Katie: Breaking from Expectations to Find Connection
Katie’s story begins in the early hours of the morning with much frantic Googling amidst an asexual crisis – “it was just the 3am realisation that I wasn’t going to magically start wanting or feeling [any sexual attraction towards my partner at the time]. I could not sleep at all.”
She had been “in denial” about being asexual since she was sixteen but was now looking for connection and was feeling the need to talk to other ace folks. It was an online search for ‘ace group London’ that gave her the link to the London Ace Book Club Facebook page. “It was perfect!”
Katie is a secondary school teacher and said the first book club meeting she attended stood out. We read Genderqueer by Maia Kobabe, a graphic novel memoir, for book club in August 2023. Katie said she had no exposure to ace representation in books prior to reading Genderqueer, a book that she ultimately liked and connected to. She said she saw herself in this book and suggested this may have been because it presented a “more ambiguous relationship with asexuality.”
Even though Katie had done a lot of research into asexuality before joining book club, she hadn’t specifically gone looking for ace representation in books or other media: “I think I did that quite big burst of Googling and then just didn’t do any for a bit.”
For Katie, the connections book club has provided them with, and not the representation so much, was what she longed for.
“I was looking in terms of needing to talk to other people who are ace and then the fact that it was a book club was just an extra plus at first […] Teaching can take over your entire life, so it’s nice to have things that are not my job […] Having that connection, the kind of social aspect we have [at book club] now, it’s just nice to have that little reminder, time to check in and be like ‘okay, so there are people like me’.”
I asked Katie what she thinks makes in person groups, like ours, so important for queer people, and there was one theme she kept coming back to: “connection”
Asexuality is a minority sexual orientation - it is often hard to find other aces ‘in the wild’ - and so it is unsurprising that one of the things in-person communities provide ace people is connection. Katie was also saying that book club is an escape for them; somewhere they can go and break away from the pressures and expectations of an allonormative society.
“Theres expectations about what your life is going to look like, what choices you are going to make. It can feel quite overwhelming. […] People have certain ideas of what you’re looking for and I’m not going to be doing that.”
“You know, I still have those moments of doubt where I’m like ‘Am I really [asexual]?’ [But overall, coming to book club has been] reassuring. There are a few moments when I first came when I was like ‘oh wow, we really do have the same experience!’”
Katie mentioned that our conversations at book club can sometimes lack discussions around being ace whilst having romantic relationships, but that this doesn’t take away from the fact that this group of aces has provided her with a space to escape to and the connections she was longing for.