At 41, I discovered my asexuality. Thanks, Tumblr

What generationality looks like in the asexual community

I discovered my asexuality while scrolling through Tumblr. I was 41 years old.

My husband is fourteen years younger than me. I learned Tumblr through him. “It’s a good time-waster,” he said. “You’ll find the stuff you dig, and if you curate the right way, it’ll just be a stream of stuff you dig, whenever you want.”

Horror stuff? Check. Art stuff? Check. Queer stuff? Check. The occasional chubby hairy guy to gawk at? Check. Check. Check.

It was a good time-waster, and as someone in love with shiny new things and prone to hyperfixations, Tumblr became a constant digital companion.

It was in all that scrolling that I started to see posts about asexuality. I was aware of asexuality, had a basic understanding of what it was. But the posts on Tumblr were an education. It was my first encounter with the spectrum of asexuality (Demisexual! Aegeosexual! Gray-asexual!) and the first time I’d encountered people talking about what asexuality felt like, how they came to know they were ace, how they lived as ace in the world.

I felt two things.

One was unsurprising. I felt bad. I felt bad that, as an out queer man for over two decades, I didn’t know this stuff already. I should know about my queer family. Here was a whole world of queer lives that I’d just made assumptions about — assumptions that were wrong and, in some cases, downright damaging.

But I also felt something entirely unexpected: I felt seen. I saw myself these posts. My reluctance and discomfort with the act of sex. A disinterest in sex I felt was wholly unlike my queer male peers. A nagging feeling of difference — of being an Other among Others — that had always followed me around sex and intimacy. Here was a language describing twenty years of my experience. My life — which I’d always assumed was just a broken form of “normal” — had a name.

I was asexual.

“Elder ace”

In the community now, I’m seen as an “elder ace.” The irony is that I owe this position and my self-awareness to young asexuals. They were the ones writing the Tumblr posts that kickstarted my identity journey. If it weren’t for them — for their facility with the tools of the Internet, their capacity for digital education and community building, their breathtaking and generous vulnerability — I’d probably still be feeling like a broken queer, a lousy lover, an incomplete human being.

The kids were my mentors. I learned from them.

I’m not the only one. I’ve run into many ace folks in their 30s and 40s who point to the Internet as the source of their asexual awakening, Whether it’s Tumblr or a message board or a video that happened to come across their feed, so many of us encountered asexuality — and more specifically, deeper, real and valuable conversations about asexuality as a lived experience — online. And those conversations were more often than not shepherded by people much younger than us.

That’s a unique dynamic. Cultural history and identity are usually passed downward, elder to younger, but in the ace community, that pipeline is inverted. Young people, who mastered the rapidly evolving digital landscape of social media where the most underrepresented sexual and gender identities were articulated clearly and accessibly for the first time, passed knowledge upward. They were the teachers and mentors. The elders learned from them.

This is not to diminish or erase the valuable work of asexual thinkers, writers, researchers and activists that built the foundation of asexual identity. That work, dating back to the early 1970s and Lisa Orlando’s The Asexual Manifesto, is essential in understanding who we are today. But the asexual discourse of the latter part of the 20th Century was largely academic and activist in spirit, or limited asexual identity to being exclusively nonsexual. It lacked the widespread accessibility made possible by the Internet, and it failed to describe the more varied expressions of asexuality that are now an integral part of the community’s self-definition.

What young asexual folks have led is a democratization of asexual identity, a synthesis of the academic/activist underpinnings with social, support-focused community building in digital spaces that make things like geography, time and finances almost irrelevant. The Tumblr posts that led to my asexual awakening had The Discourse down, but they also were kind, supportive, and affirming. They didn’t just define asexuality. They explained what it meant to live asexuality and what validation felt like. There’s a recognition and insistence of ace joy.

This was radically different from my experience as a young queer man in my twenties. The shared knowledge and history of gay culture was held by the elders. The boys sweating their asses off on the dance floor weren’t the ones holding history. It was the old guy at the end of the bar, sipping drinks and talking shit with the bartenders all night, who taught, between barbed jokes and the occasional invitation home, what it meant to be gay, what came before, who made it, who didn’t, what was gained, what had been lost, and who had been lost.

Much of this was couched in the rhetoric of survival. This was, for me, due in large part to when I came out: 1994. The AIDS epidemic was still raging, and a positive test could still feel like a death sentence. The closet still made sense for many of us in inhospitable parts of the country. And violence was still a looming and very present threat. Learning how to be gay meant learning how to stay alive.

We were validated, yes. But the dangers came first. There was affirmation, community, but it was often formed in the shared need for protection from the executioner of the moment. The passing down of culture and history was rooted in passing down trauma. To inherit our pleasure, we had to inherit their pain.

Ace, young and old

Inherent in the difference in these community architectures is the nature of the architects. The ace community, while encompassing members across the age spectrum, sees its principal architects in the young. They make up the majority of the online community. They’re the ones you’re seeing interviewed and quoted in recent articles. They’re the principally visible advocates out there, writing and speaking about asexuality.

It not that older ace folks don’t exist. We do. We’re just a little late to the party in most cases. While our Tumblr aces came out as teenagers or in their early twenties, many of us later-in-life ace folks came out much, much later — in our thirties and forties — and while they’re in The Discourse, we’re still in our ace adolescence.

And the young folks have gotten to establish the ground rules. Their ground rules reflect their generational concerns: deep empathy, and insistence on justice, a prioritization on kindness, an appreciation for softness. I certainly don’t want to oversimplify or infantilize young ace folks, but the tenor of the communities they’re building are starkly different from the ones I entered as a queer man in my twenties.

I’m more at home in the ace community today than I was in the gay community at 20.

If there’s a down side to this inverted culture construction in the ace community, it comes in what’s lost without visible elders.

I recently downloaded Tik Tok, at the insistence of my Millennial barber, Todd. “It’s fun, man,” he said. “And you’re not too old to use it. Give a shot. You’re gonna be hooked.”

He was right. (Once again, shiny new thing plus hyperfixation equals all of my free time staring into my smartphone.) And I casually starting posting some content identifying myself as ace.

One of those videos took off in a big way, mostly because of the flood of comments from young ace folks that all revolved around a similar theme:

“OMG I’ve never seen an older ace person before!” “I didn’t know elder aces existed!” “I’ve never seen an ace that looked like you before! This is so cool!”

In our absence, young ace folks built a community. But what they couldn’t build without us was a vision for their future. It’s one of the most important roles for elders in a community: modeling what the future can look like for the young.

This is where later-in-life ace folks can step up and fill a vacuum. We can show what ace looks like after 30, after 40. We can show them that careers, relationships, passions, activism can all happen for you as you move into new phases of life. We can be the ace dads and moms, ace aunts and uncles that don’t exist in the digital discourse.

We can show that the ace joy they’ve centered in the construction of our community continues when you’re older. We can show it just gets better.

We’re not passing down a past to young ace folks. We’re handing down a hopeful, joyful, asexual future.