I was interviewed in the University of Ottawa’s student paper, The Fulcrum. Some of the answers are about my new book, and some of them are just about asexuality.
Read it here:
Tag Archives: asexuality
Interview: Left to Write
Dannie Morin interviewed me for her “Awesomesauce Authors” feature on her blog, Left to Write. It’s a great little article on my experience as an asexual author, discussing my writer’s journey, what inspired me to write the book, my favorite and least favorite things about writing, what I love about my book and what was challenging about writing it, what has surprised me about the publishing journey so far, and a few fun personal questions.
Read the interview on Dannie’s blog!
Book giveaway for The Invisible Orientation
Anyone who’s interested in trying to win a free copy of my book, The Invisible Orientation, can do so in this Goodreads giveaway!
ENTER NOW!
Update: Giveaway over, winners were Eileen, Stacy, Susan, Lilian, and Mato.
Also, see the latest news in my recent newsletter and check out the new options available to get autographed bookplates.
And for electronic copies, you can get my autograph for free using Authorgraph:
Interview: YA Interrobang
Nicole Brinkley of YA Interrobang was kind enough to interview me for the column Dragons Raging: a feature that is for interviews of people from marginalized backgrounds.
Check out the interview now!
We could definitely do with more asexual characters. Canon asexual characters in mainstream media are almost nonexistent, and characters interpreted or rumored to be asexual are often played as uninterested in sex/relationships for a specific reason (they’re an alien, they’re a villain, they’re ill, they’ve given up).
I would love to see both “issue books” about asexual people AND books in which characters are incidentally asexual. We need both of those things.
Featured and Quoted: The Varsity and The Daily Dish
I was featured a couple places today. In The Varsity, Jasleen Arneja wrote about the WorldPride-affiliated asexuality conference and quoted me, using my book table photo as the featured photo. You can read the article in “Toronto hosts second-ever International Asexuality Conference” on their website.
And this was just a quick mention, but The Daily Dish decided to excerpt my The Toast article and that’s pretty cool:
“She’s Just Not That Into Anyone.”
Article: “Enjoy Your Houseful of Cats”
I got an article published in The Toast today.
Please read “‘Enjoy Your Houseful of Cats’: On Being an Asexual Woman.”
This article is about my personal experiences being asexual in a very sexualized world, discusses the intersection of femininity and asexuality, and examines the prejudices and misconceptions behind some of the poor treatment I experience.
International Asexuality Conference, Toronto
I had the pleasure of attending the International Asexuality Conference in Toronto, Ontario, at the end of June 2014. As a WorldPride-affiliated event, we got some pretty amazing coverage and attention, with something like 300 registered attendees!
I was on the Asexual Leadership Q&A panel with Sara Beth Brooks and David Jay. Video here!
And later I was on a Visibility and Content Creation panel. You can see video of it here.
But what’s also great is it was the first appearance I made with my book!
I asked attendees to enter their names to win advance reading copies. Around fifty people entered and I got to talk to quite a lot of amazing people who were really excited about the book coming out. And there were a few who treated me like a celebrity or excitedly told me how much they like my videos online. How nice!
And after attending sessions and sitting on panels all day, I rounded out the night by appearing on Canadian national television.
Click to watch the video!
So yeah, that was a good experience. Hanging out with new and old friends was also fun–I was staying with asexual friends in a hotel, some of whom I’d known on the Internet before and some of whom I was getting to know for the first time. I didn’t stay for the parade–just the conference–but I’m glad I got to go.
Hooray for visibility and connections!
Review (Mark Carrigan): The Invisible Orientation
I got a pretty super review for my book The Invisible Orientation, provided by sociologist and researcher Mark Carrigan.
Please read it here on his website.
This is a long overdue book, offering the general purpose introduction to the subject which has heretofore been lacking. It is an essential addition to any academic reading list that encompasses asexuality and should be required reading for any therapists with an interest in sexuality. It provides a sense of what it is like to be asexual that can sometimes be missing from academic work and engages with the literature while nonetheless refusing to be constrained by it. It is also immensely readable, providing an authoritative overview that sign posts the reader who is keen to explore further. I can’t recommend The Invisible Orientation highly enough and hope it has a wide readership.
Feature and Excerpt: TIME Magazine
My book The Invisible Orientation has been featured in TIME online with a six-hundred-word excerpt. They titled the article “How to Tell if You Are Asexual” and showed a bit of my intro and a bit of my section addressing asexual people on how to decide if it’s the label for them.
As of this writing, the feature contains a couple of inaccuracies.
[1] The article’s introduction claims that “[Decker] explains that asexual people can become sexual later in life, and that doesn’t mean they were not asexual before. Similarly, sexual people can become asexual,” and this is misleading. I discuss both sexual fluidity and label experimentation in my book, but it is part of a more nuanced discussion; I do not say “asexual people sometimes ‘become sexual’ later” or vice versa, and I think including it in this introduction contributes to the damaging perception that asexuality is just a phase. For most people, sexual orientation is a lifelong piece of identity, and the invalidation asexual people experience at the hands of the “you’ll grow out of it” myth makes this at best inaccurate. [2] As for “Decker has written for the Huffington Post, The Daily Beast and Salon”–That’s incorrect. I have been interviewed in all of those publications but have never written for them.Asexuality Book: Advance Reading Copies
I received some advance reading copies of my book!
I’m going to be giving a few copies away for free at the International Asexuality Conference later this month. They’re uncorrected proofs, so they’re not the final.
But it’s cool to be able to see it in hard copy for the first time. 😀