Asexuals deserve a history.

writingfromfactorx:

And y’know, sometimes I worry that bits and pieces of it are being lost? Because there are things that I know, as someone who has been around for a fairly long time and listened in a lot of spaces, that I think other people might not. I’m thinking here of things like the Non-Libidoists, who were an early asexual splinter group that set itself in opposition to AVEN and who indirectly influenced AVEN’s culture (fun fact: they used unicorns as their symbol, and I have seen aces years later saying they were uncomfortable using unicorns as a symbol because of that). Or the early history around the term “ace.” (I remember there used to be arguments on whether it should be spelled “ace” or “ase,” with people arguing very earnestly that they disliked “ace” because they felt it seemed too arrogant.) Or where the cake jokes came from. Stuff I remember either because I was around for them or because other people who were around told me when I asked.

I also wonder how much in the way of historical understanding of why particular asexual communities and institutions have formed the way they have is being passed down. I suppose being a largely Internet-based history helps a lot, in terms of retrieving important documents and conversations, but I do sometimes worry about the lack of historical resources for interested parties.

I do want to link here to Andrew Hinderliter’s fabulous set of posts on the history of defining “asexual” as we know it, and also to this graphic and AVEN post that has a truly fabulous timeline of some important historical events from the last ten years. Also interesting may be this post by someone who was heavily involved in the writing of AVEN’s FAQ. Anyone else have either cool resources or thoughts on this? Aside from Andrew’s work and the AVEN post linked in that timeline, I don’t think I’ve really seen a lot of discussion on creating a cohesive resource of asexual history that can be pointed to be people looking to learn more.

Well, I know there’s the Asexuality Archive being set up over here: http://www.asexualityarchive.com/

In addition, Hex has just joined us on the PT recently as PT historian, so sometime in the future we will probably start seeing some more results from that - they’ve also done some other cool history stuff on AVEN before, so I’ll have to dig up some of the links to that later.

I know there are actually a lot of bits and pieces of history recorded in various places in blogs, forums, in the wiki - I think the key is just gathering them all into one place.