Tag Archives: asexuality

Review (Mark Carrigan): The Invisible Orientation

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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

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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.

timefeature

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.

Speaking at Pride Week: Asexual Relationships

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I appeared at the University of Virginia on Thursday, April 10, to talk about asexual relationships as part of the university’s Pride week.

uvaposter

My presentation in the University Chapel went well, including a slide presentation and an interactive talk. I got some really nice questions and got to hear from asexual students who attended my presentation. It was a positive experience all around!

You can see a recording of the presentation on my asexuality channel.

Cover: The Invisible Orientation

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Looks like my book has been assigned a cover!

BookCoverThis may not be the final design, actually, but for now it’s representing the book on Amazon and Goodreads and other book-selling sites, and if it changes I’ll give you that news too! For right now it’s what my distributor will see at a conference, I’m told, so we’ll see if they have input and if they do it might get a different design.

Interview: Best Magazine

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A piece about me has been published in Best magazine in the UK. It is included in the print edition as well as the abridged online version.

The article is written in first person as if I had written it. I did not. I also did not approve the article’s approach or content. I was promised a read-back and did not receive it. I also found out about its publication more than a month after it appeared.

The article contains factual inaccuracies about my life (I do not go out with friends in heels and a dress to have fun, and I would never imply that being asexual frees a person from the experience of jealousy), and its writing style not only contains British conventions I do not use, but employs reductionist and simplistic phrasing and philosophy I would never touch.

A read-back would have prevented this. A more comprehensive debunking is posted here on my blog.

The link to the article:

“I’m a 35 year old virgin”

Grainy scans of the print article (click to enlarge):

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Speaking at IvyQ: Inclusivity and Asexuality

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The pan-ivy queer conference IvyQ, held this time at Princeton University, invited me to be a speaker this year!

ivyqprogramMy workshop, entitled Inclusivity and Asexuality: Examining Asexual Participation in Queer Spaces, was held on Friday, February 7. In my afternoon workshop, I spoke to a small crowd about discrimination and prejudice and how it affects asexual people differently than it affects LGBT folks, and discussed how queer spaces can be more inclusive to asexual people and how asexual people can be more aware of the reasons behind opposition to their inclusion.

My program extract:

ivyqdesc

I really enjoyed talking to a few other asexual people and queer asexual allies, seeing the LGBT space on the Princeton campus, and meeting people who were actually familiar with my work! My asexuality workshop wasn’t the only slot on asexuality, either; David Jay was there as well, presenting a similar workshop the day after mine. (We didn’t get to see each other, though.) I was also lucky enough to be in the neighborhood of two of my writer pals, and got to meet both of them.

Yung Huang and Ronan O’Brien were the two volunteers who assisted me personally several times each and put up with my inability to find my way to anywhere, and even got me swanky shuttle service and a really beautiful, comfortable hotel room. The only thing that could have made the trip better was that the weather was too cold for my wimpy Florida self—there was snow everywhere!—and I didn’t get to record my presentation. All things considered it was a wonderful experience and I’m so glad I was part of it.

New title: Asexuality book

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I’ve been notified by my publisher that a pre-sales meeting with my book’s distributor led to a decision to change my title. This is pretty common in the publishing world, and not at all a bad thing in my opinion.

My new title: THE INVISIBLE ORIENTATION: An Introduction to Asexuality

I think this title does a much better job hooking audiences and encouraging them to buy the book than did my original title, So You Think You’re Asexual: An Introduction to the Invisible Orientation. It’s a much more inclusive title and won’t make interested non-asexual people think they’re not the audience for the book.

Hooray!

Sold: So You Think You’re Asexual

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My nonfiction book SOLD!

I’m thrilled to announce that my nonfiction book SO YOU THINK YOU’RE ASEXUAL: An Introduction to the Invisible Orientation has sold to Skyhorse Publishing/Carrel Books!

Publishers Marketplace announcement

[Publishers Marketplace Announcement]

Please check out a more in-depth explanation of the process on my blog, and sign up for my newsletter if you want to be sure to get news on the book’s progress! Read more about the book here.

We’re expecting a Fall 2014 release date.

Feel free to watch my video about it:

Interview: DiversifYA

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An interview with me was posted on the DiversifYA blog today. DiversifYA is all about providing resources for authors to make their young-adult fiction diverse and sharing perspectives about what it’s like to live with different experiences.

I submitted a suggestion last month volunteering myself as an asexual interviewee, and Marieke Nijkamp accepted my offer and sent me her questions. Marieke told me she’s gray asexual herself (an orientation that usually suggests being somewhere between asexual and non-asexual), and she discussed it in a roundtable shortly before my interview posted, so that was a nice connection!

Anyway, here is my interview: DiversifYA: Julie Sondra Decker.