A Carnival of Aces: October 2016 Call for Submissions: Joining the Asexual Community

The Carnival of Aces is a monthly event wherein ace bloggers (and all types of authors and artists besides) are invited to talk about a particular asexual-community-related subject, with all posts thus submitted being collated at the end for ease of perusal.
For more information, please refer to the Masterpost.

Last month’s Carnival was hosted by Robin Enby, on Asperger’s and Asexuality. Go check it out!

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I am most excited to announce that the October 2016 Carnival of Aces will be hosted here on Yapbnweca, by none other than myself! This is my first time hosting, so let’s hope I don’t do this wrong. The subject for this month is Joining the Asexual Community, which I was somewhat surprised to learn has never come up before in a Carnival.

By that, I mean the events leading up to and immediately following joining (in any sense of the word) ‘the’ asexual community. The focus is on personal “ace origin stories”, but you are invited to take a more general or abstract approach if you wish. Carnivals of Aces are traditionally of wide breadth, so as to capture the most interesting ideas people have, and this is meant not to be an exception.

(The theme for August was Naming It (Hosted by Valprehension), which unfortunately had some overlap in interpretation with this theme, but I think plenty has been left to say for this carnival.)

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Possible subjects include, but are not limited to:

• How did you first learn the meaning of the word “asexual” (or “aromantic” or any other relevant label)? When and why did you first apply that label to yourself? How long did it take?
• Did you immediately jump into the community or did you privately identify for some time first? Perhaps you joined as an allo ally and later re-identified?
• Did you first join a local community or an internet one? How do they compare?
• How did you identify before joining the asexual community? What identities have you taken on since joining? Would you have been exposed to them without already being in the asexual community?
• What do you wish was different about your joining of the asexual community? What do you wish will be different for aces joining the community in the future?
• Was the asexual community a welcoming place from the beginning, or did you have to make a space for yourself to be comfortable?
• October has Asexual Awareness Week, a week specifically set aside every year for aces to try to reach out to others, with goals including addressing asexual invisibility and introducing as-yet-unidentified aces to our vocabulary. How do you feel about it?
• You may have noticed that I quoted the “the” in “‘the’ asexual community” above. That is because there isn’t really just one community. However, the asexual community is much more centralized than most other queer/LBGTQ+/GSM communities. How has this centralization affected your engagement with it, particularly when you first found it? Do you appreciate the unity and culture, or do you wish it were less monolithic?

And, of course, many others I haven’t thought of. In short, the prompt may be read as:

• How did you get here?

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Pieces may be submitted through commenting on this post, asking my Tumblr, or by emailing me at [killerbee13.0197+coa@gmail.com]. I can post (anonymous or otherwise) guest submissions on my blog, just send me an email.

Edit 10/05/016: I cannot recommend Tumblr asks for submissions because any ask that is determined to be spam (from what I’ve heard, this can happen based on simply including URLs) is silently deleted. Therefore, I recommend emailing or commenting.

The roundup post will go up sometime on or shortly after November 1st, however, submissions will be accepted late for as long as I may receive them.