A Love Letter to Demisexuality
By Elliot Robinson
There has never been any doubt: my older sister is a raging lesbian.
I obtained this particular piece of information via my own coming-out as bisexual, which did not occur until a distance of nearly six hundred miles split my sister and I apart. I was twelve or thirteen years old, visiting Washington, D.C. with my eighth-grade class, with a crippling fear of confrontation hardwired into my DNA. This wasn’t the first time I had come out — but it was the first time it really mattered.
Since revealing a pivotal aspect of my identity via osmosis or telepathy was out of the question — either of which would have been infinitely preferable — I opted for a text message. I think I like girls, I wrote, hitting send before the already tenuous threads of my courage dissolved completely. Then I waited, heart in my throat.
My sister responded almost immediately. Me too, lol, she said. Then she sent me a gif of the famously pansexual Captain Jack Harkness from the hit BBC sci-fi epic Doctor Who.
And that was that.
Until I came out again, around two years later. I was a sophomore in high school, dating a girl in the way that only terrified and raised-religious queer kids know how to date — which meant lots of texting and calling in the small, dark hours, and very little face-to-face contact. The whole experience was nerve-wracking and lasted approximately two weeks. This time, I at least had the decency to tell my sister face-to-face: “I think I’m asexual.”
“Cool,” she said. And that was that — for real this time.
Except it wasn’t. A year and a half later, I realized that I might have just been a late bloomer on SSRIs with a heaping of religious trauma, and cheerfully re-embraced the bisexual label. It’s unclear whether this fact was relayed to my sister — she’d probably already known, having survived the same evangelical brainwashing. But even if I didn’t tell her, I know what her reaction would have been. It was the same reaction, after all, when I told her that I was nonbinary and wanted to change my name; and again, when I began to identify as transmasculine.
This is not a fear-mongering piece about the transience and temporality of labels. Because for every time that my self-understanding shifted and evolved, my sister knew exactly who she was — and who she loved. For every queer person that tries on and discards identities as easily as outgrown clothes, there is someone else who has never once doubted their place in the world. It goes without saying, of course, that either type of person is equally valid.
Rather, this is a piece about how much it sucks to come out, and to keep coming out. It’s a piece about how difficult it is to know who you are at twelve or thirteen or fifteen or eighteen or twenty-two — a challenge that is only exacerbated by trauma, neurodivergence, and the plain, everyday troubles of existing in a world that demands certainty, always. But mostly, it’s a piece about being demisexual, and the fact that this label is no less authentic — no less meaningful — for being at the end of a very, very long road.
Demisexuality is defined as a lack of primary sexual attraction; that is, lack of love-at-first-sight heart-skip or butterflies-in-the-stomach type of sensations that precipitate a crush. But there’s a problem with identifying with the lack of something: how can you know what you’re missing?
I certainly didn’t. My goalposts for normality had been different since birth, and as my friends and loved ones grew up and gushed about celebrity crushes and the boys or girls at school that they liked, I always assumed that we were all feeling the same thing — that they were just fortunate enough or clever enough or normal enough to hide it better.
A great, sucking void of loneliness in the space behind my ribs.
Because I did want to be in love, badly. I wanted to be with someone — a partner, a soulmate — and it was a wanting that consumed me, resembling conventional attraction enough so I didn’t linger on all the cracks in the logic, like the fact that I’d never had a celebrity crush or, really, a crush at all. Or the absence of a pivotal “gay awakening” in the form of a particularly attractive female fictional character, even though I knew the staples of the genre: Shego, Elizabeth Swann, Eris. And I did remember loving those characters, those television shows and movies — but it wasn’t the same, it wasn’t right. How could it have been, when I never strayed any further than fondness; when romance novel tropes like fantasizing and daydreaming remained perpetually, incessantly out-of-reach?
That was the biggest problem — the unquantifiable grayness of my experiences. It was why I discarded the asexual label after carrying it around for less than two years: because I did feel something, nebulous though it might have been. But I hated the absence of certainty. As an adult, I stayed afloat in the dating world by fiercely gaslighting myself into adequate levels of sexual attraction to various iterations of incompatible partners, which required a willpower thatwas almost admirable if it had been applied to literally anything else. The results, as one might imagine, were dismal. I’ve since left that version of myself behind.
So where does that leave me now?
There’s a series of books that I read in high school, and continued to sporadically re-read up until the present day. They were published in the early 2000s, and the main character of the original trilogy (two-thirds of a subsequent trilogy has since been released) is an unequivocally demisexual man. This particular plot point did not affect me very much when I initially read the books, but a great deal has changed between then and now. My most recent re-read began just a few months ago and is still ongoing — and this time, I have paid very close attention to the protagonist’s conceptions of identity and sexuality. Here is what I found:
1. There is — obviously — a great chasm between being attracted to someone, and being attracted to the idea of someone and how they can make you feel. The former is biological hardwiring: either you have it, or you don’t. There is nothing wrong with you if you don’t have it. The latter is an addiction.
2. Demisexuality is inherently complex; this does not make it any less real.
3. Sometimes the only difference between caring deeply about someone and feeling attracted to them is whether or not they are also attracted to you. Loving them does not have to be a choice — but it can be.
4. Existing in the in-betweens is not a death sentence.
5. I am demisexual.
About the Author
Elliott Robinson is a queer author, journalist, poet, and teacher located in central Indiana. He received a B.A. in English from Butler University, which is where he first encountered Matthew’s Place, and his work has been published in the Butler Collegian as well as in several editions of Manuscripts Literary Magazine. Elliott is extremely passionate about LGBTQ+ advocacy and volunteer work, and he strives to use his talents as a writer and educator for the betterment of his community.
