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YES THEY CAN

Aroace + pumpkins + skeletons + black cats for the anon!!!

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ive recently found out that in the 80s lesbians who were more interested in cuddles and kisses rather than sex were called bambi lesbians

it’s such a cute thing omg let’s bring this term back

the love ace lesbians found for this post warms my heart mind body and soul and spirit

reblog to make an ace lesbian feel happy

Okay, so I hate to be a Debbie-Downer here because I would love to use this term for myself. But I went back and tried to look into how accurate this is and honestly? The only source for the term is literally OPs. Everyone who mentions “bambi lesbians” always points back to this post. I even went into archived text and lgbt magazines SPECIFICALLY in the 80s and it never came up. I sure as hell found every other kind of lesbian category (I could even tell you when they started to trend in the community) but not that one.

Sorry, OP is either lying or got lied to. But hell, use the term anyway because lgbt slang is always evolving. Make it a thing. Just don’t keep quoting it was a thing in the 80s because there’s no evidence and its misinformation.

This has been loitering in our likes for a while, and ace awareness week seemed like a good time to bring it out, and share some good news - there is actually some evidence suggesting this might be true! We found it while researching for our podcast on queer slang: on p.60 of the second edition of The Alyson Almanac, you’ll find the entry:

The Alyson Almanac describes itself as “a treasury of information for the gay and lesbian community”, and was first put out by the Boston-based queer publishing house Alyson Publications in 1989. I can’t find the first edition online, or determine how different the second edition, published in 1990, was to the first, so I can’t confirm that bambi-sexuality was mentioned in this book in the 1980s, but I am willing to hazard a guess that it didn’t appear in a book in the very first year it was spoken - which would suggest it was being used in the 1980s. And while this doesn’t confirm the existence of the term “bambi lesbian” at that time, it definitely points in that direction. If anyone knows more, let us know!

Asexual Awareness Week: Edward Gorey!

Hello again queerlings! Happy Asexual Awareness Week from your friendly History is Gay hosts.

To our ace, aro, & anywhere in between listeners, we love you and hope you have all the delicious cake you can get this week! Each day this week, we’re bringing you short factoids about some people in history who likely could have identified as ace!

Today’s #AsexualAwarenessWeek highlight is illustrator Edward Gorey! 

Gorey’s quirky & morbid works may have occasionally featured sexual themes, but he himself viewed his identity as a sexless one. 

In an interview, he was once asked about his sexuality and he responded: 

Asexual Awareness Week: Nikola Tesla!

Hello again queerlings! Happy Asexual Awareness Week from your friendly History is Gay hosts.

To our ace, aro, & anywhere in between listeners, we love you and hope you have all the delicious cake you can get this week! Each day this week, we’re bringing you short factoids about some people in history who likely could have identified as ace!

Today we bring you some fun factoids about none other than the Serbian-Croation mad genius of electricity, Nikola Tesla!

The fastidious inventor was famously celibate, died a virgin, and had a strict personal hygiene regimen that could have prevented him from having sexual intimacy, even if he desired it. Many historians have posited that he was both asexual and aromantic. 

Women fawned over him (I mean, look at those dashing good looks!), but he often insisted that romance or sex would hinder his creativity and scientific abilities. 

Speaking on these matters, he was quoted as saying: 

Seattle Aces on the march!

Aces on the march!

Aces in 3D!

4. Wigglegram (wiggle wiggle wiggle)

Now it feels like we disappeared around 1980.  What happened?  Were we silenced?  Did we stop talking?  Did everyone get burnt out and give up?  Did we just turn invisible?

What happened to us?  Where did we go?  Why weren’t they there for me when I needed them to be?

Where are they now?  Some of them still have to be around.  Talk to me.  Tell us your story, our story, the story of those yet to come.  Asexual StoryCorps, go forth and find them!

And perhaps the most important question:  Can it happen again?  Can we vanish and be forgotten yet again?

I’m afraid that I don’t really have any answers for you yet, but I decided to dig deep into some historical archives to see what I can find about asexual history. It’ll probably take me a few weeks to sort through everything that I’m finding, but I wanted to share one thing that I have found so far.

