David Jay and the Rise of Asexual Visibility
Photo courtesy of David Jay
David Jay is the creator of the Asexual Visibility and Education Network and has been a prominent asexual activist since the early 2000s. In this interview, he discusses coming to terms with his identity, how it has impacted his relationship, and what it was like to be a part of the asexual movement from the start.
LTA: Could you start by introducing yourself and explaining what you do?
My name is David Jay, and I use he/him pronouns. I live in San Francisco with my two co-parents and my kid, who is two and a half. I chair the board of an organization I founded called the Asexuality Visibility and Education Network. For a long time, I have been working to create an open and honest public dialogue about ace experiences and to help aces explore themselves and express themselves.
LTA: What has your personal journey with asexuality been like?
I remember being in high school and starting to realize that all the people around me were experiencing something I wasn’t experiencing. They were having crushes on people and starting to talk about exploring sexuality. All the adults in my life said this was something I was going to explore. The culture around me said this was not only something I was going to experience but that it was an essential part of my human experience – something I needed to experience. But, I wasn’t experiencing it… and I had no idea what that meant. I didn’t have words like asexual or aromantic. I didn’t know how to tell the difference between sexual intimacy and emotional intimacy, between love and romance. I was really convinced that there was something fundamentally wrong with me. It took me all of high school to understand that this wasn’t the case. I went to a high school in St. Louis, Missouri that had really out, bad-ass queers. I was really fortunate to get to a place where I was supported by a queer community. I was able to come to understand my aceness as, not a reason I was broken, but rather as a part of human sexual diversity. When I accepted that it was something I could be radically unashamed of, I came to that place of accepting myself.
“I remember this overwhelming feeling of allyship when I found other ace people for the first time.”
— DAVID JAY
When I went to college on the East Coast, I thought I could go to a place where I could find asexual people around. I started looking but I couldn’t find them. At that time queer culture was radically sex-positive but in a way that did not include my sexuality. So I put up a website talking about my experiences as an asexual person and asking others to share their experiences. That was the beginning of my journey to connecting with others. Before, there were pockets of discussions about asexuality, but it was hard to connect on a larger scale. The website was created around the time of Google, and all of a sudden, something immensely powerful was happening. We were finding one another.
I remember this overwhelming feeling of allyship when I found other ace people for the first time. Because I spent so long having to base my sense of validity on my internal voice, having someone say, “I feel this too” was incredibly powerful. I wanted other ace people to feel what I had felt. That became my motivation, and motivation for other people, to do the work of visibility: Knowing what it was like to feel alone and wanting to invite people out of that.
As people found the community, they started coming to the forum and telling their story. Saying: “This is my experience… Am I asexual?” We faced an important decision. Some people basically wanted a test, and to say, “Either you qualify as asexual or you don’t.” They basically wanted to tell people who got to be asexual. I, and others in the community, advocated for the website as a tool, not a language. It didn’t need to mean the same thing for everyone. If it helps you figure stuff out, then you should use it. We should never tell someone that they can or can not identify as asexual. We also said that if someone wanted to use another word [to describe their identity] but still hang out in the forum, then that was okay too.
Because of that ethos, people started to identify as gray sexual, demisexual, or asexual and heteroromantic or homoromantic. All of these words for asexual identities came out of these people coming together and trying to find a language for themselves. Similarly, we started to realize we had to talk about asexuality from an intersectional standpoint. The asexual experience is really different depending on the expectation of your sexuality in groups you identify with. So my experience of asexuality as a white, cisgender man with class privilege, who is able-bodied and neurotypical is different than that of other aces because of the expectations of sexuality that are on my body. The ways I access intimacy are different for other minorities. As a community, we’ve been trying to move towards speaking about that intersection. It’s a whole other story about intimacy and relationships. Intimacy is something that ace people are often denied. But I’ve had my whole path to life replaced where I now have amazing partners, a non-traditional three parent family, and I’m a legal parent – that’s a part of our journey with queerness.
“There was no script for me with the people I loved.”
— DAVID JAY
LTA: How have your definitions of intimacy and relationships changed due to your asexual identity?
I think when I was younger, I had pretty heteronormative definitions; Intimacy meant taken, and intimacy meant sexuality. In the early days, I thought, “Oh, I must not want to be close to someone.” I remember being in college and realizing that I wanted connection. I wanted intimacy, and I even wanted touch. I just didn't want to be sexual. There was no script for the way I wanted to connect with people. That was both deeply liberating and frustrating. People around me would start dating, and there was a script for them to talk about getting serious with one another; There was a script for them to talk whether after college they would move to the same city. There was no script for me with the people I loved.
I started realizing a lot of the things that other people did while dating through my work in activism. In communities of activists, I thought, "This is where my emotional needs are being met. This is where I'm forming deep commitments with people because we were passionate about the same things. This is where I can rely on people." And out of those relationships, I started learning that one of the real differences between dating and friendship wasn't sexuality. It wasn’t even romance. It was the tension that, in romantic and sexual traditionally-scripted relationships, people had a way to talk about where their relationship was and where they wanted it to go. I didn't have a way to do that. So I started experimenting with it. Once I became really close with someone, I tried going on a walk with them and saying "Look, you've become a really important part of my life. I just want to acknowledge that. If you're open to it, I would like to go on a walk, and we can each talk about the role we play in each other's lives and what we want that to look like next." Often, what we would do is name the ways we had shown up for each other, how powerful that was, and we’d commit to continue showing up for each other in that way. That completely and utterly transformed my relationships.
