Rachel: Putting the A in LGBTQIA+
Rachel had previously attended ace socials before coming along to book club, saying: “a book club is - or at least I thought - was so not my thing.” She said she would never have sought out a book club as a social activity because she thought book clubs were “for nerds talking about books.” But I am very glad she did decide to come along and that, given she is also someone who works in science communication, she did accept the fact that she is one of us “nerds” during our discussion, saying: “so it made sense for me to go, and I’ve been going ever since.”
Rachel came out as asexual in her 30s and finds this is quite late in life compared to the representation we are often reading about for book club. She said: “I tend to resonate with more of the non-fiction that we read because a lot of the characters [in fiction] are so much younger than me and it’s a little hard to relate to someone that age but that far along [their] journey.”
Although the asexual characters in books tend to be young adults, Rachel said she still finds book club to be a “safe space” to talk about asexuality with “people who know where [she’s] coming from”, and that our little book club is inclusive and welcoming to those of different ages.
“We’ve got such a range of ages, genders, people at completely different points along their journeys, different relationship statuses, and no one of them is seen as ‘more ace’ than another. Each person is kind of there in their own right and equally valid and everyone’s voices are equally heard.”
It’s not just that within book club everyone’s asexuality is seen as equal either, but Rachel pointed out that it is also an LGBT+ shop that has decided to include asexual people and become the venue for an ace group.
“It’s such an iconic queer bookshop with so much history itself - and has seen so much history - and, for me, there has been so much… debate I want to call it - part of me wants to call it ignorance - about whether asexuality belongs under the queer umbrella, and the fact that a bookshop as iconic as Gay’s The Word is where we have our ace book club, it means a lot to me that the shop feels like we’re part of their community as well.”
Most of all, it’s the social aspect that keeps Rachel coming back – “my favourite bit about it is when we meet up beforehand in Leon; the bit where we are all so eager to talk about everything and anything but pretend the book doesn’t exist.” Our book club meetings each month have become a time when it’s “just nice to be able to let [our] guard down every so often.”
Rachel may not have thought book club would be for her initially, but she proudly states she is “now a talking-about-books person” and she’s made friends here:
“We’re not only bonded by our ace journeys or our ace experiences, but also by the fact that we’ve all read the same book and are talking about it. It’s like another thing we’ve got in common.”