In November of 1979, the president of the Asexual Liberation Movement gave an interview that appeared in the Chula Vista Star News and several other newspapers. (I’m sorry that the archive linked to requires a subscription, but it’s the largest newspaper archive available.)

Obviously, the modern conceptualization of asexuality is slightly different than what he describes, but what really stands out is the fact that at the end of 1979, asexuals were out there advocating for themselves, fighting discrimination, organizing asexual-specific gathering places, and generally being hopeful about the future. But by the time AVEN is founded in 2001, there is an entire generation of asexuals coming of age who were totally unaware that asexuality as an identity pre-dates online communities.

In only 22 years, we went from an active community that apparently had asexual restaurants, bars, and motels in nearly every community in the country to being a group of lost and scattered young adults who were so disconnected from their history that they thought they were inventing the asexual community for the first time.

We still don’t know for sure what the catalyst for this change was, but it’s clear that this loss of knowledge has deeply hurt, and is still hurting, the asexual community.

So…  Were asexuals the butt of a joke because they were so preposterous a thought that they couldn’t possibly exist, or so marginalized that it wouldn’t matter if they were offended?

So, I’m going to be a bit of a party pooper here, but Art Hoppe was a well known satirist, and this was a fictional parody article, not a real interview with a real person.  This is a tricky issue issue in ace history, as a lot of references to asexuality in early sources are admitted parody or fall in an ambiguous area where it’s not clear if they are sincere or parody. That said, in cases like the first linked Village Voice article, the original parody received sincere responses, which itself is meaningful proof of the existence .

There are also other early articles that are not satire, including more sincere sources like letters to advice columns and occasional articles from psychologists/sociologists. These give an impression that is more in line with what shows up in research and personal testimony from older aces, which is that there have long been many people who ascribed to asexuality as a concept, but there doesn’t seem to have been much in the way of organized communities or consistency between researchers until the rise of later internet communities like HHA and AVEN.

Everyone’s finding articles.  I want to find the people who were there.  They’re not all dead yet.  That Lesbian/Feminist Dialogues event was in 1972, so your mother or grandmother or awesome spinster great aunt might have gone or heard about it or ran in circles where these sorts of things discussed.  Is anyone going that route?

If you are interested in talking to older aces who lived through these periods, the older aces forum on AVEN is definitely one place to start - there are pages and pages and pages of folks who have been around during the 70s and 80s talking about their experiences. As far as contacting specific people, or recoridng oral histories from older aces more generally, that requires more time than I have to dedicate to new projects but it would definitely be a great project for any students of history with a need for class projects. On another note not really related to the above, though, I want to iterate more clearly thay my impressions from both those conversations and the historical written record have not really implied any sort of “lost” golden era of organizing any sort of collapse or losses after the 80s, so I’d be careful about finding explanations for a shift that I’d argue may never have even happened in the way that was suggested above. Out of curiosity, besides the (satirical) art hope article, what in general do you see as the main evidence for a decline?

Yeah, I wouldn’t really call it a lost golden age, it doesn’t feel like it was anything close to what we have now.  What I see are scattered shards of pottery that say “asexual” on them.  The “Labels” photo, the “Asexual and Autoerotic Women” paper, Storms’ paper, the Village Voice letter writers, and so forth.  They’re a signal that a civilization once existed, and that the people who lived there seem like they were a lot like us.  I see them about to start building pyramids in the early 80s, and then…

…

And then in 1997, the Internet invents asexuality again, because it didn’t exist yet.

I guess to put it another way:  Why wasn’t there a golden age?  There were groups publishing pamphlets about it.  There was a presentation about it at a conference that was important enough for Gloria Steinem to go to.  There were academic papers that mention and don’t have to explain what it was or defend its existence.  Why didn’t that grow and flourish?  Why wasn’t it something that surfaced into the general consciousness when I could have used it in the mid-90s?  It’s like the reset button was pressed and all that vanished, and people had to start over, and now we’re digging trenches to try to find an occasional glimpse of who was here before us.

