Le Slow Evening Show

The Golden Orchid association (1644-1949) - a group of women in China that included lesbians, bisexuals, and “women who wanted to avoid both marriage options, and any romantic or sexual partnership” that today we would call asexual or aromantic. 

Another Golden Orchid association link (which, interestingly, describes what appears to be a poly relationship). 

Personal experience of a queer-identifying person noting that aces were part of the bi community in the 80s and 90s.

A book published in 1999 supports the previous link of someone’s personal experience, and notes that asexuals could be considered part of Kinsey’s “Group 3″ (the bisexuals) because they were “about equally homosexual and heterosexual” and “have no strong preferences for one or the other” just like bisexuals. 

Another book that supports the personal experience source by noting that asexuals were considered part of the bisexual “Group 3″, which was published in 1999.

Another post of someone’s personal experiences of asexuals being part of the LGBT+ community in the 90s. 

A source from 1999 noting that, while some female-female relationships in the early to mid-twentieth century were obviously lesbian relationships, not all of them were, but that it would be a mistake to label them all “friendships”. It specifically notes that asexual partnered relationships also existed. 

This book describes a series of interviews done in 1990 by Catherine Whitney who interviewed heterosexual women married to gay men, and found that they were often asexual. It also describes how, in 1990, Ann Landers (a very popular advice columnist) asked her readers if married couples could enjoy a full life without sex and was flooded with 35,000 responses from people of all ages who had little or no sex and didn’t miss it. It also describes how “Boston marriage” was originally coined with a not-necessarily-always-accurate implication that such a relationship between women was nonsexual, but that later on the assumption was reversed to imply women in a sexual lesbian relationship, and how that caused some women involved in such relationships to hide the asexual nature of their relationships for fear of being called frauds by the larger lesbian community.

This 1997 book that states “To be a Kinsey 3 (bisexual) is to be equally attracted to men and women, i.e. completely bisexual…it is also to be equally unattracted to men and women, i.e. completely asexual. Bisexuality is never about two, only about one – asexual, or self-fulfilling – or three – continuously and equally attracted to both men and women”.

Proof of asexuality being considered as a concrete, distinct orientation before 2000:

One of the first online posts about asexuality in its current use, was made in 1997. 

A study on anorexia and bulemia in gay and bisexual men done in 1999 found that 58% of anorexia patients were asexual. 

The 1997 Australasian Gay & Lesbian Law Journal mentions asexual as a “relevant sexual identity”.

A 1983 issue of the Journal of Sex Research studied the Mental Health Implications of Sexual Orientation among heterosexual, homosexual, bisexual, and asexual people. 

The article “Asexuality as Orientation: Some Historical Perspectives” describes different historical studies on asexuality, including a study from Johnson in 1977 where the word asexual was used to describe women “regardless of physical or emotional condition, actual sexual history, and marital status or ideological orientation, [who] seem to prefer not to engage in sexual activity”. It also describes a 1980 study by Storms who included asexual as one of four orientation categories when mapping out sexual orientation. It also describes a 1983 study by Nurius that found out of 685 participants, 5% of males and 10% of females were asexual. It also describes a 1990 study by Berkley et al. that included questions “related to homosexuality, heterosexuality, and asexuality” and included four items (out of 45) that were specific to asexuality. 

This book published in 1922 contains a lot of what I personally would describe as narcissism and pseudo-science, but acknowledges asexuality nonetheless: “In addition to the ordinary distinctive males and females, we have asexuals, homosexuals, bisexuals, and old women of both sexes.”

This book from 1996 that notes “A transsexual may have a heterosexual orientation, a homosexual orientation, a bisexual orientation – or an asexual orientation” and clarifies that “a very small number – are asexual or bisexual.”

This book mentions a study by Malyon in 1981 that noted the options available to gay and lesbian teenagers choosing whether, or how, to come out by “[describing] three possible modes of adaptation in adolescence: repression of sexual desire, suppression of homosexual impulses in favor of heterosexual or asexual orientation, or a homosexual disclosure.”

Kinds of oppression that asexuals face:

Eunjung Kim wrote a chapter titled “How Much Sex Is Healthy? The Pleasures of Asexuality” that describes how “the absence of sexual desires, feelings, and activities is seen as abnormal and reflective of poor health” in Western contemporary culture “because of the explicit connection between sexual activeness and healthiness” and argues that “medical explanations of asexuality as an abnormality that has to be corrected constitute a large part of the stigmatization and marginalization experienced by asexual people.” It also discusses the ways in which some groups, specifically Asian American males, that are desexualized can erase the space for asexual Asian American men to simply exist.

Asexuals also face sexual harassment, rape threats, corrective sexual assault, and corrective rape (which, no, is not a lesbian-only term according to actual South Africans) specifically because they are asexual. 

