This is a conversation with Angela Chen, author of the book ‘Ace: What Asexuality Reveals About Desire, Society, and the Meaning of Sex‘.

The Fire These Times is available on Apple Podcasts, Google Podcasts, Spotify, Anchor, Breaker, Amazon Music, Audible, Stitcher, Radio Public, Pocket Casts, Castro and RSS.

This isn’t an Asexuality 101 episode. Feel free to look up the basics if you want. There are loads of asexuals who do explain what it means, Angela Chen’s book including. This episode is more about what asexuality says about our societies.

And as I’m notoriously crap at explaining why I like the books I like, I am going to read a paragraph written by Sarah Neilson for them.us which summarizes really well why Chen’s book matters: “The crux of society’s difficulty with accepting asexuality is, Chen argues, because compulsory sexuality is ingrained in societal narratives about mental and physical health, politics and liberation, and interpersonal relationships. Compulsory sexuality posits that sex is a primal human need, ties sex to maturity, and places sex in relationship hierarchies. Even in the queer community, though we hate to be oversexualized by the straights, we often sexualize ourselves and each other. And while queer sex is indeed liberating for allosexuals (or those that do experience sexual attraction), so is the ability not to have sex. Chen argues, through a fantastic blend of nuanced and clear-eyed reporting, research, and personal reflection, that true liberation requires the dismantling of compulsory sexuality.” So yeah, this book is great.

Support: Patreon.com/fromtheperiphery
Website: http://thefirethesetimes.com
Substack: https://thefirethesetimes.substack.com
Twitter + Instagram @ firethesetimes

Recommended Books:

• Minimizing Marriage: Morality, Marriage, and the Law by Elizabeth Brake
• Refusing Compulsory Sexuality: A Black Asexual Lens on Our Sex-Obsessed Culture by Sherronda J. Brown
• More Than Friends [The Other Significant Others: Reimagining Life with Friendship at the Center] by Rhaina Cohen

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Transcript via Antidote Zine:

Many aces both do not want to assimilate and are unable to assimilate into these norms, but there are also many people who can follow these norms but maybe don’t actually want to—and they should think about whether they want to, and whether something else is possible.

Angela Chen: I’m Angela, I’m the author of Ace. My other life is as a science and tech journalist: I’m a senior editor at WIRED magazine, and I live in New York.

Elia J. Ayoub: Can we start with the backstory to Ace? How did you come to write it, and why did you feel that it was important to do so?

AC: I came to write it because I realized that I was ace, and because there was a sense of annoyance, frustration that it had taken me so long to realize that I was ace. I’m mostly a science and tech journalist; hopefully my next book will be about science and tech—it’s not as if I always wrote about sexuality or relationships. But after a series of relationships of my own, in my early twenties, I came to realize I was ace, and there was so much in the ace world, and how aces thought about the world—so much that I felt the ace lens really enriched my life. It was just sad to me that a book hadn’t been written about it.

At that point, because I’ve always been a journalist, because I had an agent, I just seemed like the right person at the right time.

EA: Why do you think this is one of the first books on the topic, if it’s something that’s not anything new? 

AC: Ace people, or people who we today might call ace, have existed throughout history, but the contemporary ace movement itself has really only existed in the past twenty years. A lot of aces are young, and when you’re young you just have less power, you have less money, people pay less attention to you. 

There’s also this idea that asexuality is tied to the internet—I think that’s both good and bad. It’s definitely true that the internet has helped ace people find each other and organize, and recognize each other, in the same way that’s true for many other identities and groups. At the same time, when any identity or group is deeply associated with the internet, a lot of people don’t take it seriously—they think it’s fake, or something people are just making up because they want attention. 

That’s part of the reason asexuality has been invisible for a while, and even when it has been visible it hasn’t been taken seriously, hasn’t been seen as worthy of attention, thought, and deep engagement, the way it deserves.  

EA: You talk a lot about the difficulty of how people usually think of the term, when they do so at all. You have a chapter about “explanation via negativa.” Can you talk about that?

When I read that, I thought of autism, because I’m autistic and I never know how to explain what or who I am. Usually the person asking me isn’t autistic, and I have to put myself in their shoes and imagine certain things we might have in common or things that person might find familiar. I’ll be finding terms that don’t matter to me, but trying to get a point across.

At the end of the day, when most people think of asexuality, it’s just the lack of sexuality—it’s something that one does not have. Whereas in reality it’s so much more complicated than that. You talk about it being a spectrum, and all these things. Can you walk us through those difficulties?

