On a table in a Chinatown pizza place sat a toy birthday cake.
It was a symbol to newcomers looking for the Asexuals of the Mid-Atlantic Meetup that they had found the right group. Because after all, what’s better than sex? Cake.
Six people in their 20s and 30s showed up that night. They talked about books and previous gatherings and what other members of the group were up to. And they talked about classic “ace moments.”
“Ace” is the nickname for asexuals — people who aren’t sexually attracted to either gender, to anyone at all.
A pretty dark-haired woman who’d recently moved from Boston to Washington had just had an ace moment that week. Her new co-workers were asking about “her type” of guy.
Roger Fox, 31, of Bethesda, arranges get-togethers for the MidAtlantic Asexual Meetup. “We’re not pushing for specific rights,” he says, “except awareness.” (April Greer/For The Washington Post)
“I’m not really that into people,” she responded.
And what she got in return, mostly, were blank stares.
It’s the blank stares — and reactions that are sometimes much worse — that a growing number of asexuality awareness advocates are trying to reduce. They want people to know that sometimes boys like girls and girls like boys. Sometimes boys like boys and girls like girls. And sometimes some people don’t like either — not in a sexual sense, anyway — and that is perfectly okay, too.
Roger Fox, one of three young men at the Chinatown meetup, has always known that he was different. He was bullied pretty badly as a kid in suburban Baltimore, in part because he was quiet and studious and half-Japanese. By high school, he’d learned to protect himself by going off on his own.
“I thought I was just socially different,” says Fox, now 31. “I didn’t know it had anything to do with sex until I was old enough to where people were talking about it all the time. Then I was like, ‘Oooohh, that’s why I’m different.’ ” Fox had no interest in sex at all.
Life got easier at the University of Maryland, where he found new groups of friends. Privately, he began to think of himself as “non-sexual.” A few times, girls expressed interest in him, but the physical intimacy thing always came up quickly, and the connections fizzled.
In 2008, he moved to Washington for an accounting job and began to look online for interesting Meetup groups that might allow him to establish a community. He went to a hiking meetup and one for German-language speakers. And then, fatefully, the Meetup Web site suggested that he might be interested in the asexuals meetup.
“I didn’t know it was an actual thing that other people experienced,” he says. “For me at that moment, when I realized there were other people, it was really kind of a joyful moment.”
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