Speaker 1: When I was a junior in high school, it was apparent that I wasn’t interested in people in the same way as everybody else was. Two of my friends actually suggested to me that perhaps I was asexual. I told them, “I’m not a plant. Go away. Like, leave me alone.”

I went and I looked it up and I found asexuality.org, and I read asexuality is when you don’t experience sexual attraction. I thought that can’t be me because I have crushes on people, but I went to the frequently asked questions page and I realized, “Oh my goodness. Like, this fits me perfectly. Oh, dear.”

It was an overwhelming sense of dread. It wasn’t something I wanted. It was isolating, because at the time I didn’t want to be this sexual orientation that I knew nothing about. I didn’t know anybody else who was like that. I felt like it meant I wouldn’t be able to make strong or intimate connections with other people. I felt like that for a really long time.

When I realized that I was really asexual and there was no way I wasn’t, I knew I needed a community and I didn’t have one at all. I moved to New York originally thinking that the biggest city in the country would be the most likely to have an ace group.

Aces is a shorthand for asexual but it also inherently means the asexual spectrum, which includes anybody who finds asexual to be helpful but not quite right. There wasn’t one in New York where I had been for six years. By that point I said, “If nobody else is doing it, I’m going to do it.” Over the course of two and a half to three years, now all my friends that I see on a weekly basis are also asexual and from all the work that I’ve done.

I have a partner, Levi. I met Levi when I was brought in to help the NYU students start an Aces and Aros group at their LGBTQ center. Probably the most typical relationship that I have. We live together. Our hardest question is consistently what should we have for dinner. We snuggle. I kiss them hello and goodbye, things like that.

It sort of blew my mind in the sense that this was something that was actually possible. I don’t feel like I’m alone anymore. The idea that asexual just means that you don’t want to have sex misses the whole point of who I am. You wouldn’t know that I like to stay up until 4am talking to my friends, or all on one bed watching a movie together making comments, or how I feel vulnerable and share different parts of myself. That is a much more accurate representation of who I am and my life instead of just saying, “Oh, your a person who doesn’t want to have sex.”