AC: The trap is that to explain asexuality, we have to describe something we don’t experience. It’s a lot of saying, You know when you (supposedly) feel this? Well, I don’t feel that. But I’m not sure I’m describing it right, because it’s something I’ve never felt. It’s very abstract, and I find it philosophically interesting that people’s experiences can be so different. We’re trying to use language to grapple towards that.

Many people have a limited idea of asexuality that focuses on behavior: it means you either don’t have sex, or you hate sex. But asexuality is really more about attraction. The word asexual can be confusing; people will say, How can someone be asexual and still have sex, and still enjoy sex? That’s where the complexity comes in.

That’s another reason there hasn’t been much understanding: because in order to talk about the really interesting things that asexuality offers, ways of looking at the world and of questioning relationships, and thinking about consent—in order to get there, you first have to do this long explanation of, It’s this, but it’s not that, and not that, but some people are like this anyway. That can be really tricky.

EA: I can only speak to my own experience, obviously. The reason I think there are some similarities [to autism] is being a minority within a big world. I have to cater what I’m saying to a specific audience—usually it’s one-on-one, but even when I speak on this podcast about autism, which I do from time to time, I assume I’m not speaking to an autistic-majority audience. This undoubtedly affects the words I use, my literal vocabulary. This aspect of language is really interesting to me.

What’s it like to have to do the “Asexuality 101?” Does it ever get annoying? Does it get tiring to have to talk about asexuality to a mostly allosexual world?

AC: I think about this a lot, and I’m trying to change the terms in which I talk about asexuality. Before recording this, you and I had corresponded a little bit, and one of my requests was that the first question is not What is asexuality?

I did used to do interviews and podcasts, and that would be the first question, and I would answer. And then I realized that this automatically makes it seem like I’m talking to an allosexual or non-asexual audience, but that was never my intention. I’m ace, but I don’t want to be the face of asexuality; I don’t speak for all aces. Most importantly, I’ve always wanted to talk to other ace people—I don’t want to talk only about other ace people. 

So after a while, I started requesting that. I love talking about this and of course I’m happy to explain, but the “Ace 101” question? I want the interviewer to be the one who does that, because it’s also about holding the people I’m talking to to a higher standard. If the goal is for asexuality (or almost anything) to be widely understood, then at a certain point I have to act as if it is, and hope and trust that people will say, Okay, maybe I don’t really understand, but I can go find articles about it, or read a book. 

In this weird way, I feel like the more I keep on answering the Ace 101 question, the more I’m making it so we’ll never get past Ace 101. And once I start saying, The information is out there, we’re going to talk about 201, that feels like a more comfortable place—in which it’s taken for granted, in the same way that maybe if you’re going to class, I’d take it for granted that you do the reading for the class.

EA: That makes sense. There is something I found very interesting: the subtitle of the book is “What asexuality reveals about desire, society, and the meaning of sex,” so there’s an implication that this book isn’t just for aces. It might be for people who are questioning, for people who are unsure or curious, or even for a non-ace or allo audience, which statistically is probably most listeners (though I have no way of knowing). 

Asexuality reveals a lot about the non-asexual world—can you talk about that?

AC: You’re right, the book is not only for aces. It’s definitely not only for allos—it’s for both. I think about it two ways. Asexuality is an identity, but then you have the structural force. Asexuality is what who I am and how I experience my sexuality, but there is a force called compulsory sexuality, the idea that all normal, healthy adult humans are sexual creatures and experience sexual attraction. It’s not the idea that all adults have to have sex. It’s that you want to, even if you are not currently doing so.

Compulsory sexuality is a force that affects so many people beyond aces. Aces are a little more extreme in our experiences, and it probably affects us most, but you don’t have to be ace to be affected by compulsory sexuality. So many men feel that “you’re not a man” if you’re not out there having heterosexual sex with a lot of women. A lot of women sometimes feel, To be a good feminist I have to have casual sex and have a good sex life, I can’t be too emotional, otherwise how can I be a good feminist? There’s so much pressure in relationships to feel like you have a “great sex life,” otherwise it’s really sad. 

Many people can feel and experience all those things regardless of what their identity is. That’s part of what I hope to get across. I saw someone wrote a short review of the book and they said something interesting: they thought the title was a little misleading, because yes it’s about asexuality, but really it’s just about variation in human desire and how all that is okay.

