#aceblogging

https://taaap.org/ The Aro Ace advocacy project. A US based advocacy project with events and info and so on.

https://azejournal.com/ Aze Journal is an aro, ace and agender journal with multiple mediums, but mostly writing (poetry, essays). People submit responses to a theme. Entirely free.

AVEN is an online asexuality forum.

Asexual Outreach is a canada-based organization that organizes ace week and is behind the organization aces and aros that runs local communities, especially in the US, but also elsewhere.

International asexuality day is a website dedicated to said day that has global connections.

asexual [dot] net is a website centred around ace dating and finding ace friends. they also have a blog that's about asexuality

acespace.love is a dating & friendship site targeted at alloaces.

what is asexuality is a website about asexuality

aces.nyc is an organization dedicated to asexuality based in new York city. It has more resources

asexuality archive is a website about asexuality

Alberta Asexuals and aromantics is an organization in Alberta.

I’m thirty-one years old and I identify as asexual. I’ve seen it insinuated that being ace is a “stepping stone” sexuality, something you identify as when you’re younger before you realize your “true” sexuality later, something you grow out of. I learned about asexuality when I was 24, and didn’t start identifying as such until I was 26. Before that, I identified as straight, bisexual, and pansexual. I don’t intend to imply that those are sexualities you grow out of, either. I mean to say that everyone has their own journey, and sometimes the journey ends at ace.

Realizing I was asexual probably saved my life. I had a pretty significant drinking problem in college and for a while after, which was due to both untreated anxiety and depression and to feeling like I was broken when it came to sex and relationships. Finding a good therapist helped significantly. So did discovering asexuality. 

I still feel broken sometimes. I still get lonely sometimes.

I’m out to some people in my life, but not most, and probably never will be. I’ll probably also never be entirely comfortable talking about my sexuality regularly and freely. I exist in a place somewhere between “out and proud” and “in the closet,” and that’s probably where I’ll remain. Sometimes, it helps to hear that other people exist here, too.    

I’ve had sex with people of multiple genders. I might have more in the future. To me, sex is kind of like going to the ballet - I recognize it’s something a lot of people enjoy, and something that can be inherently beautiful. It just doesn’t do a whole lot for me. I can appreciate it when it’s particularly good, and I can be a willing participant when it’s something a partner really enjoys and wants to share. But I’m not looking for opportunities to go the ballet, and if I never went again, it wouldn’t phase me.

My sex-positivity does not negate the experiences of sex-negative aces. My asexuality also doesn’t negate the experiences of people who aren’t ace. Sex is awesome for people who want it, and also I think our culture relies far too heavily on sex as a universal touchstone when people’s relationships with it are so varied and nuanced. All these things can be true at once.

I most strongly identify as queer. I know a lot of people aren’t comfortable with that term. I will never call you queer if you don’t want to be called queer. I also am going to continue calling myself that. I don’t want to be called gay. That’s an umbrella term that doesn’t work for me. It’s not an experience I identify with.

I actually don’t write about being ace much, but I do really love exploring non-sexual intimacy, which are the parts of relationships I find most fascinating and most attractive, romantic or otherwise. Tenderness, physical and emotional closeness, different ways to communicate affection - that’s the good shit.

I don’t talk about being ace much, either, because I still struggle with anxiety and depression and mostly want to stay out of people’s way. But it’s been difficult to see some of these assumptions when my experience has been so different. Narrow, maybe. Under-informed, probably. But valid, and worth sharing. 

I am deeply, DEEPLY uncomfortable with being perceived as alloromantic, to the degree that "repulsion" might be the best word to describe my feelings about it. I've felt like that pretty much all my life, although I didn't know that's what I was feeling.

Because, like, okay. It's 2026. There's rising queerphobia of all stripes--which is undeniably one reason I'm thinking about the lateral violence of it all, and we'll circle back to that--but the media environment of today does still makes it more possible than ever before to find and enjoy queer fiction. And this is critical to what I'm about to say next, so I hope those of us that grew up in times where that was not true can sort of table our thoughts on what things were like when we were kids.

