🏡 Return home
🍃 Branches (key topics): Asexuality, Queer History
🍂 Roots (Status): #seed
🌰 Source: https://slate.com/human-interest/2020/03/asexuality-history-internet-identity-queer-archive.html

Notes

"In 1981, a woman named Catherine Koably wrote a letter to the feminist newspaper Heresies. She thanked them for their recent issue that centered marginalized sexualities but added, 'I also felt a bit left out, for among the many points of view represented, I was unable to find one with which I could identify wholeheartedly'" (Waters, 2020)

"Kobaly was asexual, she wrote, and so were most of her friends. She recounted wrestling with shame over her identity, noting that mainstream American society promoted the notion that 'the lack of a sexual partner, and especially the lack of a history of sexual partners' — a possible signifier of asexuality — 'is seen as a negativity, a lack, an expression of the incompleteness of a human being'" (Waters, 2020)

• a form of Aphobia.

"The mere existence of Kobaly's letter shatters a pernicious stereotype. Because modern asexual organizing has largely happened on the internet, some commentators have defined asexuality as the first 'internet orientation.' But these framings perpetuate the myth that asexuality is a new phenomenon, borne out of a series of internet forums and Tumblr posts. In reality, history is crammed with people talking about their complicated relationships to sexual or romantic attraction, and in countless queer spaces in the 1960s through the 1980s, 'asexual' was a recognized and valid self-identity'" (Waters, 2020)

"Today, activists consider asexuality a spectrum. While the oft-repeated definition of asexuality as 'experiencing minimal to no sexual attraction,' captures the experiences of a segment of the asexual community, it does not align with everyone. Some asexual people experience romantic attraction; some do not. Some asexual people, particularly demisexuals, might feel sexual attraction under certain circumstances; others do not experience it at all" (Waters, 2020)

"In the US, one of the earliest explicit references to asexual identity came courtesy of Carl Schlegel, a German-born reverend and one of the first modern gay activists in the US. At the turn of the 20th century, Schlegel issued pleas for queer equality that specifically invoked asexuality. 'Let the same laws for all the intermediate stages of sexual life: the homosexuals, heterosexuals, bisexuals, asexuals, be legal as they are now in the existence for the heterosexuals,' Schegel said in a speech composed in 1907." (Waters, 2020)