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.)
This is a really good summary of the "externally-sourced" Ace Discourse I remember growing up with and (thankfully) being peripherally present for but not directly engaged in. I also want to add another layer to Ace Discourse from my experience of it, though, and that's specifically the in-fighting within the ace community itself during this time period.
Much in the same way that transmedicalism rose to prominence in no small part out of the pursuit of legitimacy & externally-validated definitions of transness, there was a branch of Ace Discourse that saw the rejection of asexuality by the broader queer community as a failure of sufficiently strict definitions – if we just clearly proved that this rigorous definition identified an oppressed community, then they'd accept us, right? This led to all the purity-testing arguments about "can an ace person have sex, enjoy sex, masturbate, etc" and drove the production of the many sub-identities and -features of the asexuality spectrum (e.g. demisexuality, the split attraction model, autochoris-/aegosexuality). From there arose further, nested arguments about whether those things were real – are gray asexuals/graysexuals really different from straights/gays/bis/pans? Is autochorissexuality just a voyeurism fetish? Is there a meaningful difference between "ace/aro" and "just ace?" There were heated debates that repeated the pattern of "we have a word for it, therefore it must be real" vs "you're inventing words for experiences that don't exist (or at least are socially illegible) and delegitimizing The Movement."
The result was this feeling that, if you were ace (or at least, thought you were ace – the Discourse made it hard to trust yourself), nowhere felt safe. You couldn't trust other queers, because what if they didn't think you were one of them? You couldn't trust fellow asexuals, because what if they thought you weren't actually ace? Your choices were to either fight tooth and claw for space, thereby participating in & reinforcing Ace Discourse, or you had to recede into the woodwork. For my part... I chose the latter, same as the folks mentioned in the OP's part 3.
