was gonna leave my comment in the tags but tbh i’m silent enough about this as it is.
seeing stuff like this is so upsetting because these terms were well known and widespread in the ace community but because of exclusionists many people stopped using terms like this because they felt uncomfortable and unsafe.
i loved these terms when i was in highschool, i loved the feeling of community, but i lost that because i didn’t feel comfortable openly and proudly calling myself asexual.
they’ve hurt so many people and damaged our community badly and i will never forgive them for that. we deserve to use our own terminology and feel safe within our community.
sometimes i notice i haven’t seen “grace” (grey-ace) in a while and consequently wonder if i made it up.
I remember ppl – even other ace ppl – saying the card suit thing was “cringey” and “straight ppl aren’t gonna take us seriously” (sounds familiar?) So i guess the community wound up abandoning it. We were also having severe issues at the time with aces being stereotyped as “childish/immature” for associating things like cake, dragons, and space with asexuality, plus in general as most aces just don’t “get” allosexual things in media and irl. We were starting to be viewed as ignorant, virginal, childish, losers, etc. I haven’t seen an ace-cake thing in a good while now.
This was the infancy of exclusionary influence on us. I didn’t realize it did more damage than just closeting us. Whole symbols and terms have been lost. Community has been lost.
I remember three-four years ago I got myself into the ace community on Insta, and I came across these terms. People in these circles would talk about cake, space, dragons, and the black ring on the middle finger. Then, a year or two later, ace content fizzled out (I thought it was Insta’s algorithm figuring out that I knew all this and didn’t bring me the old stuff) and young aces had no idea what any of these were – including the black ring. Finding out young aces had no idea what the black ring meant nearly snapped my heart in two – I proudly wore the black ring, I drew characters with it, and it was my quiet way of communicating to others what my sexuality was. I was baffled at the lack of knowledge – and it turns out that exclusionists got their hands into our community and snuffed us out.
Anyways, we need to bring this back. I thought the card suite thing was cool, it taught people the different ways people can experience attraction, I loved making jokes about preferring cake, I loved wearing the black ring and talking about it with my fellow queer people at my highschool QSA club.
I’m sorry, people don’t know about the cake or ring anymore? I remember being welcomed with spams of cake gifs, photos, and MS Paint drawings. I also distinctly remember that the block solo ring in the midle was meant as reference to the Ace of Spades (black, solo, middle of card). Only thing I didn’t know was that other aces could represent a more refined nuance. Let’s see if we can get this all rolling again.
Welcome to anyone who is interested in helping with the culture revival.
This is the exact reason I started my #ace positive and #aro positive tags. I remember learning about asexuality and thinking it was cool, but not for me (yet). I remember ace visibility day where people would post selfies with an ace card to signify their orientation like in the original post. I remember going through the tag and following every ace blog I could find, turning notifications on and scrolling through their blogs endlessly to learn more about it. I haven’t gotten a notification for any of those blogs in ages.
Going through all those blogs and seeing validation, learning more things about my newfound orientation was so incredibly as a questioning and unsure 15 year old. It’s devastating to me that this community has fallen quiet so much. So I started my tags, hoping to spread some more positivity and maybe inform people. This community is full of incredible people and the fact that so little of them remain, it heartbreaking.
Check out my tags if you ever need to. Maybe I’ll add more tags to my list to do whatever I can in support
I remember seeing the start of ace exclusionary rhetoric only a few years ago… I can’t believe so much of the ace culture got lost to it so quickly.
Please, if you want to start exploring an identity for yourself (especially one exclusionists will try to tell you doesn’t “belong”), consider finding and talking to older people who’ve been in the community for a while – preferably IRL if that’s safe, or on dedicated community forums.
Diversify your research and look outside of socmed, which can be a hive of exclusionist rhetoric and flat out misinformation. Ask around about old publications or websites (the ace community has been developed and discussed in queer spaces for pretty much as long as those spaces have existed)! Check out the sources in wikis! Do your best to learn the history – because there is history. Share what you learn with your peers!
Every queer identity has an older and richer culture than the exclus want you to think, and you all deserve to be a part of it.
