When I was 18, I witnessed the birth of a sexual orientation. There is immense power in the words we use to describe ourselves, and this is the story of one such powerful word: where it came from, how it grew, and how I worked to make it a little different.

I’d realized at a young age that I felt differently about sexuality than my peers, differently than the adults in my life all seemed to expect me to. I didn’t understand why the boys at summer camp were getting excited about girls, or why the girls at school were getting worked up about boys. It wasn’t that I was attracted to other boys, the whole concept of crushes seemed perplexing and awkward. If I liked someone I would want to be their friend, but the notion that there was any other way to like someone was completely alien to me. I waited patiently for these strange feelings to emerge towards either boys or girls(1), to feel what all of my friends were feeling, but the pull towards sexuality never came.

At first I assumed that there was something wrong with me, that I was broken. I had the general impression that people who weren’t sexual were either emotionally stunted or sexually repressed, and I spent years of high school trying to rigorously scrub myself of both conditions. Nothing changed. I spent countless hours monopolizing my family’s landline to with conversations about the nature of sexuality, trying to understand the thing that everyone but me seemed to be feeling, and slowly began to think of my asexuality less like a medical condition and more like being gay or straight. I had plucked the word “asexual” out of thin air to refer to experience I was grappling with, and slowly the word began to morph from a problem I was trying to solve to a truth about myself that I could accept. I knew that I might change, but I needed a way to accept the way that I felt in the moment and (though the prospect terrified me) to explain myself to others.

When I graduated high school I had never spoken to another person like me. Growing up in Saint Louis had exposed me to a fairly narrow spectrum of LGBT identity. I hoped that somewhere in some queer mecca, asexual people were getting together and confidently swapping stories about all of the things I was still struggling to come to terms with, like how to form deep emotional relationships if I couldn’t date. In 2000 I set out for a university on the east coast where queer kids chalked radical slogans on the sidewalks and began my search.

The campus Queer Alliance, whose meetings I attended religiously, had not responded favorably when I emailed them about asexuality from a throwaway Hotmail account. Our library had one book on nonsexual relationships in the early 20th century, but no hints about a community that was active today. Pre-Google search engines turned up nothing. I began to face the possibility that the community I had dreamed of might not exist, that I was either alone in the world or that the people like me were struggling with the same sense of isolation that I was facing. After a semester of searching, I decided it was time to start making noise.

I put together a simple website, a bid to make visible the things that I’d been hiding and struggling with for so long. I called it the Asexual Visibility and Education Network, or AVEN, in the hopes that it would one day be a network with more than one node. I put up a definition of asexuality, “a person who does not experience sexual attraction,” and my email address.

When the first email came in I felt overwhelmed with a cocktail of excitement and fear. Was it possible that the isolation that had defined much of my life and my identity was coming to a close? After reading the first few sentences I stood up and went for a long walk across campus, letting the implications sink in. Later that week I was on a three-hour phone call with a stranger, moving from experience to experience that could be truly shared for the first time. Soon, more email began to flow in from people across the country, and I decided that it was time to find a more robust communications channel. I upgraded our server and set up a web forum, which was a decent idea way back in 2002.

My timing was perfect. Unbeknownst to me, thousands and thousands of other asexual people across the globe were going through struggles very similar to my own, had invented the exact same word to describe themselves, and were typing that word into a new search engine called Google. Google’s algorithms had decided that the most interesting thing about asexuality on the internet was my site, asexuality.org.

At first a few people showed up a week, then one or two a day. They came from Google at first, then from articles and links as our community began to gain notoriety. Like me, these people were hungry for someone to validate their experience. Their first posts were often lengthy life stories. They talked about feeling broken, about feeling confused by the way that the world around them seemed obsessed with sexuality, about feeling scared that they would be alone forever. Then they asked if these experiences made them asexual.

The few of us who were regulars on the site debated how to answer this question. How would our nascent identity decide who to let in? My friends in Queer Alliance came back from conferences with stories about horrific fights over who was “really” a lesbian, and with critiques of gay male culture that tightly proscribed how men must look and act. Now, in this moment when we were laying the cornerstone of a new sexual orientation, could we avoid that? Some in the community argued that we couldn’t. Words must have rigid definitions, and we needed to maintain some standard about who could and could not identify as asexual if we ever hoped to gain understanding and acceptance.

I sided with those who argued for a different path(2), one that sees the word asexual not as an intrinsic part of one’s being (the way that being gay was seen at the time) but as a tool of self exploration. An identity is something to pick up when it was useful, modify as one saw fit, and put down if it ever stopped being useful. If someone puts down the word “asexual”, rather than kicking them out, the community should celebrate their newfound self-knowledge. When someone asked if they were asexual, we told them that only they could answer that question, but that they were welcome in our community regardless of what word they chose.

Policing another person’s identity became taboo. There exists a concept of a true Christian, a true American, or a true Yankees fan, but we strongly resisted the notion of a true asexual. Anyone who used the word “asexual” to describe themselves was just as asexual as anyone else. This led to some seeming contradictions: how could someone who actively enjoyed having sex but used the word “asexual” to describe themselves be just as asexual as someone who had never desired sex in their life? But rather than resolving these contradictions by policing people’s behavior, we resolved them by complicating our own conceptions, like a scientist modifying a theory to match the data. Asexual-identified people who enjoyed sex started showing up and telling nuanced stories about the many reasons one might choose to engage in sexual activity, some of which had nothing to do with traditionally defined desire or attraction. Rather than pushing these stories to the side, our community was challenged to recognize and celebrate them.

This notion that identities exist for self-exploration and self-expression runs counter to the logic of many organizations, and counter to the logic of corporate branding. It argues that to provide a consistent and coherent face to the world communities must tightly control the way that their members use language and imagery. In some struggles this is necessary. Sometimes to win we must unite and march in unison. Other times we win by respecting the diversity of the places we come from, and by supporting one another in attacking a problem from a multitude of angles. Let’s be sure to use language that doesn’t get in the way.