Take my survey on aromanticism and asexuality

[Blue Phoenix Ace]

3 hours ago, morallygayro said:

especially in light of what happened with David Jay

 

What are you referring to? I'm just curious.

 

Good discussion so far I think. Just keep it respectful.

[Mark]

22 hours ago, Cassiopeia said:

 

The LGBT+ community originally had a very different concept of queer identities. The concepts, the terminology, the definitions change. Originally it was a coalition for all sorts of freaks and weirdos, nobody had anything figured out. And yes, this internal catfight is been going on since Forever. Some people wanted to kick out all sorts of segments of this word mosaic at different points in time, usually when it was convenient to do so.

 

Wanting to remove (or add additional) bits to what you aptly describe as "word mosaic" is very much still ongoing.

 

And also, which community are we talking about? There are small groups all over the world, and they aren't exactly uniform. If you speak more than one language, and have engaged in different communities, you will notice the differences.

 

 

Even within one language and culture different groups and organisations can be (very) different in character.
(Terms such as "GSRM", which would include aros of all sexual orientations are uncommon.)
There is a no singular "LGBT+ community". (For similar reasons there is no singular "poly community" or "kink community".)

[Cassiopeia]

1 hour ago, Mark said:

There is a no singular "LGBT+ community". (For similar reasons there is no singular "poly community" or "kink community".)

Ooops. That makes sense. Sometimes I use weird grammar.

[Mark]

19 hours ago, Vega said:

I think it's a bit selfish to kick aro people out of LGBT+ spaces, since frankly many of us are extremely isolated. Besides, the LGBT movement has a history of erasing bi and trans people as well, and those divisions never help the community.

 

I suspect that some organisations would rather consider themselves "gay", "lesbian" or "gay and lesbian" if left purely to their own devices.

Its not like there's a consensus of what "LGBT+" means. By some definitions "LGBTQIA" includes aro.

 

Most likely, even when this was known as the "gay community", (homo) aros were accepted.
 

[Vega]

4 minutes ago, Mark said:

 

I suspect that some organisations would rather consider themselves "gay", "lesbian" or "gay and lesbian" if left purely to their own devices.

Its not like there's a consensus of what "LGBT+" means. By some definitions "LGBTQIA" includes aro.

 

Most likely, even when this was known as the "gay community", (homo) aros were accepted.
 

Of course, and if an organization wants to focus on lesbian/gay or trans or bi or whatever issues, that's their right, and there many issues that only affect a portion of the alphabet soup. I meant to comment on the sentiment that an aro or ace did not belong in any LGBT+ community unless they were also homoromantic or something.

I do also think some services such as mental health lines should be open to anyone under the umbrella.

[Cassiopeia]

1 hour ago, Mark said:

 

I suspect that some organisations would rather consider themselves "gay", "lesbian" or "gay and lesbian" if left purely to their own devices.

 

Oh, I'm quite sure some of them would. Its not like some of them even bother to conceal their rampant bi or transphobia. I have seen Pride organizers asking trans people and crossdressers not to attend because its too offensive for the cishets and what about the chiiiiildren.

[morallygayro]

On 6/4/2016 at 5:11 PM, Cassiopeia said:

There should be resources for aros and aces, we can agree on that. But there aren't.

The problem is, building these safety nets and resources does take time. That time can mean lives, its not like people can reschedule a life crisis because its inconvenient. People "infiltrate" these spaces and resources because they have no choice. And they will continue to to do so until there is an alternative.

 

If there was an alternative, it would be a bit more fair thing to ask them to keep out of LGBTQ+ spaces... I'm not sure if its a right thing right now. I'm certainly not a person who would feel entitled to go around ad decide who is queer enough to deserve more to live.

A lot of LGBT resources were built within five years of Stonewall. Now, we have more technology with which we can communicate, meaning that we can get together and build a community much faster than Sylvia Rivera and her contemporaries did during the 1970s. And I really shouldn't have to remind you - cisgender, heterosexual aros and cis heteroromantic aces are FAR less likely to need something like a suicide hotline or a support group than gay, bi, and trans people. They're also far less likely to be correctively raped, experience job discrimination, or be denied housing.

