that you don’t deserve those words or communities ordefinitions; that someone’s going to see right into you and find you don’t fit.I got tired of it, I got pissed off. I’m sick of the idea that something elseinside me can be measured; that what I choose and want and claim is somehowless important than some essential Inner Self.

I fully support the use of labels, self-identification, thewaving of flags, the coining of words. I think everyone should have access toall the tools they possibly can find in order to find communities, to feel likethemselves, to understand themselves, to be understood. I don’t believe thatany identity inherently requires extreme self-analysis but I think the systemwe have, certainly on tumblr and online more generally, is sliding rapidlytowards requiring it.  I do not mean tosuggest that everyone should take ona behavioural model for themselves. I do however think that the climate we haveonline is making things less helpful, more opaque, via constant gatekeeping.

That is not a fault of the labels themselves, but it is a consequenceof identity-based models falling prey to respectability politics andauthoritarian mindsets.

That is not a fault of the labels themselves, but it is a consequenceof identity-based models falling prey to respectability politics andauthoritarian mindsets.

Moving away from a behavioural model was, at first, a goodthing, because it moved discussions of queerness away from morality. It did,however, wash us up where we are now – full of “discourse” and infighting andconstant, constant measuring.

Not everyone is going to be unhappy with the system as it isand that’s fine. Perhaps in encouraging them to do as they want while I do as Iwant I’m making another box, but perhaps I’m not.

There are aspects of the identity model I keep, but wordsand definitions have become less important to me as I’ve gone on. It is, forinstance, important to my sense of self now that I use he/him, that I feel asense of odd kinship with those troubling, “effete”, arty, dandyish, decadent,immoral gentlemen of the late eighteen-nineties. How I specifically define mysexuality is less important to me than the fact that I’m with Book, that I’mgoing to be with Book my whole damn life. How I define my sexuality is lessimportant to me than what I actually do and who do it with. It’s imperfect. I’mnot sure I’ll ever be able to fully move away from an identity-model in someform, partly because the identity-model is so pervasive that if you refuse anidentity you’re presumed cis and straight. This is happening even now with queer; even though queer is itself anidentity label, its lack of measurability has lead it to be considered spicy cishet.

If any box can be redefined as “cishet” the second a morevocal box disagrees with it, I don’t want to play by those rules and wait to bemade cishet; I want my behaviour to speak for me. I want people to have to consider me queer because theycan see I’m not-straight, I want to evade those who would shove me intostraightness just because I don’t fit their boxes.