Now, I admit that maybe there isn’t a discontinuity, that maybe I just haven’t seen the through-line, because I haven’t read the right page or heard the right story.  Or maybe there really wasn’t anything there at all, that these pottery shards are misleading us all, and that’s not really what they meant by asexual, and that it wasn’t really a thing, and that we’re all just falling for a 40-50 year old joke because we want to believe.

So, on a more mundane note, part of the issue is that newer content, including potential content from the 80s and 90s, is just harder to find because it’s less likely to have been added to easily accessible historical archives, and also much more likely to be behind paywalls in the case of things like research and newspapers. Overall, though, my impression of asexuality in history is that starting around the early- to  mid-1900s, as the concept of “sexualities” and “sexual identity”, and terms like “heterosexual” and “homosexual” start to take hold in western culture, we start seeing the concept of “asexual” (as well as concepts like nonsexual, antisexual, autosexual, etc)  popping up fairly organically and fairly consistently as a label for concepts similar to both celibacy and what we call asexuality today - and then never being expanded or referred to again. In my view, the presence of references to asexuality up to the late 90s is not a continuous chain of development or growth so much as repeated instances of spontaneous invention with limited reach and eventual obsolescence. Most references are confined to one scholar, one article, one activist - it fades from memory as soon as they or their work are forgotten, and gets reinvented again by the next person over and over again. Plus, in a pre-internet era, each of these references would only have reached a tiny fraction of people before fading out - not than many people read paywalled sexological articles, or go to queer conferences, or read the letters to the editor on a specific day. (Also, re: defining and defending - most articles from the 80s and 70s also do define it, in many different ways, so that hasn’t changed. The reason they didn’t have to defend it was because no one knew or cared about to even think of commenting to the contrary) So rather than a growing chain of increasing asexual awareness that builds on what comes before, there are lots of independent sparks where someone made the basic semantic step from “some people seem to be sexually attracted to no one / engage sexually with no one / other similar concepts” to “hm, I guess they aren’t very sexual….they’re more a-sexual!”. It’s frequency is a result of the properties of the english language rather than an inherent widespread knowledge of asexuality. What all of these pre-internets sources don’t do is draw connections to or build on any other pre-existing or concurrent sources or content. While we do see academic papers periodically using the term asexual throughout the last few decades, for example, they never cite each other. Newspaper writers and readers repeatedly refer to asexuality as a new concept. That’s why the activity in the 80s didn’t lead to anything any more than the activity in the 50s or the 20s or any other era. Things only really changed when the internet (and more importantly google) came on the scene, which lowered barriers to sharing, recording, and accessing information enough that more people could stumble on and write about asexuality that they reached the critical mass that allowed a community to form. (Before google, you actually see the same pattern in the earlier 90s on places like usenet groups, where brief conversations about or references to the idea of asexuality pop up but never really lead to anything more).

It’s a story that’s mirrored in the stories from aces who came to their identity before AVEN/HHA/etc. (swankivy is a well-known example of this iirc): They knew they weren’t sexual, at least towards other people, so they used their knowledge of english and prefixes and came up with a new term: asexual. You can see dozens of stories of people doing the same thing over and over despite having no knowledge of asexuality as a formal academic concept or real world community. However, until google and the internet became big, they simply had no way to connect to with other people doing the same - or to even know that they could.

Aces Represent at SF Pride! (maybe next year I’ll remember to source an actual decent quality video camera)

Were you in front of that same dance troupe we were in front of last year?

activists at barnard college providing “labels”, photographed by susan rennie and published in off our backs: a women’s newsjournal vol. 3 no. 6, february 1973

Wow, David Jay really time traveled back to 1973 to start inventing asexuality. 😮

This makes my heart so happy

Just for the purposes of authentication…

Here’s a link to where you can view the image in-context (you must have a jstor account, which is free if you’re okay with only reading 6 papers a month, if you do not already have institutional access). It turns out that this image, along with another, was intended to be published in the previous issue of off our backs, but was not received in time.