I loved that, because that’s a broader idea of what the book is. Of course I want to center aces, my own community, but thinking about all the ways variations in desire—high, low, or none—can be okay is really fulfilling and helpful for a lot of people.

EA: I like that term, compulsory sexuality, because it summarizes quite a bit. 

At the beginning of your book, you say you don’t want to presume to speak for everyone (and on this podcast I try and make that clear as well). That being said, I have found a lot of similarities between stuff that’s mentioned about culturally conservative Christianity in the US and my own experience growing up in Lebanon in a very conservative Christian environment.

The reason I mention that is I had a recent realization, and your book has helped me reach this conclusion: that my upbringing was sex-obsessed while at the same time guilt-tripping everyone about sex. Sex is supposed to be this thing that everyone is supposed to want, and to be a good person you’re supposed to resist this thing that everyone is supposed to want (until you get married).

That apparent contradiction makes a lot more sense—I’m not saying it’s a good thing, it’s not, it’s very unhealthy—but there’s an internal logic that only makes sense if you understand the entire thing as being compulsory sexuality. I was wondering if we can talk a bit more about that. 

In a previous interview, you talked about the tension between common forms of feminism and asexuality; there is this idea of “sex-positivity” which is often translated as “your body is your own” (and all of that is good), but there is the implicit assumption that this means you want it and what’s wrong is you’re being shamed into not wanting it, rather than: You may want it, you may not want it, and it’s completely up to you what you feel comfortable with, and that includes not wanting it.

AC: I always want to preface this by saying I’m a feminist and I value feminism, and I know this is not what all of feminism is. But a certain strain of sex-positive feminism has over-corrected. The idea was that women having sex and acting on their sexuality is bad, so let’s oppress them with ideas of virginity and slut-shaming and all of that. Totally agree that’s bad. But it overcorrects, and now it’s become the idea that to be a feminist, to be liberated means to have a lot of sex, means having kinky sex, or being polyamorous. Basically, everything that was “not okay” before sometimes can feel like it is now obligatory.

What ends up happening is that the norms have shifted but they’re still norms. True liberation means you can have kinky sex with many partners and be polyamorous, and that is neither better nor worse than not having sex and/or not experiencing sexual attraction at all. There is that tension—it’s not really between feminism and asexuality, because of course there are a lot of ace feminists. It’s between sex-normativities.

Normativity isn’t quite the right word, because it’s fine to have sex—but it’s a new kind of sexual pressure. The old sexual pressure is Don’t have sex, pretend you never have desire and the new sexual pressure is To be a vibrant woman, you should be having a lot of sex, you should be using men, and you should be proud of your body and showing it off all the time. Whatever the norm is, there will be some people who are fine with it, and there will be some people who don’t like it—so it would be so much better to do away with the norms. 

As long as there’s consent, and as long as it’s mutual, and as long as it’s what you want, then it’s fine. Of course, that’s a huge order, because it can take so long to figure out what you truly want and how to disentangle that from what you’re supposed to want. But if we loosen up those norms it would be easier for us to figure out what is right for us, because we’d see a lot of different possibilities, with none of them being stigmatized.

EA: Somehow I was just thinking about the norms around beauty standards. Before, it was very much about body-shaming and fat-shaming and all of that, and it’s still a lot about that, but there’s more of a trend (it’s something we see in commercials and that sort of thing) where You can be any body type, and you can still buy our products!

I can give an analogy: when it comes to autism, I prefer a society that is okay with autistic people rather than a society that isn’t (which is still most of the world). But I would still prefer to live in a world where it just did not matter. It’s the difference between tolerating and accepting; I feel like I’m being tolerated a lot—and I would prefer being tolerated to not being tolerated, obviously, but it’s just choosing which is your poison. Being accepted is very different.

Being accepted in a society where disabilities, whether mental, physical, or both—there’s a difference between taking into account that we are all different and therefore building a society together in which these differences are just what they are—they enrich us—rather than having to make an effort all the time to justify who we are and why we’re different and why that shouldn’t matter. Rather than having to assert ourselves all the time.

Those aren’t good comparisons; I can just go with what I know. Maybe we can find some common ground to explain these differences. 

AC: Those a really good examples, and they make a lot of sense. You mention body positivity: especially for women, there was this idea that you have to be very thin, and then it became the idea that you have to love your body every day—or that’s what the pressure felt like to me. For me, I don’t want to hate my body, but I don’t want the pressure to love my body either. I want to mostly not think about it. 

