This is a continuation of my thoughts from last week, so, again, if you’d rather spend this pride month focusing on joy, please bookmark this blog post and come back to it later.
When I hear someone say that they don’t think they belong as an ace or aro person – both in the context of whether they belong in the broader queer community, or specifically in aro and ace communities – it’s often accompanied by the idea that they are not “representative” enough of all ace or aro people. There’s an anxiety around seeming like the perfect asexual or aromantic person, around needing to perfectly fit the label in every way and every minute of your life, or else you won’t “count.”
Often this anxiety comes from a place of concern for others. I’ve heard demisexual people worry that someone might look at them and think, “Well, you eventually became sexually attracted to someone, therefore this must be true of ALL ace people!” I’ve heard aromantic people worry that if they decide to date or get married, someone might look at them and think, “Since you decided to enter a romantic relationship, that must mean that ALL aro people should just suck it up and do it too!”
What bothers me most about this whole thing is the real impact it has on individual queer people’s journeys of self-discovery. I knew about the aromatic spectrum for years before I realized it applied to me. I knew, objectively, that aro people experienced “little or no romantic attraction,” and that microlabels like grey-aromantic existed. Heck, I already knew that I was demisexual – that I didn’t need to be the same as all ace people in order to be ace!
But I flat-out could not think of myself as aro for the longest time, because I knew that my experience was not the same as all aro people. I was judging myself as harshly as I was afraid alloromantic people would judge me, and misunderstanding myself just as much as I was afraid alloromantic people would misunderstand me.
It wasn’t until I started listening to the podcast A OK, and heard the stories of many different aro people, that I realized I did not need to be representative of all aro people in order to consider myself aro. I knew then that if someone tried to say to me, “Since x is true of you, then x must be true of all aro people,” I could just send them a link to the podcast. It’s a cliché, I know, but it really did feel like a great weight had been taken off my shoulders. I realized that it wasn’t my job to represent the entire community, and I had no obligation to comply with other people’s expectations that I be representative.
Whoever you are, and however you experience attraction, you are NOT responsible for other people deciding that you are representative of anyone or anything. That is on them. Someone looking at you and thinking, “If x is true for you, then x is true for all aro/ace/queer people” is not your fault. It will never be your fault.
And anyone who tries to tell you that it is your fault – anyone who claims that your identity is “too confusing” and will “make the queer community look bad” – is dead wrong. It will never be your job to make sense to the people who don’t want you to exist.
Something I’d like to focus on this pride month, personally, are the ways that the pride community and sub-communities can hurt the very people they ostensibly exist to support.
Now, June is a joyful month, so if this isn’t the kind of thing you want to think about right now, by all means bookmark this blog post and come back to it later. I’m not here to “ruin” anyone’s fun. I’m here to say that queer joy is just as important as queer self-accountability.
The more ace and aro people I meet, in person and online – and I keep meeting more of them, revealing just how big our community truly is – the more stories I hear about aces and aros feeling like they don’t belong. It’s common for them to phrase it as, they’ve been told they’re not “enough.” Not queer enough to be queer. Not LGBT enough to be LGBT. Not oppressed enough, not visible enough, not representative enough to belong. And sometimes it’s not about belonging in the broader queer community. It’s about being told by other aces and aros that they’re not ace enough or aro enough to belong.
An unfortunate truth of the world is that in every group of people, there are those who are only happy if they are excluding someone else. These people look at the world we have, where the powerful and those in the “in-group” take every opportunity to hurt the disempowered “out-group,” and decide that the only way to attain power is to become someone who hurts and excludes those with even less power.
This is sometimes a conscious decision, but not always. Sometimes we really do believe that excluding others is the only way to protect ourselves from insidious infiltrators.
But speaking as someone at a cross-section of identities that often gets me labeled an insidious infiltrator by people who have never even met me, this is a fallacious belief.
The person with a different queer identity to yours is not your enemy. The person with a microlabel or neopronoun you’ve never heard of before is not your enemy. The person who experiences the world differently from cisgender straight white Christian men, and who also experiences the world differently from you, is not your enemy. You will gain nothing from treating them like dirt.
I look at the world we have, where the powerful and those in the “in-group” take every opportunity to hurt the disempowered “out-group,” and I say, we do not need to remain this way. I say, I will gain nothing from perpetuating the cruelty that has been directed towards me. I say, I reject the cycle of violence and exclusion.
I say, it is high time we held ourselves accountable.
I used to get really anxious about stickers. You only get to use them once! What if you make the wrong decision, put them in the wrong place, want to move them somewhere later? What if someday you don’t like that fandom or quote or color anymore? What if you end up peeling off the sticker and then have that nasty sticky stuff all over your desk/wall/computer/folder? What if it turns out using that sticker was a waste of time?
Now the truth is that I still get anxious about stickers. But I have a workaround: I put my stickers in my journals. So I will always have that sticker right there at the part of my life where I liked that thing and wanted the sticker. If I want to look back on it, I can go find it. If I decide I don’t like the sticker anymore, then I don’t need to flip back through the journal.
I think a lot of people feel the same way about identity labels. The perception of a label is that it is a sticker. You need to find the right one, and once you choose one – once you come out – you’re stuck with it forever! And if you don’t completely fit this label, then you’d better not use it!
A lot of pressure comes along with this idea. Sometimes, we put this pressure on ourselves. It’s okay to feel driven to find the right label for yourself. Sometimes, though, other people put that pressure on us. This is not okay.
Because here’s the thing – labels are not stickers. They are words. And words are the tools we use to describe ourselves and the world around us, as we experience it.
Sometimes, that experience changes, and so the words we chose before don’t apply anymore. Sometimes, the words change – we find new ones, we realize that old ones don’t work so well anymore. Sometimes, we just plain don’t have the exact right word to describe our experience, so we need to come up with a new word, or we just need to choose a word that’s close enough and comfortable enough for us. Sometimes, the journey of self-discovery is not immediate, and we need to use a word for a while and see how it feels before deciding if it applies to us. Sometimes, we change our mind, and sometimes we don’t.
If you feel that a label applies to you, then it’s yours to use. If it’s useful and comfortable for you to use this word to describe your experience, then do it! There’s no test to pass to prove that you’re worthy of using a label, and if you decide you don’t want to use a label anymore, then you can stop using it. There won’t be any sticky stuff left over. You’ll still be able to look back on that part of your life where that label was useful to you, if you want to. And if you never want to look back on it, then you don’t have to. If it was useful to you when you used it, then it wasn’t a waste of time.
This pride month, and every month, I hope we all feel comfortable to try on labels, and to see them as the tools as they are, instead of as a source of pressure.
I’ve been thinking a lot about queerness lately and I keep getting stuck on how deeply I want it to be normal. I want little girls to come home excitedly telling their parents about a pretty new girl in school that they have a crush on. I want young boys to have their first kiss with another boy and be able to tell their friends about it. I want them to be impressed and slap him on the back and say congrats. I want to bring home a woman to my family and have my father give her that whole fake threatening, “you better be good to my daughter” speech before offering her a handshake and a beer. I want people everywhere in the world to be able to hold hands in the street and not even think twice about it, not have to feel afraid, not have to feel like they’re making a statement. I want so desperately for the world to catch up with something that so many of us already understand as normal. I don’t want to be merely tolerated, and I wish pride wasn’t necessary. I wish that having confidence in myself wasn’t a revolutionary act.
This! This is so beautiful and we should all strive to make this a reality!