 

Until we can actually get our collective asses into gear and convince straight cis aros and aces to stop trying to make LGBT people feel unsafe - and I've gotten physically threatened by a straight cis aro for calling them straight -  we can use some LGBT resources, but the ones we use should not go to straight cis people first.

On 6/4/2016 at 6:37 PM, Blue Phoenix Ace said:

 

What are you referring to? I'm just curious.

 

Good discussion so far I think. Just keep it respectful.

Okay. So. Fucking story time. Gather round, children.

 

People had been identifying as asexual or aromantic, in some form or another (I had to research this for a school project - an AU fanfiction of Dracula in which everybody was asexual or aromantic) since at least the late 1800s. Probably longer.

 

But the word asexual was only coined as a label in the nineties, and aromantic in the mid 2000s. They weren't really seen as LGBT, at least not right away. In the early 2000s, David Jay founded the Asexual Visibility and Education Network and ace activism, visibility, and the online ace and aro communities soon took off.

 

David Jay was an asexual cis man who at the time identified as heteroromantic. He was also a notorious homophobe. He re-styled the LGBT acronym to not only include asexuality and aromanticism - without the consent of actual LGBT people, whether ace, aro, both, or neither - but to include gender nonconforming and kinky straight cis people as well. And if that weren't bad enough, he also put the word "fag" in the middle of the acronym and was openly proud to have done so.

 

Pretty soon, hundreds of straight cis aces rallied around him, invading the LGBT community, making its members feel unsafe, demanding the "right" to identify as queer, and bullying any LGBT person who had a problem with that. When the concept of romantic orientation was officially introduced around 2005, straight cis aros did pretty much the same thing. And they've been doing so for years now.

 

David Jay is not an A-spec (asexual and/or aromantic spectrum) messiah. He's not representative of the whole ace, let alone aro, community. But he does have a hell of a lot to answer for.

 

That whole time, all those years that we should have been building an actual community and creating things like suicide hotlines or support groups for aces and aros, was wasted on letting homophobia, transphobia, ableism, misogyny, and racism in the ace and aro communities fester and making thousands of our own people feel unsafe and alienated because of it. Because of David Jay's actions, because of the oppression he encouraged, and because of his failure and that of so many other straight cis A-spec people (especially able-bodied, neurotypical white men) to actually be allies to their marginalized A-spec siblings.

 

Within a year after the Stonewall Riots, Sylvia Rivera and Marsha P. Johnson had managed to get STAR up and running. They were only two people, and one of them was barely a kid. They were both poor, they were both struggling with addiction and mental illness, and they didn't have the Internet or cell phones. Yet they still managed, despite facing multiple obstacles along the way, to start an organization for homeless trans kids.

 

Imagine the resources we could create, now, in the twenty-first century, if we all actually worked together and did something productive for our community. Now that we have the internet, now that we have cell phones, and because so many of us have privileges that have helped catapult us into positions of social power, we have the ability to unite thousands of people across the world to set up suicide hotlines and activist organizations.

 

We have the ability to prioritize our most marginalized members, as we should, rather than doing bullshit like centering white ace perspectives over ace PoC or excusing straight aros' homophobia or silencing A-spec trauma survivors and disabled people or blathering on about """allo privilege""".

 

We could do a lot with that, yet we haven't. And I want to know why.

[morallygayro]

On 6/4/2016 at 5:11 PM, Cassiopeia said:

On 6/5/2016 at 2:19 PM, Mark said:

 

I suspect that some organisations would rather consider themselves "gay", "lesbian" or "gay and lesbian" if left purely to their own devices.

Its not like there's a consensus of what "LGBT+" means. By some definitions "LGBTQIA" includes aro.

 

Most likely, even when this was known as the "gay community", (homo) aros were accepted.
 

