No one can "allow" you to be part of the queer community.

Every queer space is an aspec space.

There are always recurring motifs that arise from conversations during Pride Month. The one that stuck with me the most this year was an aspec-focused one: "I don't want to be part of the queer community, because the queer community says I don't belong there."

I totally get where that sentiment comes from. It is difficult to feel seen and embraced by the queer community. This is even true for me, and I've been in the queer community since I was 18 years old. Across the last thirty years of my life, the only time I've ever had my queer bona fides consistently questioned was after I came out as asexual and started asserting that identity in queer spaces. I’ve been ghosted by gay men when they find out I’m ace. I’ve been told my identity is “fake” by other queer people. I’ve been sharply told there’s no reason “real queer people” should care about asexuals, because what’s so hard about not having sex?

So, I understand the frustration. The mainstream queer community, in various configurations of queer identities, has not yet figured out how co-exist with ace and aro people in these spaces in inclusive and supportive ways. That lack of support and inclusion -- particularly us not feeling as though we are being included and supported -- is enough to motivate washing our hands of the whole thing.

But it leaves us without the capital C kind of Community. Sure, we can find community among the ace and aro people we find online or in the world and connect with them. It's a good and necessary kind of community. But there is also a value for us as a sexual and romantic minority community to also understand our marginalization within the context and history of related marginalizations, to see ourselves in dissimilar but related struggles.

I’ve griped in other places about the failed project of LGBTQ+ solidarity, but while the project has failed, the idea is a grand one, and it’s one we could benefit a lot from if it became a reality. We may think we don’t need this solidarity, but this kind of connection to a broader Community is powerful. It’s the reason we find solace and joy in the things like being “book people” or “horror fans” or “anime fans” or “gamers.” To see the ways we, in the specific, can be couched within interconnected “we”s is to see the ways in which who we are gets woven into the tapestry of a larger human fabric. In a queer context, this is even more important, because as queer people we are told we simply should not exist. We are told, in countless ways, that we do not belong. To exist, and then to exist in concentric circles with others, is validating in ways we might not always know we need.

Which leads me back to the idea, “I don’t want to be part of the queer community, because the queer community says I don’t belong there.” It’s a sentiment I get, but it’s hard to sit quietly in that solidarity without seeing the way that sentiment gives up our power.

No one has to allow us entrance in order for us to deserve room in queer space. We are who we are, and the fact of who we are is one that makes us queer. Every queer space — every Pride march, every panel, every community social, every activist planning session, every kink workshop, every policy lobbyist strategy session, every room of every size that’s designed to contain queer people — is one in which ace and aro folks belong. We don’t have to wait to be invited to the table when that table is already sitting in our house.

I’ve wondered if the digital nature of so much of our community plays a part in our sense we might be “invited” into queer space to inhabit it. While we are able to form bonds and relationships online, we can encounter the siloing that happens throughout the social media landscape. We can construct our ace and aro circles, curate our aspec timelines, and not have our online queer experience brush up too often with other queer people. We can even, through digital space, silo our aspec life and community entirely from every other part of our life. Through the anonymity of the internet, we can build an aspec digital support system without ever revealing our name or our face. Sure, this happens away from the keyboard, too; gay, lesbian, trans and other queer circles are siloed as well even in physical queer spaces. But there is something in the inhabiting of actual physical spaces — bars, parades, queer community centers, and the like — that on the one hand make interaction with other queer identities more possible and on the other is an affirmation that you can take up space. While our aspec digital communities provide comfort and support, we can inhabit them without investing ourselves in the same, deeper way that we would if we were bringing our aspec bodies into rooms and buildings and the world.

So while we absolutely should continue to critique the attitudes, behaviors, microaggressions and exclusions of the other groups in the acronym, we have to also be active agents in our own inclusion. We can’t just shrug our shoulders and accept a fundamental inequity. We can’t behave as though we don’t have agency. That assertion doesn’t mean storming Pride and enacting an aspec civil disobedience. (Although it could. I’m into it. Call me. Let’s make it happen.)

That assertion could start from any level of aspec engagement. It could be a stern reply on a comment thread. It could be writing an email to the local queer center asking for more ace visibility. It could be spending more time in local queer social spots with visible aspec merch to show that we are, indeed, here. There are so many ways we can claim and exercise our agency and our right to belong within queerness that can urge change along.

I hope we do. Queerness is a project of imagining and constructing a world that supplants the one that fails to imagine us. Let’s imagine ourselves into the spaces that have always had a seat for us.

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