Here’s the article that that image was supposed to accompany (apologies for the fact that this is another jstor link). It turns out this was from an event called “Lesbian/Feminist Dialogue” that those young women (from the Lesbian Activists at Barnard) were supporting. Now, before we get the hue and cry about “they weren’t really talking about asexuality in the sense that you mean it!!!!11! they were just spitballing label ideas,” here’s what the author of the article, Frances Chapman, had to say about it:

Obviously not quite the definition we used today, but decently close to it. 

Here’s the text in case anyone can’t access it on jstor

“ YOUR-OWN-LABEL 

I can be honest without using the word “lesbian,” she said. Her advice about relating to women outside the women"s movement is worth repeating: Talk about lives, don’t talk about the issues of women’s liberation. She is a teacher in a public girls high school where “girls who come on butch, don’t stay in the school,” and there is little she can do to help them and yet keep her position. 

Topic workshops included workshops on age-ism, how men keep women apart, trust between women, dealing with anger, oppression within the women’s movement, women loving women, coming out, the revolutionary woman, a and black attitudes toward feminism. 

I attended the workshop on asexuality led by Barbara Getz. According to Barbara, asexuality is an orientation that regards a partner as nonessential to sex and sex as nonessential to a satisfying relationship. “The Asexual Manifesto” can be obtained from New York Radical Feminists, P.O. Box 621, Old Chelsea Station, New York 10011). 

The conference drew a whole constellation of women’s movement stars. In addition to Jill Johnston, in chevrons, and Gloria Steinem, Barbare Love, author of “Sappho Was A Right on Woman,” Grace Atkinson, who now calls Joe Columbo “Sister,” and Kate Millet were spotted. 

The New York straight press didn’t think the conference was a story. Maybe it wasn’t for the male everydailies, but for women who survived the sexuality splits within the movement, an attempt to unify with allowance for sexual variety was an herstoric occasion. Why didn’t someone think to rent a hall in Seneca Falls?

by frances chapman”

Also, the article mentions “The Asexual Manifesto” which it says can be obtained from New York Radical Feminists. I would love love love to be able to find that. Anyone know how I might be able to get my hands on it? (The group disbanded in the 1970s and I have no idea where their writings would have gone) 

I did a little digging and it looks like Duke University has a collection of their papers in the library archives, although the catalog listing doesn’t mention that piece specifically. Curiously, I also found some mentions of “The Asexual Manifesto” being read on air during Margot Adler’s show on WBAI-FM radio in New York in the early 1970s, so there might be some leads from that direction, too? One person who recalls hearing the broadcast writes that “The general idea had to do with the liberation of people who are into solo sex.”

thanks @bi-gray !

i got over excited and actually emailed Margot Adler and Jim Freund, who’s hosting the (still running!) radio show. It’s a long shot they would have copies or remember anything from then, but it doesn’t hurt to ask i guess?

You never know! It seems like you and @redbeardace are doing a pretty efficient job of filling in different pieces of the story so far. :)

Update: 

Sadly, Margot Adler passed away a few years ago and Jim Freund doesn’t have access to the old airchecks. So no luck there. There might be mention of it in Adler’s book Heretic’s Heart: A Journey Through Spirit and Revolution. 

There is:

And according to Google Books, that’s the only mention in the book.

aro culture is lacking the communication skills to explain and ask for the complex and nuanced relationships you want.

Normally I’d just reply “big mood” to this and move on, which is a perfectly fine response.  But I want to talk about this, especially because I’m going to start inviting my allo friends to read my blog, and they need to understand this critically important concept.

Lack of visibility, both because our peers are afraid to come out and because writers of mainstream media don’t think it’s important, is literally hurting us.

Lack of language to both identify and talk about our own experiences is literally hurting us.

