Ace Week 2021 – Older Aces

The theme of Ace Week 2021 is “Beyond Awareness” so we wanted to focus on the struggles and issues of specific parts of the ace community – people who are often overlooked by mainstream allosexual people talking about asexuality and even hidden within ace communities.

Older asexual people are often invisible and many don’t even realize they exist, so we wanted to highlight some of their voices. Thank you to all who volunteered their time and shared their experiences.

Introductions

My name is Bob O’Boyle. I am asexual and 40.

My first name is Camilla (she/her). I’m in my early 50s and call myself mostly cis right now. My orientation is aromantic asexual.

My name is Cody. I am asexual and 45.

My name is Joshua Godfrey and I am aroace and 38 years old.

How does your age intersect with your orientation?

BOB: The two most often intersect when I’m interacting with other aces. It’s a bit tougher to find peers, in the strictest sense, because the people who are closest to my age are generally partnered, sometimes having started families, and thus can’t relate as well to navigating dating and being single as an over 35 ace, and the people who can relate to the struggles of dating, being single, and dealing with the societal expectations that come with being ace are in their early/mid-20s – sometimes even teens – and haven’t yet had the kinds of life experiences that I have. I don’t always feel the age gap in either direction, but when I do, it’s VERY noticeable. 

Camilla: I grew up asexual in a vacuum. There was no internet to influence or guide me. I just went my own way because it was all I knew how to do. I filled my head with daydreams and had no tolerance for boys or peer-crushes. All along, I figured that partnered sex was compulsory and would likely be inevitable. The idea grossed me out, yet I still sleep-walked through the delusion that “someday you’ll meet the right one and you’ll fall in love and it will happen naturally.”

But until that mythical time, there was no way I was just going to date around and “pay the toll” of sex just to be part of a couple, or because everyone else was doing it. It never even occurred to me to want to try that. I know now that I was simply far too queer (and anxious) to even pretend to be Allo. My lack of interest in relationships & hookups gradually became a mark of shame. The more years I spent as a virgin, the more shame I felt. Which is how I got to be over 50 without even kissing someone, let alone commit to them.

Cody: I’m 45, so I didn’t know a thing about asexuality when I was figuring myself out as a young person. In a lot of ways, when I grew up contributed to me missing out on an ace adolescence. Now, I see my age as a bonus. I get to assume a mentor role, and educator role. And that suits me. I get to be what I didn’t have when I was young.

JG: I don’t feel it does.

How is your experience in ace communities impacted by your age, or your experience with other people your age impacted by your orientation?

BOB: It makes a big difference in how I interact with and relate with others, frankly.  Building on what I said above, the age of the person or people that I’m speaking with changes how I’m able to relate to them.  Younger aces, in my experience, don’t have the same experiences that I’ve had with literally not having the language to describe themselves (as opposed to simply not knowing it), in turn having their entire lives shaped by that lack.  Older aces can relate to that feeling of Not Knowing, but they’re also harder to find, and don’t usually have to deal with the ongoing effects of that not knowing since they’ve more often settled into the life that they wanted, or that works best for them. 

Camilla: Most ace communities are online and also trend very young, so they jump to new technologies with more agility that I’m able to. I’d like to join more groups on Discord, but find the app hard to navigate, especially on my phone. Enlarging the font size for my older eyes messed up the formatting of the platform.

It’s also difficult to find common ground with younger generations because they have completely different cultural references than I do. I often feel left out not being able to relate to other self-identified Aces on anything except shared asexuality.

Cody: I know my experience isn’t universal, but I feel very supported by the community. I experience a lot of gratitude and appreciation for being an out, visible older ace. Other people my age… you know, not many folks my age are up to speed on asexuality, so I do a lot of explaining and a lot of educating.

JG: I grew up in a time when it was not safe to be LBGTQ so when I wear the rainbow I have a tendency to watch my back.

How could ace communities better support you?

BOB: I’m unsure, frankly.  My problem is more of an individual level one than a community one, and I feel like the community write large already does a lot of work reaching out to people who think they might be ace to encourage them to explore that notion 

Camilla: It’s scary even to admit this, but perhaps more patience when I say something out-of-touch online or fail to discern what needs a trigger warning and what doesn’t. I was born anxious and grew up in a world that triggered me right and left, but that was just the world. Online it used to be the same way. Nowadays I’m getting better at using content warnings & spoiler tags, but when I forget them or overcompensate by using them too much, I wish the young folks could be more kind about that.

Cody: No complaints from me, personally. The community supports me and my work wonderfully. But I’d love for us to put more pressure on media outlets to include older ace voices in stories, articles, panels, etc. I think we have something valuable to say, and it helps show the real spectrum of lives in our community.

JG: Even as an old man (38) I feel supported by the ace community.

When did you discover asexuality? Do you wish you discovered it sooner or later? 

