Refusing Compulsory Sexuality: A Black Asexual Lens on Our Sex-Obsessed Culture

by Sherronda J. Brown

There will be no such reassurances here. I find them often to be more harmful than helpful, especially when these reassurances are presented as a means to make asexuality more palatable—or at least more tolerable—and more legible to allosexuals.

researchers Cara C. MacInnis and Gordon Hodson, measured bias against asexuals compared with other marginalized sexual orientations and found that asexuals were “evaluated most negatively of all groups” in a survey of heterosexual attitudes in university and community samples.14 Of the four sexualities the respondents were asked about—the other three being heterosexual, homosexual, and bisexual+ individuals—asexuals were perceived to be the least “human” and to have the least emotional capacity.

I tried to “come out” of the proverbial closet, but every time I took a step, there was always someone there to shove me back in.

“We are not allowing people to know what is possible.” An untold number of people would be significantly helped if there were more awareness of asexuality and the different ways sexual desire can show up. “I know for a fact that if I had seen more representation, or had more conversations or just more education about it, I would not have been as troubled, would not have struggled as much as I did in the beginning,” Ev’Yan says.

Have I spent my life mistaking a desire for attention and validation from certain people as attraction to them? How much of the way I (think I) experience attraction has been determined by social norms and compulsory heterosexuality?

reading nervousness, being flustered, or having “butterflies” as attraction, but later coming to understand these things as manifestations of anxiety or panic

What are we writing onto Langston Hughes and others like him when we use them as canvases to paint our own frustrations about queer (in)visibility, performativity, and closets? What if we instead respected the poet’s closet of his own making? A closet can be a cage, but it can also be a sanctum. Refusal was always his right, as it is always ours.

think it’s also hard because when people talk about revolutionary lifestyles and radical outlooks, conversations about moving from a scarcity mind-set to an abundance mind-set often center sex and sexual partners. I wish I saw more conversations about living abundantly that didn’t involve having more than one sexual partner, or having one at all.” —G (she/her), asexual woman