I really resonate with what you said about not having to justify yourself all day. Sometimes people will say to me, I think I might be ace, but I don’t know if I like the label, I’m not a label person. I completely understand—that’s fine. The greater purpose is to dismantle compulsory sexuality. Once there’s no compulsory sexuality, it doesn’t matter that you’re ace. Maybe you can be allosexual but you want to be celibate for whatever reason, and you can just say no and live your life, and you never need to point to asexuality or any other reason other than No.

What matters to me is not that everyone uses the ace label. For some people it doesn’t serve them. The idea is that nobody has to think about it again, because it doesn’t affect their life negatively. If they want to be part of the ace community, that’s great. But it’s about that force, if that makes sense.

EA: Since publishing your book, have you received feedback from people who were questioning or who knew they were ace but didn’t know how to talk about it, or who are allosexual but felt some kind of relief in reading this book?

I can think of someone who is allosexual as far as she knows (she gave me permission to mention this) but she read this book and identified with a lot of what was written there even though she didn’t identify as ace in the end.

AC: I’ve received a lot of interesting feedback. There are aces who knew they were ace, and there are people who didn’t know they were ace. But what’s interesting to me are people who kind of suspected deep down that they were ace and felt afraid to read the book. I had a number of people say to me, I don’t want to read this because I’m afraid it’s going to confirm I am ace, and I’m not ready to deal with that. 

I always say, That’s your journey. Of course I’m not pressuring anyone to read the book. But I’ve also had people say I didn’t want to read the book because I was nervous and anxious, and I read it and it made me feel so much better. If you suspect you’re ace, or you know you’re different in some way, and you resist it, it’s because you think it’s some horrible sentence: to be alone, to be different, to not be understood, to be stigmatized.

I try really hard in the book to show that aces can have joyful lives, both in terms of having relationships and having children, and also in that they can move past that. Often when people realize they’re ace, the first thing people say will be: You can still have a relationship; you can still have sex if you want to, you can still be monogamous. That’s important, because often that’s what people want and what they fear they can’t have.

But the next step beyond that is: what are different ways of relating? Is a monogamous, sexual romantic relationship actually what you want? Is what you want an intentional community, or a queer platonic relationship? I’ve tried in the book to show there are other possibilities, and that’s what people are reacting to when they say, I didn’t want to be ace, because I thought it meant being normal but worse, and now I see it’s different and also opens up possibilities.

EA: It says a lot about what counts as our norms in today’s society. We’re a bit more accepting when it comes to sexuality and the diversity of experiences, at least compared to a few decades ago. But there is still an expectation that even if someone doesn’t tell you outright You have to be this or You have to be that, there are still internalized things. It’s sometimes in the subtext, but there are different expectations, what is implicit in different conversations. 

In the book you point out how there’s a difference between women and men identifying as ace. Way more women do so, and you say it’s because of how men are usually socialized. Can you talk a bit about that? 

AC: Women are usually socialized to try to behave as if they’re asexual; in that way, asexuality is not as much of a challenge to female stereotypes. But the idea of what a “real man” is, is intimately bound up with sex, with pursuit, with aggression. I know ace men who, when they first realized they were ace, they questioned their gender, because of the way these two things are so intimately connected.

I don’t think that most of the time to be a woman means you have to be out there having sex, or you have to be lusting after every person—but I think that’s true for men. There are men I know who could be described as ace—and I say that because I let people describe themselves; I’m not going to force a label onto anyone. But these are people whose experiences line up with other ace men I know, and they’re aware of asexuality and what it means, and they still prefer to reject the label.

They often prefer to think It’s an erectile dysfunction problem or some kind of health thing—although we know those are not the same. For some men, the idea that they have a disorder that can maybe be fixed with some new drug, therapy, or innovation is in some ways more comforting than the idea that there’s no disorder but they’re different. For one, you’re still a real man and you will be again once you find some kind of fix. For the other, it feels deeper. It’s ontological, and that can be more threatening.

EA: It speaks a lot to expectations that men have about what it means to be men, about masculinity—the rigid definitions of masculinity which are very toxic. At the same time it also speaks to misconceptions people have about asexuality; it’s usually not thought of as a spectrum, just the absence of sexuality.

