Something most people don’t know about me is that I am asexual. It’s also timely that I’m publishing this because it’s Asexual Awareness Week from October 20-26th this year. An asexual person is someone who experiences little to no sexual attraction. In high school, I didn’t really know much about asexuality. I didn’t know about it really until the summer before entering college. I took a pre-college seminar on Western classics at a local university, and one evening, in my dorm, I was talking with these two other participants (I will name them Morgan and Jade to protect their privacy) and Jade said she was asexual. She said that she had told a guy at her high school about being asexual and he made fun of her and joked that she was a plant.
“I can kind of relate,” I said. “Guys ask me out on dates and I just wouldn’t be interested.”
“You would be aromantic,” Morgan and Jade told me.
I didn’t think much about it after that. Honestly, I didn’t even think my asexuality was an issue. I walked around the world thinking it was perfectly normal to not want sex or think about sex. In ninth grade I joined my high school’s GSA club (back then, we called it Gay-Straight Alliance, but I did more research and found out that it’s actually called Gender & Sexuality Alliance. Which I think is better because it’s much more inclusive) and I didn’t think I was doing anything out of the ordinary. I just really loved being part of GSA. The people around me were dating and talking about sex, but it just totally went over my head. I assumed I just wasn’t ready yet or was just a late bloomer, but then I got to college, and I still didn’t experience this intrinsic desire to have sex with anyone. In my freshman year of college, I found out that a student ran an asexuality awareness club on campus, and I was pretty interested (this was before I started realizing I was probably asexual) but I didn’t think much of it. Then I went to someone’s dorm room and saw a flag hanging on her wall. It had four stripes: one purple, one black, one grey and the other white. I asked her about it because I only knew about the rainbow LGBT flag.
“Oh, yeah, I’m asexual.”
“What does ‘asexual’ mean?”
“An asexual is someone who doesn’t experience sexual attraction,” she told me.
We ended up talking more about it. And then the next year, I started to wonder if I was really just default straight or if I was another orientation altogether. In high school, I assumed I was straight, then I thought, Wait I care a lot about the LGBT community and get offended when people make homophobic comments. Maybe I’m not straight. Maybe I’m bisexual. Of course, knowing what I know now, there are plenty of straight people who are allies of the LGBTQ+ community. In my sophomore year of college, I started learning about asexuality and in the fall of 2013, I found a site called AVEN (the Asexuality Visibility and Education Network.) However, back then I didn’t know a lot of other asexual people of color other than some bloggers on the Internet and on the AVEN forum. And then I went to my first Asexuality Awareness club meeting in my junior year of college (2015) and because I was so hyperaware of my Blackness, I wondered, Wait, do I belong in the asexual community? Can I be Black and asexual? I had really terrible low self-esteem already, so dealing with this internal conflict, wrestling with my asexuality and Blackness, made me feel pretty awful about myself. I also didn’t know any asexual people in the faith community I was in, so again, I thought, Maybe I’m default straight again. Then I listened to a podcast I really love, and the person being interviewed mentioned she is asexual, and I thought, Wow, I’m not alone. I went to a Buddhist conference for members of the LGBTQIA+ community and allies, and after chanting Nam-myoho-renge-kyo a lot I realized that I could fully embrace myself as I was. I could be my authentic self. I didn’t have to change my sexual orientation for someone else. I could fully embrace being ace. Recently, I started reading a book by Angela Chen called Ace: What Asexuality Reveals About Desire, Society, and the Meaning of Sex. Even though I couldn’t relate to every single ace person’s experience in the book, especially since I’ve never had sex, I found it really affirming because there still isn’t a ton of information about asexuality. These past few weeks I’ve been scrounging the Internet, looking for someone to bestow upon me the asexuality label, to tell me whether I deserved to call myself asexual or not. However, after seeing therapy and doing a lot of self-reflection and my own research, I’m learning that it’s ok for me to be ace, and if I choose another sexual orientation down the line or have sex at some point, it doesn’t invalidate my experiences as an asexual person. Honestly, it’s still a journey of accepting myself, but I’m going to still work through this journey of self-discovery and self-acceptance in the best way I can.
And with that, I’m going to eat some hypothetical cake since I don’t have any slices at the moment in my fridge. I did have some vegan cake last week, though, and it was DELISH.
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