BOB: I discovered asexuality in my mid 30s, and I wish that I had discovered it much sooner. There’s no guarantee, of course, but there’s a high likelihood that if I had discovered it earlier, I could’ve avoided partnering with someone for the sake of having a partner, which turned into an unhealthy relationship, then an unhealthy marriage, finishing as an abusive marriage. I feel that I could have avoided a significant amount of serious and long-term trauma, up to and including being raped by coercion, had I been able to learn about my asexuality in my teenage years, or even my early 20s.

Camilla: I discovered asexuality in a print magazine article in the year 2000 when I was 30 years old, talking about the formation of a new website called asexuality. org (that would later become AVEN). My first reaction was, “Yeah right. As if anyone is ever going to take us seriously.” In other words, I identified immediately but it didn’t feel at all like a bolt of lightning. When I dialed onto the internet, this new asexual website was not even up & running yet, so I found other proto-websites on asexuality. Their bar for entry was high: no libido, no masturbation, etc. I felt like an imposter there, and concluded two things:

1) I was a fake asexual for occasionally indulging my weak, solitary libido.

2) It was boring to talk about sex or lack of it. Sex was so separate from my identity that I had no use for discussion. I had many other passions: Wicca, Tarot, poetry, philosophy, environmentalism, liberal anti-corporate politics, and mental illness. None of those interests required having a sexual orientation.

So I left the community for nearly 20 years, completely unaware of how it was gaining steam and even recognition from established LGBTQ+ organizations. I came back in late 2019 completely by accident: I opened a new book we received at work, on queer terminology. Its mission statement was to empower queer people with words to describe their experience. I opened it because I wanted to stay current and compassionate. What I absolutely did NOT expect was to find MY words in that book–words I never knew I needed–Aromantic terms like Queerplatonic and Squish.

I thought, “Wait, the A doesn’t stand for Ally? You mean…I’m queer? Me, the cosmic botch job?” So THAT was the bolt of lightning. All the pixels of my universe blew apart and I’ve been trying to reassemble them ever since.

Cody: I discovered asexuality at 42. On the one hand, yeah, I wish I’d discovered it sooner. I’d have spared myself so much unhappiness and self-doubt. But on the other hand, finding it when I did, knowing what I know at this point in my life, has allowed me to turn it into something useful for the community as a whole. So that’s a silver lining.

JG: Yes! Had I known earlier that being ace and aro was a thing I would not have tried to force feelings on myself that I cannot feel.

Do you find that people react a certain way when you tell them that you are ace, and do you think this reaction would be different if you were younger?

BOB: This one depends on whether I’m telling queer people or non-queer people. Queer people, generally no; a lot of times they already know about asexuality, and I’m the one reacting differently becuase I don’t have to do Ace 101. Non-queer people, they usually don’t register what I just said, and get only minorly less confused by the Ace 101 that inevitably follows. If anything I think being younger would make the Ace 101 worse, since older people tend to blank out when The Youth talk about things they think are Youth Culture.

Camilla: I feel like my very existence can sometimes help shut down exclu’s and haters. If I see a validity fight in progress on Twitter, I can just step in and say, “I’m a 51-yr-old, never-partnered virgin. Care to argue with me whether asexuality exists?” It might be the only power I have.

Cody: Yeah, I don’t think people connect me — 42, a queer married guy — with “asexual.” I get that moment of “huh?” on a lot of faces. Generally, people think asexuality is a thing the kids are doing. They don’t imagine ace people as being middle-aged folks with all this lived experience.

JG: I find most people do not know what ace means unless they are queer or in high school.

What do you wish ace people knew about you or other older aces?

BOB: That we exist, mostly. Not only in the “it gets better” sense, but in the sense that our struggles will be struggles for younger aces, and that we’ve lived through experiences and events in queer liberation that serve as examples of the struggle we’ll have to go through in order to achieve our goals. Even though we lived as Straights, we still learned and paid attention and were formed by the struggles of older queers before us.

Camilla: That there’s no such thing as grown-ups. We’re all just children inside, struggling to feel settled in our own skin. When you’re told, often blatantly, for 50 years you need a partner to be considered a mature & complete adult, it’s hard not to feel forever immature & incomplete. When you’re queer, you never stop living the examined life.

Cody: There’s a Big Ace Future out there for all of us. You can be ace and have whatever kind of life you want. You can be ace and be whoever you want.

JG: I think it is harder for me to get nongender conforming pronouns right simply because i have spent so long where that was not a thing. I feel bad about this. I really am trying.

What do you wish allo people knew about you or other older aces?

BOB: Also that we exist. So many mainstream articles paint asexuality as a thing exclusive to White women in their 20s, and because of that I feel like it’s easier to write off the existence of older aces. More often than not we’ve found out about asexuality later on in our lives, so we’re not going to fit the pushed view, and that can lead to a whole host of life-upending consequences.

Cody: I’d love for allo folks to stop assuming I’m ace simply because I’m older and my hormones are out of whack. And I hope being an older, visible ace person helps allo folks see that young ace folks aren’t just “trying to feel special” or making it up for attention. We’re real. We’re valid. And we aren’t going anywhere.

JG: I am not too old to have sexual attraction. I never had it.