Don't ever call gay people "homo" again.

[Cassiopeia]

9 hours ago, morallygayro said:

Don't ever call gay people "homo" again.

Why? What is wrong with that?  I call myself homo (short for homosexual) all the time, is there a problem with that?

 

[paporomantic]

19 hours ago, morallygayro said:

Don't ever call gay people "homo" again.

 

Just out of curiosity, what term do you use to describe an ace who's romantically attracted to the same gender? The only unambiguous term for this that I know is 'homoromantic ace'; some prefer to call themselves 'gay ace' or 'lesbian ace' but I regard these two terms as oxymorons because 'gay' and 'lesbian' normally describe sexuality, as well as the term 'straght ace' ('straight-A') unless the term 'straight' is assigned an extended meaning like 'attracted to the opposite gender in some way but not attracted in any way to any gender that isn't opposite'. (But then, a question arises whether agender is regarded as the opposite of agender. I mean, zero is the opposite of zero )

_______________________________

 

@Blue Phoenix Ace and others interested in the discussion of David Jay or AVEN in general, please note that a containment thread for this has been made today by Simowl's request. As a by-product, this allows to focus the discussion in this thread on the aro/ace separatism, though I'm feeling that a separate thread might be soon needed for the discussion of homo* slurs as well 

[morallygayro]

On 6/4/2016 at 5:11 PM, Cassiopeia said:

On 6/5/2016 at 2:19 PM, Mark said:

 

I suspect that some organisations would rather consider themselves "gay", "lesbian" or "gay and lesbian" if left purely to their own devices.

Its not like there's a consensus of what "LGBT+" means. By some definitions "LGBTQIA" includes aro.

 

Most likely, even when this was known as the "gay community", (homo) aros were accepted.
 

Don't ever call gay people "homo" again.

 

58 minutes ago, aroMa(n)tisse said:

 

Just out of curiosity, what term do you use to describe an ace who's romantically attracted to the same gender? The only unambiguous term for this that I know is 'homoromantic ace'; some prefer to call themselves 'gay ace' or 'lesbian ace' but I regard these two terms as oxymorons because 'gay' and 'lesbian' normally describe sexuality, as well as the term 'straght ace' ('straight-A') unless the term 'straight' is assigned an extended meaning like 'attracted to the opposite gender in some way but not attracted in any way to any gender that isn't opposite'. (But then, a question arises whether agender is regarded as the opposite of agender. I mean, zero is the opposite of zero )

_______________________________

 

@Blue Phoenix Ace

I describe them as gay, because gay means exclusively attracted to one's same and similar genders (i.e. I'm attracted to women, demigirls, transfeminine people, genderfluid and bigender people who are partially women, nonbinary people who aren't men or women but identify more with the female side of the spectrum, and agender/neutrois/neutral people who either identify as women or are feminine and don't identify as men). Since I'm genderfluid between neutrois, agender, androgyne, female, and demigirl, that attraction makes me a lesbian. The fact that I'm aro doesn't change that or make me less of a lesbian in any way.

 

Straight means either 1) a woman who is attracted exclusively to men and male-spectrum nonbinary people or 2) a man who is attracted exclusively to women and female-spectrum nonbinary people. A heteroromantic asexual or an aromantic heterosexual is straight.

 

So, no, gay and ace are not oxymorons. Gay aces aren't any less gay than I am, and their identities aren't for you to decide.

 

I'm a gay aro, not a "homo", not a "homosexual". Gay aces are gay, not homos, not homoromantic. And "gay ace" is a completely non-ambiguous, non-contradictory term for them.

[Cassiopeia]

....But I identify as homo? I am a gay woman aka homosexual aka queer aka a lesbian aka a dyke. I'm fully comfortable with these words, I do not find them insulting.

I do understand if someone is uncomfortable being called these things, and I do respect that wish, but why can't I use them to describe myself?

