Aromantic and asexual people are doubly invisible — both in the cishet and queer worlds.
Agharsh has always hated romance. As a teenager, while their peers were getting sexually intimate with their partners, Agharsh was after something different. Their idea of a good time with a crush was intimate conversations, or even just sitting in silence together.
In their early 20s, Agharsh got into their first intimate partnership — with a college classmate who was also a close friend. Agharsh felt pressure to perform sexual and romantic intimacy because that’s what partners are supposed to do. When friends asked for details like what the first kiss felt like or how a date went, it made them extremely queasy and uncomfortable.
After five years together, they decided to part ways. Agharsh felt relieved because the pressure to be sexually or romantically intimate was removed. They didn't have the language to articulate their “lack of feeling” — till they stumbled upon the terminologies of asexual and aromantic at the age of twenty-seven.
I met Agharsh for the first time in 2020, through an online group that was doing a collective reading of Angela Chen’s seminal book on asexuality, Ace. When I met them again recently on a rainy July evening at their home in Bengaluru, we recollected our excitement at finding ourselves in the company of other people who identified with our unique experience of the world — other aroace (aromantic and/or asexual) people.
Now in their early thirties, Agharsh is an orthodontist, but they are currently training to be a counselor because they want to provide therapeutic support to people who identify as aroace. "That [earlier] relationship gave me a lot to think about in terms of what a relationship should look like,” they said. “[For me] that was always platonic, and I thought everybody operated very platonically." Today, Agharsh knows that others often have very different ideas about attraction. "It was a huge liberation for me because it was a very lonely journey to be in that relationship," they said, with a catch in their voice.
Like Agharsh, I am an aroace person. Their experience of loneliness resonates with me. Even though I had long been aware that the ‘A’ in the acronym of LGBTQIA+ stands for asexual and aromantic identities, it was only in my mid-twenties that I considered the possibility that those labels came closest to describing my intimate interactions.
In 2019, I started dating a friend of over a decade. Spending time with, let’s call her Sarah, was easy. We exchanged poems and handwritten notes and spent hours reading to each other. However, I carried a secret: I experienced the act of sex as a compulsory chore that had to be carried out to keep the relationship alive. The continuous performance of romantic and sexual intimacy left me feeling empty. Sarah and I broke up in 2021 and I still don’t know what hurts more — the loss of an intimate partnership or the loss of an old friendship.
Loneliness is a universal human experience, but the degree to which one experiences it is a result of how one interacts with dominant social structures. Aroace loneliness is rooted in norms of compulsory sexuality and amatonormativity that dominate the world at large — including queer spaces. Amatonormativity is the belief that all human beings should ideally pursue romantic love, especially through monogamous relationships. And compulsory sexuality, a concept theorized by Angela Chen, refers to the belief that not wanting sex is wrong and individuals who don't care about sex are missing out on a necessary experience which makes them human.
"It almost seems like there is a script [of desire] that is pre-existing. And unless and until you follow that script, you're not going to gain the capital that you require to be a valuable member of society," said Lajya Nayak, an ace person who is a practicing therapist based out of Mumbai. She facilitates a virtual support group for aroace individuals — it is not an uncommon experience for an aroace person exploring their identity to not know another individual on the spectrum or constantly believe that they are the only one experiencing the absences.
There is also a stark absence of literature on asexual and aromantic individuals, their identities, and their lived experiences in popular media and academic studies focusing on gender and sexuality. Whatever little literature that does exist, is dominantly white, Eurocentric, and shrouded in academic language — all of which create barriers to accessibility and relatability. Literature on aroace identities in the South Asian context, which explores various intersections of caste, class, race and other social locations, is almost entirely non-existent.
So, by social and ideological design, aroace individuals are excluded, often making the experience of embodying these identities lonely. As Lajya put it, “Aroace identities and individuals have the least amount of visibility on the LGBTQIA+ spectrum.”
Sayak has always cherished the companionship offered by intimate partnerships — despite having to be sexually active in them. So he assumed that his life would follow the usual trajectory of marriage and long-term companionship. Now, 41-years-old, he is a lawyer turned entrepreneur who runs an e-commerce venture and enjoys travelling internationally and discussing global politics over drinks with friends. But he was always aware that he was wired a little differently from his peers. "I did not crave sex. I didn't give it too much of a thought.”
