after having lived abroad in Japan and Australia for 11 years, i've finally moved back to America, turning a long distance relationship into a.... not... long distance relationship...
...wouldn't it be great if there was more of a sense of intersectional community, comradery, and identity among aces who are also bi? among aces who are also gay? among aces who are also sans romantic orientation? among aces who are simultaneously a part of any other minority community (sexuality-based or not) in addition to also being ace...?
sometimes i think about how growing up in Las Vegas has affected me. usually this is triggered by something reminding me that growing up listening to house & trance music on the radio isn't exactly common, or when i happen to have an occasion-- for whatever reason-- to question my own apparent insensitivity to public displays of nudity, sexual innuendo, etc. even when it comes to more mundane things...
Happy Asexual Awareness Week! I hope you, reader, are doing well. Last month, I had the pleasure of sitting down with two activists in Japan to shoot this interview about a topic that is pretty dear to me; that is, about the current state of the asexual community in Japan. It goes without saying that everything that’s said in the video is nothing but the experiences and opinions of three people and should NOT be mistaken as being representative of the experiences or opinions of everyone, but at the same time, who better to ask than two of the most active and dedicated people that I know in what is essentially the current hub for ace activity in Japan (Tokyo)? In this 23-minute and 10-question long (bear with me) interview, I sit down with 21 year old YouTuber, ace activist and friend, Nakaken of Seisei Doudou / 性性堂堂, as well…
cw: non-consensual touch and invasion of personal space this past Friday say the TV premiere of 「やがて君になる」 / “Yagate Kimi ni Naru” (“Bloom Into You”), a new anime based on the on-going manga of the same name by 仲谷鳰 / Nio Nakatani. while those who understand Japanese will benefit from the trailer shown above (and here, have another one), continue reading if you’re able to stomach my rudimentary rendition of the basic premise of the anime and what happened in the first episode that has me clinging to my seat in the hope that this particular series may not be your typical 百合 / yuri (sapphic / lesbian) story, but rather an aro/ace coded, mixed orientation ‘love story’. a story about two girls– one an avid reader of romance manga who struggles with having never once experienced for herself the love she reads about, the other having never experienced attraction…
six months on testosterone and navigating having a (over)active libido (or “sex drive”) to show for it. as an ace, suddenly having to navigate having a high libido for the first time in my life has been…. interesting, to say the least.
the following post was written for the May 2018 Carnival of Aces on the subject of “Nuance & Complexity“. it may or may not be cleaned up and cross-posted to the YouTube channel Queer As Cat in the future. —— some feel that people in (English-speaking, anglophone) ace communities are “overthinking” things. that the amount of words and identities (also referred to as “microlabels”) which have been coined in such communities is not only “overdoing it,” but even potentially harmful. i’d hope that this would go without saying (but understand that it doesn’t), that i disagree with the former and vehemently reject the latter. regardless of whether i or you or that random person over there petting the stray cat that’s out in the street right now feel such terminology to be useful to us personally, the fact remains that others do and there is immense value in that.
a little over three months later, the changes that i’m experiencing on 100mg / 2 weeks of injectible testosterone are seemingly more subtle than they were starting out… or perhaps that’s just me being less hyperaware of every single little thing now compared to in the beginning when every single little thing was Amaze and OMG. there’s only so long a person can maintain such hyperawareness of their own body before the hyperawareness itself becomes exhausting, you know? either way, noticeable changes are still happening and in this episode of The T Files i talk about weight gain, changing personal hygiene, higher body temperature, changes in libido and related Asexy Feels along with The Much TMI, So WTF topic of genitalia shiz. and now, stay tuned for an advertisement from our sponsors– Starbucks! bringing Quality Video Descriptions born out of sleep deprivation, fueled by the remnants of our grande Caramel…
note: this post has been ported over as-is from Tumblr for my own future reference. anonymous submitted: (i had a long question, so, i hope it’s ok to use submit instead of sending multiple asks.) as a disclaimer, i ask this as an ace person who usually just ids as queer ace or grey ace. i’m not asking to be combative or make anyone feel bad.
i’ve said this before on Tumblr, but it’s time to make it “official” on YouTube: i don’t identify as biromantic or panromantic anymore. in fact, i don’t identify as “-romantic” anything anymore. after years of quietly questioning my experience of so-called “romantic” attraction, all the while trying to navigate spaces which obviously didn’t have someone like me– someone who neither felt comfortable being assumed “[allo]romantic” nor “aromantic”– in mind, i finally opted to discard romantic orientations (for myself) all together. rather, i identify as a bi ace. as a pan ace. although if i’m being honest, more often than not as a queer ace or more simply as “queer”. but what exactly is the difference between “biromantic ace” and “bi ace”? after over a year of having identified as the latter, it seems to me that thanks to amatonormativity and the general normalization of romantic orientations in ace communities, people don’t see…