There was a recent study by the AAU to identify sexual assault on college campuses, and broke down the responders to their survey by sexual orientation, including asexual. The results clearly show that asexuals are not immune to unwanted sexual contact, stalking, intimate partner violence, or sexual harassment.

A chapter of “Asexualities: Feminist and Queer Perspectives” that notes the specific way that asexual people are talked to/about: “Because asexual difference cannot be iterated in the linguistic field where sex and a sexed position dominate the discourse of sexuality and desire, the asexual subject is linguistically and visually dismantled and reconstructed in the position of a fetish object. This fetishistic conversion happens because the asexual person is made into an image, or spectacle, for consumption.” and “The difference between the unassailable asexual (someone who lacks all of the traits commonly blamed for asexuality such as past history of abuse, disability, etc.) and the spectacular asexual is that while the unassailable asexual allegedly makes asexuality digestible for a skeptical public and presents an accessible image, the spectacular asexual is always consumed as a fetish object, regardless of mental health, ability, and gender.”

The study “Intergroup bias toward “Group X”: Evidence of prejudice, dehumanization, avoidance, and discrimination of asexuals” is exactly what it sounds like. The article’s abstract states: “In two studies (university student and community samples) we examined the extent to which those not desiring sexual activity are viewed negatively by heterosexuals. We provide the first empirical evidence of intergroup bias against asexuals (the so-called “Group X”), a social target evaluated more negatively, viewed as less human, and less valued as contact partners, relative to heterosexuals and other sexual minorities. Heterosexuals were also willing to discriminate against asexuals (matching discrimination against homosexuals). Potential confounds (e.g., bias against singles or unfamiliar groups) were ruled out as explanations.”

The Invisible Orientation: An Introduction to Asexuality describes many issues that asexuals face, including: how asexuality is seen as “invisible” and lends to people thinking it does not exist, how asexuality is actively erased as “unimportant” or not its own identity, the explicitly and implicitly negative messages associated with a lack of sexual attraction, the fear asexuals face when they believe there is something physically or psychologically wrong with them for being asexual, the belief asexuals face about how they must be deeply flawed since they do not conform to other sexual identities, how asexuals face cultural ideologies that sexuality is biologically based and ubiquitous (that all humans possess sexual desire) and that don’t acknowledge asexuality, that to describe oneself as asexual is a statement of moral superiority or purity or failure to find a suitable partner, that asexuality is an immature state they will “grow out of”, that asexuality is a description of action or a preference, that asexuality is unnatural or unhealthy or has to be a symptom of something else, etc.

Asexuality has been shown in the media in a negative light for decades, reflecting the idea that (for various reasons steeped in classism and racism) any woman who wasn’t willing to marry and procreate was a threat to the status quo, as seen in this 1955 book that notes: “Women who did not marry incurred political and social scorn for another reason. The influx of eastern and southern European immigrants in the United States pushed the question into eugenic terms–the wrong people were reproducing. Educated women came primarily from white middle- and upper-class stock, the most desired element by dominant social norms. When these women refused to marry and reproduce, they forced a new concern into the public discourse. it is not a coincidence that the stereotypical asexual unmarried older woman emerged at this time as a source of popular humor.”

Some people in some religions are very explicit about hating asexuals specifically because they are asexual, seeing asexuality as “a perversion akin to homosexuality and bestiality”. 

Other religions see asexuals as actually sinful if they choose not to have sex with their spouse.

While not every member of every religion looks down on asexuals, many people in portions of various religions choose to view asexuals negatively. 

Some people even recommend asexuals avoid being in a relationship with non-asexuals and assert that “promoting and trying to spread” asexuality, or behaving in an asexual manner, is wrong or unhealthy. 

Because of these religious beliefs about asexuality, that also opens up asexuals to discrimination in various legal ways, including (but not limited to) things like the new adoption bill in Texas. 

Asexuality was implicitly pathologized until very recently, and even now, the DSM-V states that a diagnosis of HSDD may not be given only if the patient has a preexisting knowledge of asexuality and chooses to ID that way.

TL;DR: 

Asexuals have long been considered part of the bisexual community. When people used to talk about bisexuals, it included asexuals because asexuals were the bisexuals too. Bisexual history is asexual history.

Asexuals have also long been considered as a stand-alone orientation that was part of larger non-straight communities and could be studied in comparison to other sexual orientations. 

Asexuals face many of the same issues that other marginalized orientations face as well as issues specific to their orientation. These include erasure, medicalization, misidentification, harassment, rape specifically targeted at them for being asexual, and religious intolerance, to name just a few.  

The 1881 portrait of two little girls rendered in pink and blue silk by Pierre-Auguste Renoir is, at face value, a society portrait of the daughters of French aristocracy. But the story behind the painting – and what became of the Jewish girls it depicts – is much darker.

