inspired by an old blog post and a New Year's meme, i decided to document the last decade of my journey re: identity as a #Black, #Queer, #Nonbinary & #Asexual person in the form of a video...
...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...?
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.
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…
anonymous asked: I share very similar feelings on the topic of asexuality. I am also an asexual living in Japan, and I’m embarrassed to admit that I just recently learned the words and meanings for Aセクシュアル and ノンセクシュアル. Since I am not aromantic, that would mean I’m “nonsexual,” but I feel like the “A”/”ace”/”asexual” word itself is a big part of my identity. I feel a little upset over it. I want to still identify as asexual, but I also don’t want to confuse and have to explain thoroughly everytime. Thoughts? Ty! (for those interested, see: [ these ] [ relevant ] [ posts ] and [ this page ] of links) i felt and still feel the same way, so i just use Aセクシャル / アセクシャル / Aセク and deal with whatever confusion or misunderstanding may eventually result from that on a case-by-case basis. that, or i straight up…
as someone who can count on one hand the number of people they’ve ever had intense feelings for over the course of 32 years of this thing called “Life” and still have fingers to spare, can i just say that this whole intense feelings thing is an adjustment? with a learning curve, apparently, because what little past experience i have feels like nothing in comparison, and yet has still managed to do nothing but hinder me in the present. might as well only count the one finger. yes. that finger. because fuck you, ghosts of relationships past that still haunt me to this day.
i know i’ve mostly been M.I.A. this Asexual Awareness Week, but @buzzfeedlgbt made a really nice video for their Facebook page in celebration of AAW that i was lucky enough to be a part of. check it out, if you haven’t already. browse the comments that people have left at your own risk, however. a huge thank you to Sarah at BuzzFeed LGBT for putting this together and to whoever may have pointed her in my direction. 🙂
