Sorry for all this, but since I’ve been blocked I can’t actually directly respond.
It’s great that you think that A became Asexual from Ally when AVEN forced the issue, but… AVEN formed in iike, what, 2000?
I can personally remember A being Asexual in the 90s, before that event.
My partner remembers it from the 80s, and points out that sometimes there were two As (Asexual and Ally) and sometimes two Qs (Queer and Questioning).
I know Marsha P. Johnson and Silvia Rivera were influential in the late 60s and early 70s, but they did not start the community. They were organizers IN the community that already existed. And they were in NYC. The communities in the midwest and California were not entirely identical back in the before times. Hell, the lesbians and the gays couldn’t always be in the same room with one another and stay polite.
The internet has homogenized this stuff some, but back in the 80s and 90s things weren’t quite as consistent as they have become.
The ‘X’ that Kinsey discussed were absolutely part of the existing queer community, even if they weren’t calling themselves ‘ace’. Same people.
I can’t remember citations, but I’m pretty sure if you go dig up some of good old Magnus Hirschfeld work that you’ll find that pre-WWII queer community in Berlin (ie, the San Francisco of Europe at the time) included discussions of people we would recognize as Asexual.
History is long and complicated. It’s a great story that Aces and Aros are cishet and straight and not part of the community, but it’s a story. It’s revisionist history. It disagrees with my lived experience (I’m old).
The thing that really cheeses me off about this whole conversation is that back in the 80s and 90s you had this exact conversation, except it was about the ‘B’ or the ‘T’. Not the ‘A’. Now, the people making these kinds of exclusionary statements are excluding the ‘A’ from the LGBT. And they use the same kinds of arguments. B people are either straight (and therefore not part of the community) or confused gay people (in which case they were fine). T people aren’t ‘really’ women, so they don’t belong in lesbian spaces. Really they’re just gay men who like dressing up or they’re straight men who don’t belong in the community because they’re some kind of fetishist.
It’s always about peeling off some of these queer identities and reducing them to the ‘actually gay’ part (who are okay, if strange, and part of the community) and the ‘actually straight’ part (who are our oppressors, and don’t belong and are evil and sneaky and trying to horn in on our community and make us unsafe and doing it for attention).
It’s a conversation that makes us poorer every time we have to go through it.
This is a Great Post™. Ace history is not to be ignored or swept under the rug in the name of “discourse”. Thank you for sharing this.
Please understand that we aren’t tokenizing the B & T when we point out that it’s the same tactics recycled against the A. People have lived through it and are trying to warn us of repeating history.
I think we also need to acknowledge that abroad, why do you for some reason assume that all these communities just formed after an American community? Like, we all have different terms in different countries.. Like in Norway we’ve always had “skeiv” and HLBT, and a lot of different words to describe our orientations and genders, but I’ve never heard anyone say ace people aren’t skeiv. So I feel like a lot of this discourse is quite US-centric..
That is an excellent point. This discussion is almost wholly us centric. It would do everyone well to remember that cultural homogenization isn’t a virtue. Just because you divide people in one way doesn’t mean it’s a valid division for anyone else.
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