Coming out in ten vignettes

This post has been cross-posted to The Asexual Agenda.  This post was originally posted on Tumblr.

Content notes: discussion of bad coming out experiences including being outed and harassment

1. The first time someone comes out to me, I’m 16.  We’re talking about…I honestly don’t remember.  He says, “I think I might be bisexual,” and I have a moment of pure elation followed by one of pure panic.  I’m not alone.  But also unless I say something he’ll think he’s alone.  I don’t want to say anything, because I’ve never told anyone before.

In the end, my desire to be a good friend wins out.  “I think I might be bisexual too,” I say.

(I’m not, but I don’t know that yet.)

Continue reading “Coming out in ten vignettes” →

Asexuality as a hard limit (or: the cat is dead)

This post has been cross-posted to The Asexual Agenda.  This post was originally posted on Tumblr.

Content warnings: discussion of abuse (with a few examples given, including one having to do with food restriction) and boundary violation, discussion of anti-sex-averse sentiment, mention of sexual violence, animal death in the context of a metaphor

In the past few months, I’ve seen a lot of posts in ace communities stating that “asexuality has nothing to do with whether you want or like sex.”  This isn’t a new assertion, but it is one that often makes me uncomfortable for reasons that are hard to explain.  However, recently, Talia wrote a post using Schrödinger’s cat as a metaphor for how we should approach aces attitudes toward sex, and I finally figured out how to verbalize my discomfort.

The assertion that “asexuality has nothing to do with whether you want or like sex” is uncomfortable to me, because I specifically identify as asexual because I don’t want sex.  Asexuality, for me, is a hard limit.

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In which Queenie finally stops stalling and buys a suit

So my friend D is getting married next month and I’m in her bridal party.  When she first asked me to be in her bridal party, the first thing she said was, “You obviously don’t have to wear a dress.”  So I’ve known for a while that I needed to get a suit, but I’ve been procrastinating on it because A. I wanted a men’s suit, B. clothes shopping generally makes me pretty anxious and even more so if I have to actually speak to people (which suit shopping unfortunately does necessitate), and C. I have the supremely unlucky combo of very wide hips + being a teeny tiny person (women’s XS shirts are often too big for me) which makes finding clothes a little bit a nightmare.

Anyway, I asked a couple of trans friends in Japan (since I figured that stores that are friendly to trans folks are more likely to be friendly to gender non-conforming folks in general) and did some poking around the internet and the recommendation pretty much across the board was to go to Aoyama (洋服の青山).

So today I went to Aoyama and got a suit.

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Obligatory Blog Post VI: Obligation Goes to College

A very tiny update to say that Concept Awesome is officially 6 years old.  Holy cow, I’ve been at this for a while.

Some notable things I’ve written this year:

Thanks for sticking around for 6 years, folks.  Here’s to a good year seven.

アセクシュアルオフ会

@aceadmiral said: How was the convo?

It was good!  I did surprisingly okay despite being a non-native speaker and not necessarily knowing a lot of specialized vocabulary.  There were a lot of folks who had realized that they were ace fairly recently, and a lot of people for whom this was only their first or second meetup, so most of the conversation was pretty 101.  But someone asked about the future so I got to be too jazzed about queer futurity in Japanese, and we talked about the differences between being ace in the US and in Japan.  And there were 80+ people in that room, which is probably the most aces I’ve ever been a single place with.

アセクシュアルオフ会

I went to an asexual オフ会 (more or less a meetup) hosted by にじいろ学校 today! @queerascat and I were at the table devoted to discussing 海外でのアセクシュアルの事情について (the state of asexuality overseas).  It was a ton of fun!

アセクシュアルオフ会の皆さん、お疲れ様です。３時間日本語でアセクシュアルについて話し合うのは言語的に難しかったですけど、非常に楽しかったです！これからもよろしくお願いします！

re: queer futurity

@over-emotional-robot said: I’m still reading this post, but Queenie, you’re not handing out some dollar store keychain flashlights. Your body of writing is an industrial-strengh spotlight.

QUEENIE HOW COULD YOU ALMOST MAKE ME CRY AT WORK ABOUT A GUM COMMERCIAL

This is honestly one of the sweetest things someone has ever said about my writing, but since I am wildly awkward at accepting compliments, I present you instead with this meme:

To build an unimaginable future (or, Queenie is way too jazzed about queer futurity)

This post has been cross-posted to The Asexual Agenda.  It was originally posted on Tumblr.

This post was written for the April 2018 Carnival of Aces on “All the birds but us…”  In typical Queenie fashion, I’m getting this in at the last possible second, but if you can type at supersonic speeds, consider writing a submission as well!

Content warnings: spoilers for a movie that came out in 1939, some pessimistic talk about the future and trauma

In spring of 2014, I was assigned a portion of Lee Edelman’s No Future for a class.

I hated it.

I hated it so much, in fact, that I vagueblogged about how much I hated it.  I hated it so much that I decided that I was going to prove Lee Edelman wrong with every part of my existence.  Like many things that I start as semi-jokes, it very quickly became not so much a joke as a way for me to conceptualize why what I was doing mattered.

Yeah, this is it.  This is the post where I finally talk about queer* futurity.

Continue reading “To build an unimaginable future (or, Queenie is way too jazzed about queer futurity)” →