All of a sudden, when I got a new partner, instead of removing a piece of me, there would be this commitment we made together. And so, they would take me aside and say: "Look, I know we committed to showing up and impacting each other's lives these ways, and I want to keep doing that. Or, for a period of time, I want to see if it's okay that I not show up this way, but I'm going to communicate that." They would acknowledge who I was rather than try to change it. That opened up all of these possible relationships and opportunities for stability that before had felt like they were behind a glass wall. That's ultimately led me to be a parent: a couple with whom I've had that potential conversation, and I had dropped hints about wanting kids in this potential relationship. After they got married, they sat me down and said, "Look, we really want to form a family. We really want you to be a part of that family. We don't know what that looks like, but we want to figure it out with you." That's a big commitment, from years of deeply working together. I feel honored and grateful to have been able to make it to this place.
LTA: There is a stereotypical image of cisgender men being hypersexual. How did that expectation affect you as you began to understand your asexuality?
There are many ways in which it was a real sign of privilege. Because I was someone who was expected to be sexual, me saying that I wasn't garnered attention [while] friends of mine, women of color, weren't taken seriously because they were already sexualized. This was really true in the early days of the press the ace community got. I was chosen as a poster child, and I think part of the reason I was chosen was because a lot of the sexist, racist, ableist ways in which asexuality was dismissed couldn't be applied to me. I could be presented as someone who could speak with authority and be believed. I was presented as someone who could have sex if they wanted to. I was presented as someone who should be sexual. If it was an older person, or a woman, or woman of color, there are other narratives about their sexuality. Even when exploring emotional and physical intimacy with other men, I was often doing so with less fear than friends of mine who were not cisgender. I think privilege aside, it meant that I was often in situations where the only acceptable path for me to express intimacy was sexually, where any way I expressed intimacy would be read as sexual. It was difficult for me to express that I was intellectually interested sometimes. It was difficult for me to express that I was interested in connecting with someone emotionally, outside the implications of sexual intimacy, because that was so culturally programmed. It's a stigma that I felt all the time, a perception of my body as sexually aggressive, as something I constantly had to escape. I developed a lot of tactics for doing that: keeping people from reading my interest in them as sexual. But that was a constant challenge to communicate a path to intimacy that both exists and is not a sexual alternative.
LTA: How have you seen the reception of your identity and the movement around asexuality transform over time?
The movement has made incredible progress from a place where most of our culture considered us a mystery, oddity, or even threat, to a place where we are widely acknowledged as an important part of the spectrum of queer identity. Our role in sexual liberation is pretty widely understood. Sexual intimacy plays an important role in queer liberation. I think we are moving from a place that is really grounded in whiteness, able experiences, and cisgender experiences, to a place that is more intersectional.
Photo courtesy of David Jay
“Queerness is about giving people the tools they need to understand and figure themselves out.”
— DAVID JAY
LTA: How do you think the asexual community could gain more mainstream representation, and not just in the queer community.
A couple years ago, the organization GLAAD put out a campaign about promoting allyship called "A is For Ally," and it pissed off a bunch of aces on Tumblr. So GLAAD invited me and other asexual figures to talk to them about asexuality. At that point, there were no ace characters in TV shows. What we had was a bunch of characters that had referenced asexuality – Sherlock, Dr. Who, Sheldon from the Big Bang Theory. These were characters who explicitly or implicitly were described as not being interested in sexuality and were also described as either strongly neurodivergent, psycho, sociopathic, or actively not human. These characters were exclusively skinny and intellectual.
Because we connected with this media organization, when Bojack Horseman had Todd come out as asexual, they reached out to GLAAD, and GLAAD got in touch with us. We sent a bunch of people to the writer's room to educate their team on aceness, which was edifying a bunch of – I mean, the Aces of LA, which is run by women of color who happen to be comedy writers, all went to the writers workshop. That's why Todd is one of the better portrayals, because there were these badass activists on the ground. It takes more than studios being willing to say the word "asexual." It takes them reaching out to us and asking us about our experience.
LTA: Some people argue asexuals are not a part of the LGBTQ+ community. What are your thoughts on this, and what would you say to those people?
There are a small number of aces who don't identify as queer. Not all aces need to identify as queer. But, a really significant portion of us do identify have intersecting identities, where we engage with other parts of the queer spectrum. So, you can’t say there aren’t aces on the LGBTQ+ spectrum, because if you talk to groups of lesbians, bi people, trans people, and queer people, you will find asexual people there.
The other thing I would say is that our struggle as a community is against heteronormativity. It's against the idea that there is one way there is one way to form relationships that matter, and that [a heteronormative expectation] needs to be enforced. Because of that, we see ourselves as deeply allied with queer struggles. We need to show up in those struggles, and we need to fight with them. I think it's important as a community to recognize that we need to show up in those struggles. We need to be there for trans folks, and against bi-phobia.
So, firstly, I would say: Queerness is not about labels. Queerness is about giving people the tools they need to understand and figure themselves out. The tools of queerness are deeply empowering for these folks – so I don't think they should be mad at us. The second thing is: People can say what they want. We're gonna show up to be part of the same fight. We’re not benefiting or taking advantage of the queer community, nobody is making money from being queer. We're in this fight together.
LTA: What advice do you have for young asexuals who are looking for understanding from the people around them (such as parents or friends)?
When the first wave of media hit the ace community, we got to ride the media train and talk about our experiences. What we found was that there two types of questions asexual people need to answer: Questions trying to dissect us to find either our sexuality or a form of our sexuality – people who ask invasive questions about our bodies, they ask questions about how our brains work, because they want to prove that we're "ace" but not ace.
There's another set of questions that are about the experiences of aceness: How we experience isolation, how we experience connection, how we experience loneliness, how we experience any feeling. Our job is to get people off of asking the first set of questions and more about asking the second set of questions. Instead of justifying that aceness was real, we would talk about our experience and why it is worth sharing.
Written by: Bizzie Lynch
Edited by: Bizzie Lynch
July 2020