It’s the last day of Asexuality Awareness Week. I’ve been trying to understand why discussion and postings about it have had such resonance with me and I think I’ve figured it out.

If I had known such a thing existed in my late teens/early 20′s, I’d probably have said I identified as asexual (as much as I would have been brave enough to identify as anything but heterosexual in rural South Carolina in the 1980s). I knew I wasn’t interested in women, and while I knew I might be interested in guys, I had zero interest in doing anything about it.

When I was 26 years old I came to the realization that I was gay. It is a given that orientation can be a fluid thing, so maybe I was asexual then I was gay, or maybe I was gay all along and simply unmotivated to act on it. There are also degrees of asexuality that could be used to define that period of my life. I don’t think it really matters in the end.

My point is that my experiences make me extremely sympathetic to those who identify as asexual and the societal pressures they are subjected to. I hope to support and validate aces that I know, and to continue to learn more so that I can be as good an ally to aces as my straight, lesbian, bi, and trans friends have been for me.

Also posted on Tumblr at: http://ift.tt/2dR3apH