emissary from a planet of genderless librarians

See, I understand the utility of the split-attraction model. I even understand that “romantic attraction” feels like a meaningful category to many people separate from sexual attraction.

But in my personal experience of the world, romance is too much of a construct for “romantic attraction” to make any sense as a coherent thing that I consider myself as having or not having.

And look, everything is a construct, including sexual attraction. But sexual attraction is a construct in the way a brick is a construct; simple, definable, easy to say whether I have it or don’t have it. Romance, on the other hand, is even more obviously entirely culturally defined. It’s a construct in the way a house is a construct. What makes something a house? If I got ten people in a room we could probably cobble together a decent definition of a “brick” that we are all mutually satisfied with, even if it’s not perfect at including all things that are bricks and excluding all things that are not. There might be edge cases but we could do it.

But a house? What defines a house? Is a house that is not currently livable due to damage still a house? What about a house that doesn’t look like an American white picket fence stick built house? Something made of grass or mud or stone. Something for a climate where roofs or walls are a poor choice. What about house boats and RVs?

What defines romance? Is it sex? Non sexual physical intimacy? Emotional connections? Some odd cross sectional grid of the myriad possibilities for human interaction?

Every experience is an edge case when you drill down in it. I have a structure built out of bricks, and there’s a hole in the structure where the brick that is sexual attraction goes for other people. Is the structure a house or not? Could you even tell, without me describing a great deal more about it, its size, its shape? Would you and the person next to you agree, once I did?

And all this means that while I’ll call myself aro and aroace for the purposes of communicating with others, (the size and shape of the brick structure has no bearing on the fact that I do not plan to ever be in a monogamous partnership, and that’s the important thing to convey) the concepts actually have not much real impact on my subjective internality. Being aro or being aroace are not to me separate from my being ace. Or rather they are not to me a reified part of my identity the way being ace is.

So I find it SO WIERD that everyone assumes that they would be. That by default anyone who has an a- identity is going to have a complicated interaction with the split attraction model, that, as @specialagentartemis put it, “the canonical ace is alloromantic and the canonical aro is allosexual, and aroaces are a third thing.”

by Jane Hirshfield

It was like this: you were happy, then you were sad, then happy again, then not.

It went on. You were innocent or you were guilty. Actions were taken, or not.

At times you spoke, at other times you were silent. Mostly, it seems you were silent — what could you say?

Now it is almost over.

Like a lover, your life bends down and kisses your life.

It does this not in forgiveness — between you, there is nothing to forgive — but with the simple nod of a baker at the moment he sees the bread is finished with transformation.

Eating, too, is a thing now only for others.

It doesn’t matter what they will make of you or your days: they will be wrong, they will miss the wrong woman, miss the wrong man, all the stories they tell will be tales of their own invention.

Eva Stratt, the world's whipping boy.

---

Here are just a few of our favorite new additions to QLL this May ✨

Queers at the Table eds. Alex D. Ketchum & Megan J. Elias

Masquerade by Mike Fu

Crawl: stories by Max Delsohn

Portraits as Animal poems by Victoriano Cardenas

Mega Milk by Megan Milks

Golden Ruin by Emma Kennedy

She Who Remains by Rene Karabash

Chicago After Stonewall by St Sukie de la Croix

Devil of the Deep by Falencia Jean-Francois

we’ve got westerns we’ve got mermaids we’ve got translations from Brazil and Bulgaria, queer food! essays on dairy, short stories, poems, and even… chicago

To replace the Tumblr blue color