In 2011, Sayak got married to his partner after dating for nearly a year. At that point, they shared an excellent relationship. They had been sexually active while dating and it was assumed that this would continue. However, within a few months of their marriage, it became evident that they were sexually incompatible. “My wife desired sex, which for the longest time I didn’t understand or appreciate… and since I was not aware of my asexuality, I could not understand where she was coming from and she could not understand where I was coming from,” said Sayak.
Although sexual desire is embedded in the institution of marriage, it is also heavily policed and treated as a taboo in society. It is largely assumed to exist for procreation. Chen argues that word duty is more closely tied to the institution than desire itself. Does the absence of conversation on desire hinder individuals from exploring the possibility that sexual desire might also be absent?
In 2019, Sayak chanced upon a newspaper article about an asexual couple. “The penny finally dropped” and the word “asexuality” finally entered his lexicon. He was able to contextualize his experience of “not craving sex”. The new-found vocabulary led him to a better understanding of the roots of his sense of alienation within the marriage, which was already broken by this time. In 2021, after being married for a decade, Sayak and his partner filed for divorce.
Being aroace doesn’t always mean total revulsion towards sex and romance. Like any other form of sexuality, it is a spectrum rather than a binary. Ari is a 26-year-old non-binary panromantic demisexual person — they experience sexual attraction to all genders, but only after they have formed a deep emotional connection. They are a machine learning engineer by profession and belong to the Mogh tribe from Tripura. We met on a dating app in 2022 and instantly connected through our shared experiences of being made to feel invisible as ace people navigating Bengaluru’s online dating scene.
As a demisexual person, Ari is confounded by the concept of “love at first sight”. “How are people feeling all these things [sexual and romantic attraction] just by looking at someone?” they asked. For them, the desire to have sex is intertwined with the “intense love” they experience towards a person after forming an emotional bond. In the absence of strong emotional attraction, the act of sex feels performative for them. “It just becomes like a formula, like a bunch of steps and then it’s over... and I feel very empty.”
In 2017, when Ari was in college in Kerala, they entered an intimate partnership for the first time. Much like Sayak, they enjoyed the companionship even though they didn’t experience sexual attraction towards their partner. The relationship provided them emotional support at a time when they were struggling with their mental health — they would spend hours on call with their partner, helping each other through the stress of everyday life. Living in a small town where private spaces for exploring sexual intimacy were hard to come by, Ari assumed that they didn’t experience sexual attraction because the idea of getting physically intimate felt unsafe. By 2019, Ari’s lack of sexual desire had led to the end of the relationship, but it wasn’t until 2020 that they accidentally came across the term demisexual while scrolling on Instagram — and finally had their homecoming moment.
Since then, Ari has been searching for companionship which will fulfill their emotional needs without the precondition of sex. But this has led them to loneliness. In 2022, when they had just moved to Bangalore, they matched with Rahat on a dating app. Rahat was attentive and made an effort to meet Ari even though the two of them lived in far-away parts of the city. Slowly, Ari and Rahat started getting emotionally intimate. Ari had been forthcoming about their demisexuality. Rahat proposed cuddling and assured Ari that it would be platonic. Except, when they started cuddling, “it went into other things,” said Ari. While Ari did not enthusiastically consent to the act that followed after cuddling, they were also apprehensive of disappointing Rahat and losing out on a promising companion.
Ari’s definition of companionship is heartbreakingly simple: “I just like the sound of their breathing. Just knowing that someone is there and breathing, I find it very relaxing.” The search for that companionship has rendered them vulnerable — they have wanted it so desperately that they were willing to excuse bad behavior. In their negotiations with sexual desire, loneliness has proven to be a double-edged sword. While they have been rendered lonely by the performance of sex in exchange for companionship, they are equally lonely in the search of companionship that sees their desire for what it is — fluctuating and fluid.
Ari and Sayak find themselves grappling with different shades of loneliness, but the big question that haunts them both is the same: What does life look like in the absence of relationships built around sexual desire?
When she was a teenager, Apeksha was puzzled — and often hurt — by how her friends prioritised their romantic relationships over friendship. When she wanted to make plans to hang out, her friends told her they spent enough time together at school. Instead, they would use the pretext of meeting her to go meet their boyfriends.
Apeksha is now in her mid-twenties, a dancer and therapist based out of Bengaluru. She has always valued her friendships highly, but she feels that it has seldom been reciprocated with the same intensity. As a result, from a young age, she became well-acquainted with the loneliness that comes with the loss of friendship. "My friends found different partners and just went their own ways. In most spaces or most areas of my life, this hierarchy exists and that brings a very deep sense of loneliness, that people are going to prioritize a romantic relationship over friendships."