To start off, amatonormative culture (definition: the mainstream culture of romance normativity) already severely lacks linguistic nuance and grossly misrepresents romance in particular and interpersonal relationships in general.  We’re taught that if you’re in love, “you just know”.  What the fuck kind of description of the experience is that?!  There are few detailed descriptions of that experience in mainstream media, and a lot of the media narratives of how romantic relationships are supposed to work are rife with poor interpersonal communication and toxic emotional management, not to mention oppressive gender roles and a dozen other things.  On top of that, the depictions of romantic relationship models are outrageously narrow and overly glamorized.  Like seriously, y’all alloromantics (definition: people who experience romantic attraction) should be outraged at how incredibly narrowly defined romantic relationships are in our culture, and how strict the default boundaries are for those relationships.  You have SO LITTLE FLEXIBILITY in what is acceptable or unacceptable, and this is reflected in the language you use to talk about romance.  How many of y’all have been near-inconsolably upset the first time you had a fight with a romantic partner?  You should be outraged that our society never taught you how to expect, predict, navigate, and communicate interpersonal conflict in a healthy way.  And you should be outraged that even the word “love” is primarily associated with romantic love, when I know y’all feel and care deeply about a much wider variety of loves than that.

So take these things, a lack of nuanced language, a lack of commonly taught communication skills, words that by default mean romance often to the exclusion or devaluation of other kinds of love, and incredibly narrow socially-accepted relationship models.  Now, our society puts romance on a pedestal and gives us practically NOTHING about how to do it in healthy and mutually beneficial ways, but tells us we should idolize it to the point of not caring about other relationships, and tells us that our value as individuals is dependent on “achieving” a very specific kind of romantic relationship, which is the most important relationship with a human we could ever have.  Sucks, right?  Raise your hand if you’re an alloromantic who has been harmed by this.  Single parents?  Divorcees?  Alloromantics who our society has deemed for other reasons to be undesirable?  Literally anyone who wants to have a nuanced conversation with their romantic partner about breaking down assumptions?

Now imagine people who DO NOT experience the kind of attraction that leads to these relationships in the first place.  We get NOTHING, no words to describe our experience, no relationship models, no role models, no visibility, no communication skills, no names for the subtle differences in our desires, little to no exaltation of non-romantic love, little to no overlap in what’s acceptable compared to what we want.  Oh, and we’re told our desires don’t matter, because they aren’t romantic.  We’re told the relationships we care about don’t matter, because they aren’t romantic.  And we don’t have the words or the communication skills to express our desires or navigate the relationships we want (until we develop and invent them with each other, but we aren’t ever told that’s an option, and it shouldn’t be the only option anyway).  We’re told all this from a very early age, and we’re given no alternatives, and we internalize it deep down.  Many of us struggled to even recognize our own feelings until we met other aromantics BY HAPPENSTANCE.  Many of us believed that we were freaks or somehow emotionally damaged until we met people like us, because we were never told people like us exist.

We aromantics have been irreparably harmed by the poor communication skills and the lack of nuanced language about love in our society.  And, to a much lesser extent, so have many of you alloromantics.

This is why words matter.  This is why labels matter.  This is why communication skills matter.

Made these in honor of pride month! 

Edit: Added even more flags here —–> [2nd Post]

Redraw of this!! I’m super proud of this!!

I made a quick icon for queer creators. I know I don’t have all the flags represented, I’ll do more when I get a chance. 

I’ll be putting this on all of my professional websites and printing it out for when I do shows so that everyone can see that I’m a queer creator. People have turned away from a sale before when they realized I was queer, I’ve lost money before over it. I could go back to hiding but honestly- if they aren’t comfortable with my identity, then I don’t want their money. 

I can’t believe I forgot: Yes! Please share and use this for yourselves. Modify it for your own flags if I forget yours. Print it out for yourself, keep a copy in your booth, put it on everything, post it to social media (credit would be nice, but honestly I just want this to be used- I won’t be hurt if it isn’t credited. My only issue is if its being distributed for profit, this isn’t meant to be sold.)

Also, if you want your own flag represented, here’s an unflagged version:

I liked how my previous pastel NASA logos turned out, so I decided to make a few pastel lgbt+ flag versions!

You can find each of them on my Redbubble: Rainbow | Bi | Pan | Trans | Ace

The ace up our sleeves. 

  Magic Grass

Happy #PrideMonth⁠ ⁠ month! As part of the Ace community I plea you to embrace your uniqueness, you’re valid and there’s nothing broken about you!

❤️🧡💛💚💙💜🖤

Happy Pride Month everyone! 💜♠💚🌈