It's Ace Week, formerly known as Asexual Awareness Week!

We've asked a dear friend, who's attended our Annual Conference for many years, to reflect on their identity on the asexual spectrum.

I identify as gray-asexual. It’s an a-spec identity which basically covers the gray area between asexuality and allosexuality. Gray-asexual people can experience sexual attraction, but only rarely, under specific circumstances, or just certain dimensions of attraction (not the whole package, so to speak).

It’s quite the invisible identity. Sometimes, we feel that we are neither allo nor asexual enough to fit in with either end of the spectrum. I personally feel much closer to asexuals than to allosexuals. My life experiences and the challenges I’m facing are much more aligned with those of other aces. Yeah, I might experience, sometimes, some scattered bits and pieces of sexual attraction, but, most of the time, I’m functionally asexual. And I am not happy when some people in the ace community see us as allosexuals that have nothing in common with them. It hurts to be rejected by one’s own community.

In terms of faith, us aces and gray-aces occupy an uncomfortable position in churches and religious communities. On the one hand, you can be perceived as a deviant who goes against God’s command to be fruitful and multiply. On the other hand, there’s also the purity culture - and you can get brownie points for that. Once, during confession, a priest was appreciative of me being celibate; I felt bad about it, because I knew it was no self-sacrifice and no asceticism, but simply lack of interest.

Sometimes, other queer people think that we are judgemental, sex-negative prudes (we’re not!). Some think that we are not queer enough or that we do not face challenges as tough as them. But nobody who lives outside of heteronormative rules has it easy. Asexual women face the risk of corrective rape. Asexual men are ridiculed for not being men enough. And there’s plenty of homoromantic and biromantic aces and gray-aces who are as queer as anybody else, even if their attractions are not sexual. Basically, we’re here, we’re queer and we have a right to claim queerness as ours too.