You write, “Being repulsed by sex is a fairly obvious indication of the lack of sexual attraction, but the lack of sexual attraction can also be hidden by social performativity, and wanting—and having—sex for emotional reasons. Because the different types of desire are bound together so tightly, it can be difficult to untangle the various strands.”

Can you explain that quote? Talk a bit more about the fact that it’s a spectrum.

AC: I want to amend the beginning of the quote; it’s more accurate to say being repulsed by sex can be a fairly obvious indication of the lack of sexual attraction. There are people who are sex-repulsed and not ace. We can set that aside for now, but I just wanted to clarify that.

What does it mean for it to be difficult to untangle the various strands? I’ll use myself as an example. I’m not sex-repulsed; when I was growing up, before I ever had sex, when I was a teenager, I assumed that I one day would; I was excited about the prospect, I thought it would feel great, I had crushes on people. Even into my first couple relationships I was fine having sex; I didn’t have any sexual problems, I enjoyed it.

So the question is, How can you be ace? It’s because I enjoyed it emotionally, and I did enjoy it physically, but I’d never had the experience of many of my allo friends where it’s like, you meet someone and feel horny for them. I never think about sex involuntarily. I may have sex, but I don’t experience sexual attraction. 

Moving on to the spectrum: nowadays, everything is a spectrum. It’s not that some people never experience sexual attraction in their whole lives, in the same way I don’t think it’s true that there’s anyone who experiences sexual attraction all the time. That would be a very difficult way to live, it would be very distracting. Some people who identify as ace do experience sexual attraction but only very rarely, or at a very low level. Some people are sex-repulsed and celibate, and say they have it life-long. There’s fluidity there too; some people’s sexual attraction can change throughout their life and at certain points it’s a little higher or lower.

That’s true for allosexuals as well. So often, people will say What does it feel like to be asexual? Imagine a stranger you’re not sexually interested in—that’s what it feels like. All of us know what that experience is. 

EA: I wanted to ask this question on the limitation of language. For me, language is us trying to figure out the best approximation of what we mean. It’s very difficult to get our point one-hundred-percent across without missing something or being misunderstood—all of that. There are debates; the term demisexuality for example, I asked a friend who I know is queer, and she said she didn’t know what it meant. She looked it up and didn’t really believe it’s a thing.

I’m not asking you to explain or justify or prove its existence, but why do you think it confuses some people? Can you say what it is, and why you think there’s a controversy around that term?

AC: I don’t identify as demisexual, but this is the broadly accepted definition: you don’t experience sexual attraction until there is an emotional attachment. People will say that’s just everyone, but one person explained it to me really well: it’s not about behavior. A demisexual person can sleep with someone on the first date; that’s fine. They described it like, I can go into a bar and I won’t feel sexual attraction to anyone there. 

It’s not, I prefer to have sex when there’s emotional attraction. It’s about, I actually cannot experience sexual attraction to someone, regardless of whether I sleep with them or not, until there’s an emotional connection there.

People will say that’s everyone, but it also slots into a larger discussion of what the role of labels is. That’s something that’s not unique to the ace universe at all. There’s a lot of people who think, Do you need a label for everything? Are we just pathologizing normal human experience? Then a lot of people on the other side will say, First of all, it’s not pathologizing, it’s just describing. But also, many people find that if there’s a word for something it helps you learn more about it.

If you know what demisexuality is, and you google demisexuality, you’ll find a lot of communities and people. If you don’t know what demisexuality is, and you google something like “don’t experience sexual attraction unless there’s a romantic connection,” you’ll get weird results that are not sufficient for connecting to the people you want to be connected to.

Everyone decides for themselves what labels to use and not to use. Personally, there are a lot of labels I think could describe me, but I feel fine with the big-tent label of ace and don’t need to use other labels. Other folks find this validating and useful. I’m not convinced it’s a bad thing that there are more labels people can use to find each other. I think it’s a good thing—though people can decide which ones they might want to use.

EA: A lot of the reservations that some people might have aren’t about the term; maybe they’re saying something else. There isn’t this stigmatization; the friend I mentioned (and again I have permission): her reservation wasn’t a strong opinion or anything, people can identify however they want—for her, she’s a lesbian and has faced specific problems because of it, and she doesn’t feel like it makes sense for someone to use another term.

We had a pretty interesting conversation, and in the end we found a compromise and she did agree that the problem isn’t the label, the problem is society. The problem is, if it bothers you that someone else is using a label because that label isn’t associated with oppression, your actual problem is with the oppression you faced rather than the label that other person is using.

