“Sometimes people look at me and are like ‘uhh, are you queer?’” Emma Livingston ’20 said, cocking her head to the side and mimicking their curiosity. “And I’m like ‘uhh, how much time do you have?’” She laughed.
She and three other people sat in the Resource for Gender and Sexuality one Thursday afternoon for one of the first meetings of the recently reactivated Asexual & Aromantic Community and Education Club. Usually, Livingston ’20 said, 10 to 12 people came to meetings, where they discuss aromantic and asexual representation in the media, talking about their identities with family members, as well as basic information about asexual identity for newer members. Around 34 people are on the email list for the club, Livingston ’20 said, and she hopes that as word gets out, more people will join.
“I learned so much about ace identity by being in this club,” a senior at the club meeting said. “And everyone here is so accepting, they’ll explain basic stuff to you with no judgement attached to it.”
Although different definitions of the term exist, people generally define asexuality as a lack of sexual attraction; aromanticism refers to a lack of romantic attraction. At some point, Livingston ’20 said, some had considered creating two clubs – one for asexuals and the other for aromantics – but too few people would have joined either.
The club, in fact, had become inactive for a few years. Livingston ’20, who identifies as asexual, had gone to one meeting her first year but, both because of scheduling issues and because she hadn’t felt completely comfortable delving into the topic, hadn’t gone to any others. By the time she wanted to rejoin the club, she’d found that it had become inactive. Towards the end of last year, Livingston ’20 decided to take matters into her own hands. Last October, during asexuality awareness week, Livingston ’20 put up posters advertising the club – posters with her email on them, she said, effectively outing herself as asexual.
“When I started getting emails from people I started crying because it was such an emotional experience,” Livingston ’20 said. “I thought, oh my gosh, someone else is having the same experiences that I am. And there are other people who also really feel like they need this resource. It was a vulnerable experience, having my email on the poster. But since starting this org, I’ve gotten support from professors, from my friends who aren’t ace.”
Kate Bernklau Halvor ’23, treasurer of the club, recalled seeing the posters in October.
“It was something I saw online, though I thought it’d been disbanded,” she said. “I didn’t know anyone else who was ace, so if this club didn’t exist, I might have wanted to start it myself.”
During the meeting, members of the club also discussed the experience of being asexual at Smith.
“Something I do is ask what people think the ‘A’ in LGBTQIA stands for,” a first year said. “If they say ‘a’ stands for ally, then I know it’s a no-go,” she laughed.
“I’m not sex repulsed or anything,” a senior who identifies as asexual and trans said. “I’m very intrigued by my friends’ experiences and hearing about the things they enjoy. But it’s odd being at Smith – it’s the first place I’ve been viewed as an object of attraction, and it’s a very weird experience to have to reject advances. A lot of people who look like me are very involved in hookup culture and that kind of thing, so it’s definitely confused people and has caused me to lose relationships because of some very awkward conversations.”
Along with discussing the experience of being asexual at Smith, members also talked about the tensions between the asexual and queer community.
“The queer community is all about the freedom to have sex and romantic relationships with whomever you want – and the asexual community is about having the freedom to not have those relationships,” Livingston ’20 said. “I think it’s sort of common to be just like, well, you know people would never get criticized or like harassed for holding hands with like a person they love in public, so they aren’t experiencing the same kind of oppression. And then the onus is on the asexual person to sort of prove that they’re queer enough.”
A senior agreed with Livingston. “I would say from my point of view the sort of work that the asexual communities are doing to deconstruct ideas of heteronormativity and the norm that a romantic relationship or a sexual relationship is sort of the ideal or is the most important… is really important and it’s queering the idea of what it is to even have a relationship or what’s important in one,” they said.
Shortly after the meeting, one of the club members emailed me with some closing words about their experience in the club.
“I’ve gone through a large part of my life, and especially the last few years, thinking that there was something genuinely and terribly wrong with me, and I honestly hated myself for that,” they wrote. “This group is 100% of the reason why I’m realizing that I’m not broken, there isn’t something wrong with me, and in fact other people share the experiences I have and that’s okay.”
