cinnamon_possum | Notes and Thoughts on Ace History Day Livestream

Earlier today, AVEN hosted a livestream that focused around ace history and how the ace community developed in its early days. This is due to October 11th/12th being the birthday of the Haven for the Human Amoeba email list, and as of this year it is 20 years old! The livestream was very informative, and I'm posting my notes for it here mostly for myself but also for those who would like to have a crash course on early ace community development. The video is also saved on AVEN's youtube and viewable here. My notes include some direct quotes from the speakers, and I reserve my personal thoughts and conclusions for the end.

HHA History
- was a Yahoo email list
- in America, was founded just before midnight on the 11th of October 2000
- Aven founded (David Jay) March 2001 with their forums beginning in May 2002
- Asexual LiveJournal (Nat Titman) began in April 2002
- May 1997 O'Reilly's article "My life as an Amoeba" had a prevalent comment section that may be considered catalyst to online ace community
Libidoist Aces - 2001, two sides around libidoism, beginning of discussion of people who masturbated and had libido, people who had crushes and aesthetic attraction
- also started the discussion of difference between sex and romance, is "romance" actually "intense friendship"?, a lot of aroaces were stunned bc for them it was conflated but luckily romantic aces started talking
- "people coming together and trying to figure out if we are the same thing...do we fit under this umbrella, does that invalidate some of us"
- development of different theories to explain different attractions, sex drive
- Stereo Theory : volume vs channel playing, volume could be turned up but it was static (sex drive with no attraction), a channel could be playing but you can't hear it (attraction without sexual aspect)
Noticing around age 10-12 that sexuality was "fashionable" for their peers
- not knowing why peers were having sex, not having sex as part of their paradigm, thinking that "home base" was making out
Beginning of the spectrum
- beginning of shades of grey, considering it similar to bisexuality as an orientation that is not black or white
- backgrounded by the libidoist/non-libidoist arguments making HHA an unfriendly space for (ppl who would now identify as) grey or demi, they weren't around/weren't willing to provide their own perspectives
- early discussion of a common definition being impossible
  - versus now where we include an umbrella discussion with maybe a stricter common definition, have mostly developed an umbrella with a word to hold it together without too much policing of that word
- Lauren's experience with gatekeeping and being chased out of the community
  - fear of gatekeeping, of "not being asexual enough...cannot be allosexual functionally"
  - "what could I have given back to the community" had she not been pushed out by gatekeepers
  - interesting to hear how romantic aces were pushed to the margins
    - Lauren speculates it was a purity issue because it was easier to define it as "no interest in other people" and to not try to separate romance drive from sex drive
Romantic Attraction
- started to pop up in January 2002 as successor to romance drive, romantic ace, and emotional orientation
- question of how could romance exist without sex
  - not having that romantic paradigm, imagining it as a script, not processing that feelings occur
LiveJournal had issues with slut shaming, Nat Titman made the asexuality LJ that was meant to be more inclusive of aces with romantic attraction, kinks, etc
- "massive overcorrection" that happened later on, where aroaces started as the defualt, where recently aros have been pushed out of the ace community
Aromantic
- April of 2002
- aromanticism as default until non-aros started to make themselves heard
- partially developed by people who didn't feel kinship to asexual for sex reasons but for romance reason
Gender Time
- non-binary stuff wasn't well discussed on HHA, enbies went elsewhere as it wasn't really normalized there, implicitly exclusive rather than explicit
- disconnect that aces have with masculinity and femininity due to not participating in sexual/aesthetic luring? seducing? gender performance in the heteronormative sense is heavily pushed in terms of seducing another gender
Overlap in autistic and ace communities
- possibly that autistic people are more likely to question things and not take things for granted, more likely to seek out why they feel different/alienated
- more able to acknowledge the difference as they have already acknowledged and must understand their autism, the difference is too big to just sweep away as "another autism thing"
- could also overlap with sensory issues
- could also play into the gender disconnect mentioned above
Miscellaneous
- David Jay's child is adorable
- BiCon - shift in 2001 from Bisexual Con as many people were bi for non sexual purposes......interesting
- LGBT+ ppl discussing how queer people in media had to be portrayed as asexual in order to be acceptable
- Asexuality discussed in disability circles but mainly as pushback
- airmeet is fairly well functioning
(Personal) Ending Opinions/Post-Mortem
- (Allo)romantic aces were treated very badly in the beginning and this was backgrounded by the libidoist/non-libidoist arguments happening, as there was a sect of people interested in strictly defining asexual as non-partnering, non-libidoist aroace. This was also a preface to how gray's and demi's would be treated, but they were not very vocal (with that terminology) in the beginning, likely due to non-libidoist gatekeepers.
- Accidental gatekeeping from aromantic aces who did not yet know they were aro, and this required alloromantic aces to be vocal about their experiences so that aro's could craft an identity and understanding separate from them.
- The community is better about gatekeeping these days, but it is definitely still there. It was very hard to listen to people who represent or were once part of AVEN say that the community unites under or agrees with an umbrella, inclusive definition of asexual. It feels like they are out-of-touch or in-denial about what happens in the community, and very frequently on the forums that have their name on it. As a gray-a person who dealt with so much emotional turmoil because of the AVEN forums, and based on Lauren's story (with HHA, not AVEN), I think it would be just for this to be actually addressed.
- Important connection between ace and autistic community simply due to the amount of people who overlap both. This could be due to the increased attention autistic people (are encouraged to) pay towards their differences from others - it's not an autistic trait that can be masked, so it must be another identity.
- Fantasies exist and they don't mean much in regards to your sexual orientation, fantasies do not have to be connected to desire.
- Kinky aces were brought up a lot, and as a kinky ace who knows several other kinky aces, I am now wondering why there is so much overlap with those two communities. Is it that having a libido and no sexual attraction towards people sets the stage for finding sexual interest in non-person things?
- Some communities would literally open with a quiz to "make sure" you were "properly" ace before joining. Gatekeeping centered around purity, simplicity, unassailability, "gold-star" status.
- Asexuality and it's repercussions on gender - gender performance is generally tied up in sexual seduction and being viewed as appealing, how do you perform gender when you do not perform sex? This can results in feelings of disconnect from more classic forms of masculinity and femininity.
- Confusion regarding why people engage in romance and sex. When romance and sex are not a part of your paradigm, and you notice your teenage peers engaging in it, it is easy to assume that it is a matter of peer pressure or of teenage rebellion. It is hard to understand why people are engaging in it as it is treated as an "unspoken rule", something that all teens go through. It can be alienating and painful to watch your peers engage in things that you assume are unwanted and unenjoyable. This emphasizes how crucial it can be to make sex ed more comprehensive and likely earlier, so that teens will be able to process these changes when they occur rather than being given (insufficient) info during or after their emotional processing of it.