[paporomantic]

@morallygayro I'd accept this terminology if romantic and sexual were the only kinds of attraction, but the ace community also distinguishes sensual, platonic and aesthetic attractions at least. In this light, it's not clear if the term 'gay ace' means 'gayromantic ace' or 'gaysensual ace' etc. (does the term 'gaysensual' sound good to you?).

 

But overall, your view on who is straight and who is gay is refreshing to me. Your definitions of these terms are broader than I'd expect, and they make sense.

[morallygayro]

12 minutes ago, Cassiopeia said:

....But I identify as homo? I am a gay woman aka homosexual aka queer aka a lesbian aka a dyke. I'm fully comfortable with these words, I do not find them insulting.

I do understand if someone is uncomfortable being called these things, and I do respect that wish, but why can't I use them to describe myself?

But the person who wrote that wasn't gay (and, jusing by his profile and previous posts, believes in monosexual privilege). And you don't speak for all gay people.

9 minutes ago, aroMa(n)tisse said:

@morallygayro I'd accept this terminology if romantic and sexual were the only kinds of attraction, but the ace community also distinguishes sensual and aesthetic attractions at least. In this light, it's not clear if the term 'gay ace' means 'gayromantic ace' or 'gaysensual ace' etc. (does the term 'gaysensual' sound good to you?).

 

But overall, your view on who is straight and who is gay is refreshing to me. Your definitions of these terms are broader than I'd expect, and they make sense.

Sensual and aesthetic attraction do not change your orientation in any way. Being ~•~sensually and aesthetically attracted to men~•~ doesn't mean I'm bi. And no one is ever going to be marginalized for thinking that someone of their same gender is "aesthetically attractive", but actual gay and bi people can be killed because of our identities and our oppressors' reactions to them. 

 

A """homosensual""" aroace isn't gay. They have no right to call themselves gay. They don't belong in gay spaces.

[paporomantic]

5 minutes ago, morallygayro said:

Sensual and aesthetic attraction do not change your orientation in any way. Being ~•~sensually and aesthetically attracted to men~•~ doesn't mean I'm bi.

 

In the AVEN discourse, people prefer to describe themselves with a long but accurate string of labels in such cases, like 'aromantic gaysexual bisensual biaesthetic'.

[morallygayro]

7 minutes ago, aroMa(n)tisse said:

 

In the AVEN discourse, people prefer to describe themselves with a long but accurate string of labels in such cases, like 'aromantic gaysexual bisensual biaesthetic'.

I have never seen an aro or ace gay person, on AVEN or off, describe themselves as "biasthetic" or any other bullshit. And if they did label themselves as biasthetic, they would be a biphobe.

[paporomantic]

You have the right not to care. I just wanted to point out that the approach with a multidimensional vector of orientations is more accurate and I'd totally ask someone with whom I'd consider a QPR to fill in the gaps in the 'I'm _sexual _romantic _platonic _sensual _aesthetic {mono/poly}amorous' statement, as a kind of a compatibility survey that is a first-order approximation to Cassiopeia's survey of boundaries.

 

This is actually relevant to your survey because, when you were asking about whether aromantic heterosexuals should be considered straight, I was wondering whether you had in mind that someone can be aromantic heterosexual gaysensual etc., and whether such a rare case of orientation mismatch would count as a 'reservation' (I wouldn't consider them totally straight - one of their orientations is neither hetero nor A).

[morallygayro]

20 hours ago, aroMa(n)tisse said:

You have the right not to care. I just wanted to point out that the approach with a multidimensional vector of orientations is more accurate and I'd totally ask someone with whom I'd consider a QPR to fill in the gaps in the 'I'm _sexual _romantic _platonic _sensual _aesthetic {mono/poly}amorous' statement, as a kind of a compatibility survey that is a first-order approximation to Cassiopeia's survey of boundaries.

 

This is actually relevant to your survey because, when you were asking about whether aromantic heterosexuals should be considered straight, I was wondering whether you had in mind that someone can be aromantic heterosexual gaysensual etc., and whether such a rare case of orientation mismatch would count as a 'reservation' (I wouldn't consider them totally straight - one of their orientations is not straight).

