I Desire Cake

When I was a teen, growing up in a small town in 1980s Mississippi, there were only 2 options as far as I knew:  Either you were gay or your were straight.  Because I was exceedingly liberal for the time and place (though probably less liberal than I am now) and because I wanted desperately to leave Mississippi, I spent a lot of time learning as much as I could about the outside world.  I spent hours at the library my high school shared with the local university reading the Village Voice and dreaming of going in New York City.    Because of this, and because I was a huge fan of Erasure, I figured out that there was nothing wrong with being gay.  Which was good, because I knew I wasn’t straight.  I couldn’t be:  I liked looking at pretty guys too much, and I got crushes on my male friends.

On the other hand, I also knew that I liked looking at pretty girls too, and I regularly developed crushes on my female friends.  So I lay awake at night, my thoughts spinning in my head  “I like boys, so I can’t be straight.  But I like girls, so I can’t be gay.  But I like boys…”  Repeat ad nauseum.

Fast forward to the early 90s.  I was going to college in New Orleans.  This exposed me to much more of the world than I would have seen had I remained in Mississippi.  But it didn’t bring me any closer to figuring things out until my second semester, when there was a rash of people in the dorm coming out as bisexual.  Aha!  A lightbulb went on in my head.  THIS must be what I was.  I could like both boys and girls!  But something still didn’t feel right.  Though I made out with people and liked it, I passed up chances to have sex with people of both genders.  Finally one of my female friends basically harassed me into sleeping with her (at the time I didn’t recognize date rape for what it was - the early 90s were a much less aware time, at least for me).  And when I met the woman who later became my wife, she was the one who made the first move sexually, as well as the second and third moves and most of the others.  

Fast forward again, last 2015.  My wife and I are still together and have had 2 kids.  But no one looking at our sex life would ever mistake it for a “normal” sex life (to the extent that there is such a thing).  But I still feel that something’s not right.  I’m not unhappy, but at the same time, my main feeling about sex is a resounding “meh.”  I research various fetishes and relationship styles on the internet, but nothing really feels right - some seem like they might be a lot of fun, but the whole idea just collapses for me once genitals get involved.  When I watch a TV show about pickup artists, and besides being repulsed at all the dishonesty involved, my thought is “That seems like an awful lot of work for sex.”  

Then one day I stumbled on a page about the difference between romantic orientation and sexual orientation.  And then I learn about asexuality.  And finally, after all this time, I figured it out.  I’m panromantic and asexual.  All of a sudden so many things from my past made sense.  SO MANY THINGS!  And while I’m very glad that I understand it now, I’m also rather frustrated at the time lost because I didn’t have this knowledge years and years before.  I could have been spared so much mental anguish and so many sleepless nights if I had known.

a short and simple comic about the very basics of asexuality for people who might not understand it or have even come across it!

starring Aled Last from my second novel, Radio Silence, who identifies as demisexual!

happy asexuality awareness week, everyone!!!!

Heyy guess what I made…

This is a survey for anybody on the ace spectrum!

my autochorissexual ass:

When in fact, it still fucks you up, just in a much subtler way.

Conservative Christians are actually obsessed with sex. It’s no wonder, because sexual feelings are a natural part of the human experience for many people. You have to work hard to do away with something that is a natural part of you. You have to shove it into a little box and every time it slips out (cause it will, you’re human) you have to shove it back in. And then beat yourself up for letting it slip out.

It becomes this mystical force that will ruin your life, unless you let it out at the right time. When there’s a ring on it and not a moment before. Unless of course you’re attracted to the same sex, and in that case, Never.

Everyone knows that puberty is when sexual awakening starts. And if parents want to nip it in the bud they have to stay on top of that shit, and this is the time when most teenagers start considering sex. If you’re a “normal” sexual individual starting to get those urges, you have to sneak around your parents boundaries to pursue or even learn about this stuff. Your parents know that, and are waiting around corners to catch you with promise rings and pamphlets about STDs and passages in the Bible that say “don’t have sex”.

When you’re asexual, you’re watching all this from the outside. You see your peers sneaking round corners, and you don’t really care. When you were twelve your parents said “don’t have sex!” and you said “Ok!” and went back to drawing dragons. Nothing has changed since you became a teenager. But your parents are watching you with hawk eyes, and they’re even more frustrated when they see you showing no interest in sex at all. EVERYONE has sexual urges they have to curb, so you must just be really good at hiding it. So they watch you closer and closer and closer. You saunter round the corner your peers would be sneaking round, and your parents pop out and scream “Were you having sex!?” and you scream “No?!” because you were startled by this ambush and the idea of sex that couldn’t be farther from your mind but they take your vehement denial to be a sign of guilt and they keep pressing and pressing and pressing…

It gets even weirder when you’re assigned female. Cause you can say “I don’t have sexual feelings at all” and your mother will say “you’re a woman, of course you don’t. No woman does.” But they’re still waiting round those corners for you to slip up and do the sex. And they give you this picture of the future that “you’re a woman and you don’t want sex, but men NEED sex they NEED IT SO BAD so it’s something you’re going to have to do to keep your man happy”. If you’ve got a somewhat progressive mother she’ll add, “don’t worry, you’ll love it you’ll have so much fun once you’re married” to keep it from becoming a creepy lay-back-and-think-of-England thing, but it still becomes this thing that people will do TO you. You don’t need to have feelings at all on the matter, it’ll just happen.

Not to mention there’s the idea that marriage is the highest of achievements cause like, God is both male and female so when a male and a female marry they are basically the closest to God they’re ever gonna get. It’s ultimate happiness AND you FINALLY get to have the sex that’s been denied you and how on earth does a kid tell their parents they don’t want what is, for them, the greatest prize in this life?

All these messages are weird as fuck for an asexual kid. You don’t really care about this mystical force, but your parents, your pastor, your church peers, are always shoving it in your face as something awful and wonderful. So you get the idea that it’s something super important you never got the memo for. Just like in mainstream society, where sex is the Best Thing Ever, no one believes you when you say you don’t want it.

I never expected her to be overjoyed I was professing my not being heteronormative, but I didn’t expect her to be upset that I didn’t want to have sex to begin with. I realized during that conversation the only way to make her happy would be to really really want sex and restrain myself, because the point is apparently isn’t simply not having sex.

Before that conversation, I just assumed she’d be cool with it (relatively speaking) because I wasn’t telling her I was gay or pregnant or whatever other random thing (I am absolutely not trying to say say being gay or getting pregnant out of wedlock is bad, I’m just saying my Granny might stop speaking to me if that were the case…). It was an admittedly interesting new perspective that I got that I most definitely didn’t expect when I called her out of the blue to profess my asexuality.

wanting and not wanting at the same time

Intimacy: The Whys, Hows, How-Nots, and So-Nots