There is often a sense of ambiguous loss associated with these friendships for aroace people — their loss must be mourned even when the friends are theoretically still around because the nature of the relationship changes drastically with the entry of romantic partners.
“As an ace person, for me, it is very difficult. It's a much more lonely experience... Our expectations for the future are different,” explained Apekhsa. “I see a life where my friends would be extremely important, but they might only be able to make time for friendships very rarely when they have some break from their families. That difference is what brings up this loneliness… it's such an isolating experience.”
Why is it so easy for her friends to deprioritize friendships, while she considers them a crucial aspect of her life? The answer is simple: unlike other people — both cishet and queer — aroace people do not have the illusion of redemption in sexual and romantic desire. While aroace people might seek intimacy in platonic friendships and partnerships, many others believe it can only in be experienced in its truest form in romantic and sexual partnerships. "I think many people are scared of the term intimacy [in the context of friendships],” Apeksha added. “There's this fear that oh wait, are you falling for me? Are you hitting on me?"
For her, asking to hold someone’s hand because the moment feels good is an uncomplicated gesture of platonic intimacy, to others it can be a sign that she is feeling romantic or sexual desire.
For those of us who find ourselves on the aroace spectrum, arriving at the point of acceptance is a deeply personal journey because it requires grieving the lives we will never have and desires we will never experience. Like many other aroace people, I have also spent a considerable part of my life wondering if something in me is broken. I had the privilege of having access to the internet when I had questions around sex or sexuality, but accessing knowledge about who I am isn't the same as accepting that this is my lived reality and there is no exit route.
I had been promised a certain script of life — one in which sexual and romantic desire were written heavy-handedly. And I was assured that at the right time, they would arrive. Except they didn't. I had to mourn that promised life before I could reach a point of acceptance.
But I am still left with the daunting task of writing an alternative script for my life. How does one even begin to imagine life as an aroace person? Even in queer imaginations, sexual and romantic partnerships play a pivotal role. For decades, queer political movements have fought for the recognition of the various ways in which humans experience romantic and sexual desire for each other. Where does the absence of romantic and sexual desire figure in this struggle for liberation and freedom?
In October 2020, I, along with a fellow ace friend, started an online support space for aroace people. The group was started for purely selfish reasons — we wanted a space which would help us have conversations around aroace identities and since we couldn’t find anything like that at the time, we decided to create it.
Through that space, for the first time in my journey, I felt understood. Other members, who also experience invisibility within the larger queer community, resonated with this feeling too. "I can't believe a space dedicated to aroace people exists," was a common refrain.
Counselling psychologist Nethra Menon, who identifies as demisexual, also runs a virtual support space for aroace individuals to combat the isolation and invisibility that aroace people feel. "The social position of a person that identifies as aroace makes them doubly oppressed,” she said. “Not only are they a minority community in comparison to cis-het people but also in relation to the other more known queer factions such as being gay."
This double marginalisation underscores the need for support spaces exclusively dedicated to aroace individuals. Nayak believes that such spaces enable vital discussions on the lived experiences of aroace people which are otherwise invisible because of societal norms surrounding romantic and sexual relationships.
I wear the label of absence awkwardly because it is not that I don't experience romantic or sexual attraction — I experience an intensity of desire that cannot be narrowed down to sexual or romantic desire. When I spend time with my aroace friends and community members, I am surrounded by love, acceptance, joy, and a lot of laughter. I am also surrounded by shared grief and loneliness of knowing that the lack of sexual and romantic attraction is inherently what we don't feel, and that it will still define us even though we will spend our whole lives resisting it. All of us, aroace or otherwise, are cut from the same cloth of desire but some of us wear it differently.
Agharsh has always hated romance. As a teenager, while their peers were getting sexually intimate with their partners, Agharsh was after something different. Their idea of a good time with a crush was intimate conversations, or even just sitting in silence together.
In their early 20s, Agharsh got into their first intimate partnership — with a college classmate who was also a close friend. Agharsh felt pressure to perform sexual and romantic intimacy because that’s what partners are supposed to do. When friends asked for details like what the first kiss felt like or how a date went, it made them extremely queasy and uncomfortable.
After five years together, they decided to part ways. Agharsh felt relieved because the pressure to be sexually or romantically intimate was removed. They didn't have the language to articulate their “lack of feeling” — till they stumbled upon the terminologies of asexual and aromantic at the age of twenty-seven.