Wanting to cuddle with your same gender doesn't make you not straight. An aromantic heterosexual is straight afaic, no matter how "gaysensual" they are.

 

I'm a grayromantic lesbian. Those are the only orientations that mean anything to me because those are the only ones that really affect my life or how people treat me.

[paporomantic]

There's sometimes a difference. An aro gaysexual polyamorous pansensual pan-everything-else woman is eligible for passionate friendship with me because I'd allow her to have sex with other women and her cuddles with me would be enough for me to feel appreciated. An aro gay-everything-else woman is platonically incompatible with me. Under your classification, they're both gay.

[morallygayro]

9 minutes ago, aroMa(n)tisse said:

There's sometimes a difference. An aro gaysexual pansensual polyamorous woman is eligible for passionate friendship with me because I'd allow her to have sex with other women. An aro gay-everything-else woman is platonically incompatible with me. Under your classification, they're both gay.

They ARE both gay. And your ridiculous judgment on lesbians' identities reeks of entitlement and misogyny tbh. You don't need to worry, sweetie -  I have a hard time believing that any lesbian would want to be platonically compatible with you, considering that you seem to think that if a lesbian so much as finds a man nonsexually handsome or has male friends, that means she isn't really a lesbian.

[paporomantic]

She's mainly lesbian with a bit of bi. Why is it bad?

[owl]

I'd just like to remind everyone to please remain civil and not resort to insults or attacks on someone's personality etc. and boxing other people into particular labels/identities. 

 

 

Also, this does feel like it's veering a bit off topic (from LGBT/Ace/Aro communities) so again, I might recommend making a new thread, taking it to PM or just relating it back to the general topic of the thread. Thanks.

[morallygayro]

8 minutes ago, aroMa(n)tisse said:

She's mainly lesbian with a bit of bi. Why is it bad?

She's not bi at all. She's a lesbian. There is no such thing as a bi lesbian.

 

Stop telling lesbians how to define our own identities. Stop acting entitled to relationships with lesbians when you're not a wlw.

 

A lesbian is not going to have "a bit of bi" just because you want to be with her, and the fact that you think find men nonsexually, nonromantically attractive makes a woman bi rather than lesbian is the same lesbophobic trash I've heard from straight men countless times - now, it's just wrapped in a pretty package to look radical and progressive.

[paporomantic]

Sorry for putting people into boxes - sometimes I type faster than I think 

 

To go back onto the topic, questions about the relationship between the ace community and LGBT+ were asked in the 2014 AVEN Community Census (the findings from the 2015 one aren't yet published).

 

For convenience, below are screenshots of the relevant pages (12-13) of the PDF file of 'preliminary' findings available on the linked WordPress blog page.

 

 

 



 



 



 

 

This census represents the opinions of only one of two sides of the conflict between the asexual community and the LGBT+ one, but even these results are enough to say that it's better for the two communities to stay apart for the time being.

[morallygayro]

4 minutes ago, aroMa(n)tisse said:

To go back onto the topic, questions about the relationship between the ace community and LGBT+ were asked in the 2014 AVEN Community Census (the findings from the 2015 one aren't yet published).

 

For convenience, below are screenshots of the relevant pages of the PDF file of 'preliminary' findings available at the linked WordPress blog.

 

  Reveal hidden contents

 

 

 



 



 



 

 

 

This census represents the opinions of only one of two sides of the conflict between the asexual community and the LGBT+ one, but even these results are enough to say that it's better for the two communities to stay apart for the time being.

Good. That means aroace guys can just stay out of LGBT discourse and stop trying to tell lesbians we're actually bi ✌✌✌

12 minutes ago, morallygayro said:

Good. That means aroace guys can just stay out of LGBT discourse and stop trying to tell lesbians we're actually bi ✌✌✌

@aroMa(n)tisse why did you like this post? I was referring to you.