Photography by: Natalie Shao, Asri Alhamdaputri
Article by: Desmarie Jackson, Emily Sim, Gabi Backus
From October 20-27, 2019, UC Berkeley’s Queer Alliance & Resource Center (QARC) and Gender Equity Resource Center (GenEq) celebrated Asexual Awareness Week, an international campaign that celebrates the asexual community and educates about the complexities and misconceptions about asexuality. Spearheading the seven-day celebration, UC Berkeley sophomore and proud asexual Michelle Lin organized a number of events available to the public, including an Ace 101 Workshop and an Ace Game Night. Lin and fellow organizers Isaac Aguilar and Shirley Jiang enthusiastically represented the ace community on Sproul, sharing ace-themed cupcakes, flags, and pins throughout the duration of Ace Week in an attempt to shed light on a historically underrepresented community. Asexual UC Berkeley student Shirley Jiang summed up our feelings on Ace Awareness Week: “Having this awareness week thing is super cool. It makes me very happy. It’s an uplifting thing!”
GIA MAG: What have your interactions with the broader queer community been like?
Michelle (she/her): Overall, not great. But I don’t overgeneralize any experience. In general, I think it’s mostly just misunderstanding and assuming. There’s a lot of gatekeeping, and people tend to always forget that ace’s often have other queer identities too. So it can be pretty detrimental to assume.
GIA MAG: What do you love about being Ace?
Michelle: It’s taken me a long time to get here. I’m very proud now, and it’s for a lot of reasons. First, the Ace experience is so diverse. I mean, every single sexuality or demographic is diverse, but I feel like the asexual one is so different from others where it’s such a spectrum that has a lot of different people on it, layers of attraction and experience, that people identify in very many different ways but we all consider ourselves Ace and it’s like a huge umbrella, and that’s what makes me happy, seeing that all these people can find solidarity with aces but not necessarily lives their lives or experiences the same way.
GIA MAG: What do you want people to know about being Ace?
Michelle: I would just say don’t assume. Asexuality is not the same as celibacy or disinterest in sex, it also doesn’t indicate that you never have or never will have sex. I think that’s the main assumption that people make, but it’s much more complex than that.
GIA MAG: What’s one piece of advice you have for those exploring their identities and being Ace?
Michelle: I wish someone had told me that you don’t have to be a certain way to be ace. You can’t like check off the boxes, and okay, you’re ace. It doesn’t work like that, and you can experience certain things, you may experience sexual tension, you may be sexually active but you can still be ace. Don’t feel like you have to be a certain way to identify as ace, it’s an umbrella with various different identities.
GIA MAG: What have your interractions with the broader queer community like?
Shirley (they/them): I’ve never felt like I’ve been able to express myself. I think now I feel really comfortable with who I am. This is the freest I’ve ever felt. My friends, they’re all queer identifying and queer, they’re super empowering, I feel like we uplift each other. So I feel like I’ve definitely been uplifted especially in my time here. I feel really really good.
GIA MAG: What do you want people to know about being Ace?
Shirley: It’s a perfectly normal thing. It’s just something normal, and that’s really all. There’s nothing weird at all about it.
It’s okay to change your identity no matter how drastic. For a long time I felt like, you think you’re this identity and you come out as that. Even if you do, know that that’s not set for life. It’s normal to change. Even if you’re questioning, you can do that. I thought that if I come out like this, it’s this forever, I thought it’d be like that. But it’s really not like that. Identity is fluid.
Shirley Jiang