My point it, if I'm an adult who isn't in the closet (and even if I am in the closet, plausible deniability is higher than it was pre-2010 or so!), I can go see a gay movie. I can go buy a gay book. There are members of the community, like kids/teens or people in unsafe situations that might not have that freedom, but at the very least, finding the gay media isn't the hard part for anyone. Heated Rivalry is one of the biggest TV shows of the year (and the books that it's based off have since seen a huge jump in popularity, too), queer romantasy is flourishing, and even classic queer media is getting revamped (pun intended) in series like the Interview With the Vampire TV series. And if, for whatever reason, none of the current professional stuff is doing it for you, Ao3 has approximately 8.4 million M/M stories and 1.7 F/F stories--which isn't the greatest ratio for the femslash fans, but is still nothing to sneeze at. And that's not even getting into the many gay podcasts and audio dramas, self-published books, comics (indie and otherwise), and other, nicher options. Long story short, if you only want to watch, read, or listen to media with prominent gay characters in it, you can establish a very healthy media diet, with everything from fun, trashy romance to acclaimed TV miniseries to weird podcasts to RPG actual plays, and everything in-between. This has very much not always been the case, so it's really cool we're here!

As an aro/ace person I... can't do that with stories about people like me. Like I really, seriously can't do that. I guess if I was content to enjoy less media, maybe, but I love stories, which I'm sure a lot of people on this website can relate to. And I love participating in fandom, too, so sometimes I do want to be into something that's big enough for me to chat about it with other people, or get more than a handful of kudos on my fanfic. So at the end of the day I don't limit myself, and that's honestly a good thing! It's great to be into things about characters who don't exactly share your identities, too.

But like. This year I've bought* exactly one book with an actual, canonically aro and/or ace character in it--the short story collection Tales From the Folly, which is a part of the Rivers of London series and features the aro/ace character Thomas Nightingale. (*I say bought, because I'm yet to actually read it--I'm sorry, Thomas!). That's it. I've enjoyed various other stories, but as far as ones with people like me go, I've gotten my hands on exactly one. And it's not for a lack of trying! There just... hasn't been much on my radar. This is a huge reason I've gotten so excited about Project Hail Mary recently--it doesn't have any canonically queer characters, and the original author definitely didn't intend to write the main character in a way that resonated with so many aro/aces. But it's a story without any canonical romance of any kind, where as a result, I can watch a fun movie and pretend for a little bit that Ryland Grace is like me. There are so few aro/ace characters that most of what we get. Playing pretend.

This is where I think some of the wires are getting crossed. When people hear someone like me say "I'm really exhausted by all the emphasis on romance and shipping in fandom," I think what some of you are hearing--because it's historically been true, and we're at a scary time in the world where it feels more and more like it's threatening to become true again--is "I want there to be fewer gay stories." When what I'm really saying is "I want there to be more aro/ace stories--or at least stories where I can pretend the main character is like me." And to even further hamper understanding, when aro and/or ace folks say we want stories about people like us and we hear other, allo queers object, what we aspecs often hear is "I think people like you aren't worth telling stories about"--even though many of you have valid reasons for liking the stories that you do, too.

I think that those of us who belong to older generations (especially millennials and above) can all probably relate to what aspecs are experiencing here on some level. There was a point in time where gay books were extremely limited, and gay characters in TV and movies were unheard of. Even as things crept in a more progressive direction, the Bury Your Gays tropes meant not everyone could enjoy the stories those characters showed up in. That was really hard for a lot of people, and I never, ever want us to go back to that. But I do think it's important to acknowledge that gay media just isn't at that point right now. Media with actual aro/ace characters in it.... kind of still is. It's different, because society is in a very different place, and also cishet people have historically demonized aromantic and asexual people with very different tropes--the heartless villain incapable of love, the cold lover that the protagonist abandons to be happy with someone else, the boring stuck-up prude, etc. And there are people, especially in the indie sphere, who are making some good stuff. But at the end of the day, I have a lot fewer choices than you do. Which is why it really hurts to get told that my headcanons and readings of canon--which are most of what I have--are actually problematic.

Anyway. None of this is groundbreaking. It's been said before, by people more eloquent and more persuasive than me, and it'll probably be said again. It just feels worth reiterating, considering some of the blowback I've been getting to expressing this sentiment. Because I really do think a lot of us want the same thing--for everyone to be able to enjoy whatever kind of stories they like most about people like them. (Without losing sight of the fact that media can be a great way to understand the experiences of people of other experiences, of course). When the scales are so unequally weighted, however, it gets really messy to talk about.