part 0: premises

the conversation that inspired this post got me to realize that many people are actually very unaware of what happened to asexuals in queer spaces as a result of the thing called "ace discourse." this stuff did real, serious damage to the ace community, especially where it overlaps with queerness writ large. it's odd to imagine that i have a perspective on this that is unknown to many others, but it does seem like i do, and i think it is worth sharing if only to establish a context for discussions of asexuality in the future.

so: this post is my attempt to document my own experience of ace discourse and what it did to us. it will be, in all probability, flawed; i am one woman with a limited perspective, and i am largely going to be speaking from memory because i don't want to go spend hours hunting down and screencapping a bunch of vicious bigotry about me and those like me. but my hope is that, while i may get things wrong here and there, the broad strokes will be accurate enough to give people a sense of what things were like.

(a brief note: this post has been lightly edited here and there to make it clearer that what i describe here is deeply influenced by my own particular perspective. this post is about The Discourse as i saw it, not necessarily as it happened.)