I met Agharsh for the first time in 2020, through an online group that was doing a collective reading of Angela Chen’s seminal book on asexuality, Ace. When I met them again recently on a rainy July evening at their home in Bengaluru, we recollected our excitement at finding ourselves in the company of other people who identified with our unique experience of the world — other aroace (aromantic and/or asexual) people.
Now in their early thirties, Agharsh is an orthodontist, but they are currently training to be a counselor because they want to provide therapeutic support to people who identify as aroace. "That [earlier] relationship gave me a lot to think about in terms of what a relationship should look like,” they said. “[For me] that was always platonic, and I thought everybody operated very platonically." Today, Agharsh knows that others often have very different ideas about attraction. "It was a huge liberation for me because it was a very lonely journey to be in that relationship," they said, with a catch in their voice.
Like Agharsh, I am an aroace person. Their experience of loneliness resonates with me. Even though I had long been aware that the ‘A’ in the acronym of LGBTQIA+ stands for asexual and aromantic identities, it was only in my mid-twenties that I considered the possibility that those labels came closest to describing my intimate interactions.
In 2019, I started dating a friend of over a decade. Spending time with, let’s call her Sarah, was easy. We exchanged poems and handwritten notes and spent hours reading to each other. However, I carried a secret: I experienced the act of sex as a compulsory chore that had to be carried out to keep the relationship alive. The continuous performance of romantic and sexual intimacy left me feeling empty. Sarah and I broke up in 2021 and I still don’t know what hurts more — the loss of an intimate partnership or the loss of an old friendship.
Loneliness is a universal human experience, but the degree to which one experiences it is a result of how one interacts with dominant social structures. Aroace loneliness is rooted in norms of compulsory sexuality and amatonormativity that dominate the world at large — including queer spaces. Amatonormativity is the belief that all human beings should ideally pursue romantic love, especially through monogamous relationships. And compulsory sexuality, a concept theorized by Angela Chen, refers to the belief that not wanting sex is wrong and individuals who don't care about sex are missing out on a necessary experience which makes them human.
"It almost seems like there is a script [of desire] that is pre-existing. And unless and until you follow that script, you're not going to gain the capital that you require to be a valuable member of society," said Lajya Nayak, an ace person who is a practicing therapist based out of Mumbai. She facilitates a virtual support group for aroace individuals — it is not an uncommon experience for an aroace person exploring their identity to not know another individual on the spectrum or constantly believe that they are the only one experiencing the absences.
There is also a stark absence of literature on asexual and aromantic individuals, their identities, and their lived experiences in popular media and academic studies focusing on gender and sexuality. Whatever little literature that does exist, is dominantly white, Eurocentric, and shrouded in academic language — all of which create barriers to accessibility and relatability. Literature on aroace identities in the South Asian context, which explores various intersections of caste, class, race and other social locations, is almost entirely non-existent.
So, by social and ideological design, aroace individuals are excluded, often making the experience of embodying these identities lonely. As Lajya put it, “Aroace identities and individuals have the least amount of visibility on the LGBTQIA+ spectrum.”
Sayak has always cherished the companionship offered by intimate partnerships — despite having to be sexually active in them. So he assumed that his life would follow the usual trajectory of marriage and long-term companionship. Now, 41-years-old, he is a lawyer turned entrepreneur who runs an e-commerce venture and enjoys travelling internationally and discussing global politics over drinks with friends. But he was always aware that he was wired a little differently from his peers. "I did not crave sex. I didn't give it too much of a thought.”
In 2011, Sayak got married to his partner after dating for nearly a year. At that point, they shared an excellent relationship. They had been sexually active while dating and it was assumed that this would continue. However, within a few months of their marriage, it became evident that they were sexually incompatible. “My wife desired sex, which for the longest time I didn’t understand or appreciate… and since I was not aware of my asexuality, I could not understand where she was coming from and she could not understand where I was coming from,” said Sayak.
Although sexual desire is embedded in the institution of marriage, it is also heavily policed and treated as a taboo in society. It is largely assumed to exist for procreation. Chen argues that word duty is more closely tied to the institution than desire itself. Does the absence of conversation on desire hinder individuals from exploring the possibility that sexual desire might also be absent?