This is something I’ve come to terms with as well, with my own experiences. I’ve mentioned before that I am questioning—I’m not going to talk about it too much because I’m not quite at that stage yet, but when it comes to being autistic, I know that my issue isn’t whether people know a lot about autism; my issue is that them not knowing usually has negative repercussions on my life. It’s pretty straightforward.

This is a book for everyone—aces and allos as well, and reading about asexuality says a lot about society, and about compulsory sexuality. You mention a show I hadn’t head of before, called Naked Attraction—I think it’s British. I’ll let you explain it.

AC: It’s a show I watched one day when I was at a friend’s house. It’s a dating show where someone is looking for a date, and there’s something like six people, completely naked, inside these pods. The first round, the door lifts up and you see up to the waist (you see the genitals), and the next round it’s up to the neck, and so on. The idea is that the contestant is evaluating these people and eliminating folks based entirely on physical attributes.

That’s part of many dating shows, but you don’t even get to see their face. I used this in the book as an example trying to help allo people what it might be like to be ace. The day I watched it, I was with female friends who are allosexual, but it’s just not an attractive show. It’s not sexy at all. It’s just body parts; it feels clinical, detached. There’s no eroticism there. I thought it was funny: my friends, who do experience sexual attraction, are definitely not experiencing it towards any of these people on the stage.

EA: What I found revealing about that show is that it’s described as “After Dark.” The implication is that these are everyone’s deepest secrets and desires; the association we usually make is that nighttime provides covers for our dirtiest desires—it’s taboo and therefore it can be liberating. What’s also implied is that this is what nighttime is like; it can’t just be peaceful contemplation or hanging out with friends, or doing anything else that’s not sexual. The implication is, it’s after dark, therefore it is sexual.

It is a ridiculous show, but the premise isn’t that different from a lot of dating shows. There’s a sense that this is what everyone wants—the message is portrayed as if this is what everyone wants, so if you don’t want that, there’s something wrong with you. 

This is my issue—I don’t care about dating per se; some people like it, some people don’t. I have nothing against sex-positive stuff, that isn’t the issue either. The issue is that not everyone identifies with all of this, and if we lived in a society where it just didn’t matter, where it’s totally fine if it’s your thing or not, there’s no social repercussions for not wanting that thing, then those shows would be very different. 

Other than understanding experiences for what they are and learning about different experiences, and especially understanding asexuality as a spectrum (this is one of the main contributions of the book), I also found this book valuable in understanding wider society. It’s that thing where you’re reading about something you think is very specific, but its actually generalized. Of course the experiences are specific, but those individuals’ experiences are happening in the context of a wider society, and it’s that wider society that’s being examined that way.

 AC: And there’s so much to examine. One of the ideas of Naked Attraction, which is at least a little tongue-in-cheek, is that the most titillating, intimate thing is seeing someone naked. That’s something to examine too, because I know many people who will say that holding hands with someone feels more intimate than having sex with them, or that they don’t care about nudity, that’s fine, but they’re not going to talk about their relationship with their sister.

There’s so many kinds of intimacy. Of course sex can be a form of intimacy, but sometimes, especially when it comes to romantic relationships, there’s an idea that it’s lesser-than or not intimate if there’s not sexuality involved. Again, these are things that aces think about a lot for obvious reasons, but that many people would benefit from thinking about too.

Many aces both do not want to assimilate and are unable to assimilate into these norms, but there are also many people who can follow these norms but maybe don’t actually want to—and they should think about whether they want to, and whether something else is possible.

EA: That brings me to a question I had about representation. I know it’s a hot topic and people have different opinions on it, but seeing asexuals on screen, identified as asexual and having normal roles, could help especially younger folks feel more comfortable with who they are. I can only think of two examples of asexual characters (and I’m sure there are more) who are seen as a normal character like any other. I think of Todd Chavez in BoJack Horseman and one of the characters in Sex Education.

That one I find interesting because that show is all about sex and sexual orientation. There are one or two characters who end up going to this sex therapist, and she identifies one of them as asexual—and it’s seen as a big revelation and she’s very happy with that label, it’s very liberating. I found that very refreshing, because I’m not used to it. 

Maybe these days it’s as okay to be homosexual or bisexual as it is to be heterosexual; it’s normal/okay to be cis, and normal/okay to be trans—all of that is good. But I haven’t seen as many positive depictions of asexuality that are just there. I am ace, end of story, this is just my life; it’s not the only thing I identify with, I’m also an artist, and so on.