Alice and Elisabeth Cahen d’Anvers, the subjects of the Impressionist painter’s famous portrait Pink and Blue and the younger daughters of a French banking dynasty, were immortalised as youthful members of the “haute Juiverie”: glamorous, upper-class Jews of Europe at the height of the Belle Époque. Their older sister Irène was also the subject of a famous Renoir painting several years earlier, depicted with a ribbon in her flowing red hair against a lush green backdrop.

Nothing in the portraits of the young sisters gives any indication that, 60 years later, Alice would be hiding from German bombers in a ditch in Normandy and Elisabeth, the blonde child with a blue sash in Pink and Blue, would be boarding a one-way train to Auschwitz.

The Renoir Girls traces the path of the three Cahen d’Anvers sisters from their shimmering days in Belle Époque  Paris – yachting on the Côte d’Azur, trips to the opera, salons, summer retreats, and dancing the night away at opulent balls – to their little-known struggle to survive in Nazi-occupied France.

Ostler, former editor of Tatler magazine, first heard of the three Jewish sisters from Edmund de Waal’s memoir The Hare with Amber Eyes, which explores the once gilded lives of de Waal’s own Parisian Jewish banking family during the 19th and 20th centuries. His relative Charles Ephrussi, a Jewish art patron who had an affair with matriarch Louise Cahen d’Anvers - and who was rumoured to be the actual father of Alice – persuaded Louise to have her daughters painted by Renoir.

“Impressionism rises up after the Franco-Prussian War, and there's a whole new way of looking at art. There’s a lot of stuff to buy and a lot of stuff to commission and a market for it and the result is an incredibly creative period,” says Ostler, adding that Louise was an “extraordinary” art collector herself with “a hold over all the French writers and artists of the day.”

One line in de Waal’s book came as a punch to the stomach: Elisabeth was murdered at Auschwitz.

Despite the Cahen d’Anvers family’s abiding love for France, their generous artistic patronage and sacrifices during the First World War – the sons fought for France, the women were nurses, with Alice winning the Croix de guerre for bravery at the front – they were of course not spared the growing antisemitism of France that culminated in the Vichy regime. As their family friend Marcel Proust wrote at the time, the “social kaleidoscope was in the act of turning… the Dreyfus case was shortly to relegate the Jews to the lowest rung of the social ladder.”

Elisabeth, in what may have been a bid for self-preservation, converted to Catholicism in 1895 and remained a practising Catholic for the rest of her life.  In 1944 at the age of 70, just months from the Allied liberation of Paris, she was betrayed by a local mayor and Vichy collaborator “who insisted on reminding everybody that she was actually Jewish, even though she converted to Catholicism before she was 20 and had been married twice, both times to Catholic men,” Ostler says.

France's attitude to its Jews in this the era is illustrated by the Nazis’ seizure of the Cahen d’Anvers’ Paris townhouse which they used as a place to hold and torture Jews awaiting deportation.

“Antisemitism is one of those things that I've always been aware of, but it is a shapeshifter,” said Ostler, who is not Jewish herself. “It's this monstrosity, and I partly feel there is an enormous amount of ignorance about it. It overlaps with so many conspiracy theories and the darkest urges of human nature.”

She hopes The Renoir Girls will be received by British Jews as a book of support, a reminder of the immense contributions Jews have made to their societies over the past centuries.

"The Jewish community is incredibly important to this country,” Ostler said. “It's written out of respect to their strengths and creativity and generosity and the whole beauty of the culture that Jewish community can create and encourage.”

ICE

CBS News under its new editor-in-chief pulled the segment which was to run Sunday in the U.S., generating criticism — including from the correspondent who reported on it.

Dec. 23, 2025, 1:28 AM MST

By Phil Helsel and Daniel Arkin

While the furor over CBS News’ decision to delay a planned “60 Minutes” report about deportees sent by the Trump administration to a notorious Salvadoran prison continued Monday, the intended segment was already circulating online, having been streamed in Canada.

The report, titled “Inside CECOT,” was streamed by Canada’s Global Television Network. In the U.S., its broadcast was postponed by CBS under its new editor-in-chief, Bari Weiss.

It includes interviews from people who were deported from the U.S. to the Center for the Confinement of Terrorism, or CECOT, under the Trump administration. The interviewees described torture and physical and sexual abuse at the complex.

Here's the ~14 minutes someone managed to record before it was pulled

It's not a fun watch of course but I think it's important especially since what was done to these people was done in our name

I feel like it says a lot that this was pulled from ever airing in the States. The government doesn't want you to see this and doesn't want you to know what they're doing

This Christmas we can't gloss over what the US did to thousands of innocent people

I.

Personality hire