Ace Dad Advice: How can I be proud of my queerness without making others feel shame for theirs?

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CH writes:

I'll start by saying how much the aro, ace, and agender communities I'm apart of mean to me. When I finally let go of decades of internalized aphobia, it was like putting on a bespoke suit; everything fit like it was made for me.

The problem Is, I'm a very stereotypical sex/romance-averse to repulsed aroace. I'm very proud of my queerness, and I love expressing it, but I often will see posts from alloaces and aroallos saying that the stereotypical aroace narrative within and outside of these communities makes them feel so isolated. This breaks my heart, because there's nothing I want more than for everyone in the ace and aro communities to have that "I've found my people," feeling that I got.

So, my question is this: when can I be loud and proud, and when do I need to take a back seat? How can I express joy and pride for my queerness without making others feel shame for theirs?

Hey CH,

So there are a couple of things going on here. But I want to first start with this: it’s awesome that you’re driven to want this in the first place. The desire to make any queer community a comfortable and safe place for everyone who occupies it is a terrific ambition worth being celebrated.

But I want to push at an idea here.

I want to pick at this idea of “community.” I agree that there’s great power in the idea of an “ace and aro community.” There are common threads of experience, common threads of discrimination, common threads of being othered within the larger LGBTQ+ community, and the like. But when any of us asks for that large umbrella community to be unconditionally “our people” regardless of how we individually fit within that spectrum, I think we’re asking for trouble. I don’t always think the large umbrella is “our people.” The large umbrella is a social and political construction. It’s a community, but not a community. That’s reserved for the smaller groups of identities that bump up against each other under the umbrella. That’s where we find our “people:” in the smaller groups that more closely speak to our individual experiences and our individual ways of moving through the world.

So I think you’re putting undue pressure on yourself to modify the space you exist in where you feel prideful, welcomed and accepted to fit people with different lived experiences. Yes, we’re all aro or ace. Yes, we’re all in this together. But my aceallo experience shouldn’t dictate how you find queer joy in your aroace space. Those are different worlds, and it’s okay for them to be separate and not include everyone.

What the large umbrella community should be, instead of the place where people find that deep connected kind of community, is a place for achieving the shared goals of everyone in it. It should be where we refine how we educate about who we are. It’s where we can work to improve conditions for everyone’s intersecting identities. It’s where we can advocate for better policy, broader acceptance, and the like. It’s for the larger, societal goals.

(And the hard truth: the umbrella ace/aro community, as the LGBTQ community, is designed for friction. All of the identities encompassed have different needs, different experiences, different goals. It’s impossible to be everything for everyone without smoothing out what’s beautiful about each individual experience. And I think queerness demands we don’t smooth out the edges. We allow them, we allow the friction, because the friction is more real. Queerness always feels like it demands holding multiple truths in the hand at once, despite how difficult that is in practice.)

All that is to say: yes, we should do our best to create safe and welcoming spaces for everyone “under the umbrella” with us. But it ultimately has to, in some degree, be the responsibility of the individual to find the corner of the world where they’re among “their people.” We can’t diminish or smooth out our neighborhoods of joy and pride because someone who’s living three neighborhoods over doesn’t feel that way when they’re walking through ours. We can demand a little of people to take responsibility for their own place in the community.

Now, we should always try to lift up people who aren’t being heard and aren’t being seen. We should work to make sure the spaces we move through are fair and equitable to the people who move through them. We should work on ourselves to make sure we’re contributing positively to the community as a whole. And we should try to point people in the right direction when they’re feeling lost or without “their people.” But I don’t think you should change the way you express your queerness.

We still need your voice, in its full-throatedness. We lose something if you smooth our your edges. Allow things to be complicated sometimes. But express your queer joy. The clouds are getting darker for queer people all around, and we can’t have anyone dull their shine right now.