How do you think about this question of representation?

AC: You’re right there’s not a lot. I haven’t seen Sex Education, but I have seen BoJack Horseman, and I know many people who watch BoJack Horseman realized they were ace from those episodes. I think that’s great. But there’s so much more that can be done. A lot of people who identify as ace today are on the younger side, but I know there are a lot of people who are older who could or would identify as ace but don’t see older ace characters.

I want the ace storylines to go beyond the ace revelation, because there are so many things about asexuality that are not just, I realized this thing exists! A lot of queer media has thankfully moved beyond I realized it’s okay to be queer! There are many questions to explore that are so meaty: what does it mean to be in a relationship when you’re ace, what does that look like? What does it mean to be ace and want to have children, what are your options? What about aging and being older, or divorcing and being ace?

These are the stories we’re not really seeing out there, because (my guess is) there’s not a lot of ace people writing television shows, statistically. So there’s still this stuck-ness in which the innovation is to introduce the thing. That’s the same tension we talked about earlier, where this is a topic that still needs introducing. It’s not wrong that people think it is still new to be doing that. How can we both acknowledge that there’s a lot to catch up on, and at the same time start to try to tell new stories? 

EA: From what I understand, there’s a complicated relationship between the ace community and the wider LGBTQ+ community. It goes back to the “plus.” We might hear “LGBTQIA,” and a lot of people think the A means “ally,” which erases asexuals. I mention it because I’ve seen in a lot of online forums that aces can be very uncomfortable with this. 

What are your thoughts on the relationship between aces and the queer community?

AC: I think aces are part of the queer community. Aces are not heterosexual. Even if you’re hetero-romantic, you’re not heterosexual. We don’t fall into those compulsory sexuality norms. For a long time we didn’t have the language to elucidate that.

I do think aces are queer; at the same time, it’s just different experiences. There can be a fear and a sense of scarcity. Let’s say you are hetero-romantic ace—you are simply not going to have some of the difficulties that you might if you were lesbian walking down the street with your female partner. But you have different struggles: people don’t understand what your sexuality is, and you have to spend time explaining it. It’s just very different, and sometimes there’s a sense of scarcity: How am I going to get attention to this?

Every ace person I’ve talked to has said we acknowledge that the struggles are different and we want to be in solidarity; it’s not about how it’s harder to be ace than to be anything else. It’s just different, just as it’s different with any of the other experiences in the queer umbrella. To be honest there’s always been a bit of tension there; there are folks who are queer who don’t think aces are queer. I think aces are. Aces queer many things about sexuality and relationships, and I want people to understand that having a bigger tent can only be a good thing for fighting for the rights that many of us want.

For aces, I don’t think those rights are necessarily legal rights in the way that might have been the case for gay marriage. It’s cultural shifts that will help many people who are queer, and eventually everyone. 

EA: That conversation needs to happen—it is happening, and hopefully it continues to happen. It highlights what I mentioned about some people’s reservations about the term demisexuality—they’re a bit misplaced. One shouldn’t have an issue with the term itself, but rather with the fact that being LGBTQIA is difficult, and the problem is the fact that it’s difficult. The problem is we still in a live in heteronormative, patriarchal, highly oppressed societies, with more forms of domination than those—racial, class, and so on.

This is what we should be focusing on. If someone is comfortable using a term, whatever my opinion may be is not as important as making sure there are not any social repercussions to using that term or identifying in a certain way.

AC: I agree. I think about this in the way that disability advocates talk about accessibility. If there are curb-cuts or ramps, it doesn’t only help disabled people; it helps women with strollers and old people who have mobility issues. Not to steal that analogy, but it’s a wise one for so much of what we’ve fighting. It’ll help aces, but it’ll help other folks too. It’ll help queer folks but it’ll help straight folks too.

EA: The fact that there are way more ace women than men says a lot in itself. It says that men who might be ace feel there are other social norms to follow. This is what needs to be tackled. In the same way feminism is not just good for women but also good for men, because it questions why we have patriarchal norms in the first place. 

AC: I completely agree. A world that is welcoming to aces is a world that is not compatible with transphobia or racism or contractual notions of consent. These struggles are bound together.

EA: Angela Chen, thanks a lot for this chat.

AC: This was a pleasure, thank you so much.