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Asexuality: About

Asexuality

Love Doesn’t Equal Sex.

It’s important to remember that asexuality is an umbrella term, and exists on a spectrum. Asexual people – also known as “Ace” or “Aces” – may have little interest in having sex, even though most desire emotionally intimate relationships. Within the ace community there are many ways for people to identify.

Here are just a few common terms to explore:

  • Aromantic: People who experience little to no romantic attraction, and are content with close friendships and other non-romantic relationships.
  • Demisexual: People who only experience sexual attraction once they form a strong emotional connection with another person.
  • Grey-A (also Grey or Greysexual): People who identify somewhere between sexual and asexual.
  • Queerplatonic: People who experience a type of non-romantic relationship where there is an intense emotional connection that goes beyond a traditional friendship.

Aces commonly use hetero-, homo-, bi-, and pan- in front of the word romantic to describe who they experience romantic attraction to. For example, a person who is hetero-romantic might be attracted to people of a different sex or gender, but not in a sexual way. Continue reading from The Trevor Project

 

Finding Asexuality in the Archives

In 1981, a woman named Catherine Kobaly wrote a letter to the feminist newspaper Heresies. She thanked them for their recent issue that centered marginalized sexualities but added, “I also felt a bit left out, for among the many points of view represented, I was unable to find one with which I could identify wholeheartedly.”

Kobaly was asexual, she wrote, and so were most of her friends. She recounted wrestling with shame over her identity, noting that mainstream American society promoted the notion that “the lack of a sexual partner, and especially the lack of a history of sexual partners”—a possible signifier of asexuality—“is seen as a negativity, a lack, an expression of the incompleteness of a human being.” For years, Kobaly had watched gay, lesbian, transgender, and bisexual activists parade down Fifth Avenue as part of annual Pride celebrations.  Continue reading from Slate

 

From Our Collection

Link to The Ace and Aro Relationship Guide by Cody Daigle-Orians in the catalog
Link to A Quick and Easy Guide to Asexuality by Molly Muldoon in the Catalog
Link to The Invisible Orientation by Julia Sondra Decker in the Catalog
Link to Asexual Erotics by Ela Przybylo in the Catalog
Link to Blank Spaces by Cass Lennox in Hoopla
Link to Loveless by Alice Oseman in the Catalog
Link to How to Be a Normal Person by TJ Klune in the Catalog
Link to Gender Queer by Maia Kobabe in the Catalog
Link to Rick by Alex Gino in the Catalog