In 2019, Sayak chanced upon a newspaper article about an asexual couple. “The penny finally dropped” and the word “asexuality” finally entered his lexicon. He was able to contextualize his experience of “not craving sex”. The new-found vocabulary led him to a better understanding of the roots of his sense of alienation within the marriage, which was already broken by this time. In 2021, after being married for a decade, Sayak and his partner filed for divorce.
Being aroace doesn’t always mean total revulsion towards sex and romance. Like any other form of sexuality, it is a spectrum rather than a binary. Ari is a 26-year-old non-binary panromantic demisexual person — they experience sexual attraction to all genders, but only after they have formed a deep emotional connection. They are a machine learning engineer by profession and belong to the Mogh tribe from Tripura. We met on a dating app in 2022 and instantly connected through our shared experiences of being made to feel invisible as ace people navigating Bengaluru’s online dating scene.
As a demisexual person, Ari is confounded by the concept of “love at first sight”. “How are people feeling all these things [sexual and romantic attraction] just by looking at someone?” they asked. For them, the desire to have sex is intertwined with the “intense love” they experience towards a person after forming an emotional bond. In the absence of strong emotional attraction, the act of sex feels performative for them. “It just becomes like a formula, like a bunch of steps and then it’s over... and I feel very empty.”
In 2017, when Ari was in college in Kerala, they entered an intimate partnership for the first time. Much like Sayak, they enjoyed the companionship even though they didn’t experience sexual attraction towards their partner. The relationship provided them emotional support at a time when they were struggling with their mental health — they would spend hours on call with their partner, helping each other through the stress of everyday life. Living in a small town where private spaces for exploring sexual intimacy were hard to come by, Ari assumed that they didn’t experience sexual attraction because the idea of getting physically intimate felt unsafe. By 2019, Ari’s lack of sexual desire had led to the end of the relationship, but it wasn’t until 2020 that they accidentally came across the term demisexual while scrolling on Instagram — and finally had their homecoming moment.
Since then, Ari has been searching for companionship which will fulfill their emotional needs without the precondition of sex. But this has led them to loneliness. In 2022, when they had just moved to Bangalore, they matched with Rahat on a dating app. Rahat was attentive and made an effort to meet Ari even though the two of them lived in far-away parts of the city. Slowly, Ari and Rahat started getting emotionally intimate. Ari had been forthcoming about their demisexuality. Rahat proposed cuddling and assured Ari that it would be platonic. Except, when they started cuddling, “it went into other things,” said Ari. While Ari did not enthusiastically consent to the act that followed after cuddling, they were also apprehensive of disappointing Rahat and losing out on a promising companion.
Ari’s definition of companionship is heartbreakingly simple: “I just like the sound of their breathing. Just knowing that someone is there and breathing, I find it very relaxing.” The search for that companionship has rendered them vulnerable — they have wanted it so desperately that they were willing to excuse bad behavior. In their negotiations with sexual desire, loneliness has proven to be a double-edged sword. While they have been rendered lonely by the performance of sex in exchange for companionship, they are equally lonely in the search of companionship that sees their desire for what it is — fluctuating and fluid.
Ari and Sayak find themselves grappling with different shades of loneliness, but the big question that haunts them both is the same: What does life look like in the absence of relationships built around sexual desire?
When she was a teenager, Apeksha was puzzled — and often hurt — by how her friends prioritised their romantic relationships over friendship. When she wanted to make plans to hang out, her friends told her they spent enough time together at school. Instead, they would use the pretext of meeting her to go meet their boyfriends.
Apeksha is now in her mid-twenties, a dancer and therapist based out of Bengaluru. She has always valued her friendships highly, but she feels that it has seldom been reciprocated with the same intensity. As a result, from a young age, she became well-acquainted with the loneliness that comes with the loss of friendship. "My friends found different partners and just went their own ways. In most spaces or most areas of my life, this hierarchy exists and that brings a very deep sense of loneliness, that people are going to prioritize a romantic relationship over friendships."
There is often a sense of ambiguous loss associated with these friendships for aroace people — their loss must be mourned even when the friends are theoretically still around because the nature of the relationship changes drastically with the entry of romantic partners.
“As an ace person, for me, it is very difficult. It's a much more lonely experience... Our expectations for the future are different,” explained Apekhsa. “I see a life where my friends would be extremely important, but they might only be able to make time for friendships very rarely when they have some break from their families. That difference is what brings up this loneliness… it's such an isolating experience.”
Why is it so easy for her friends to deprioritize friendships, while she considers them a crucial aspect of her life? The answer is simple: unlike other people — both cishet and queer — aroace people do not have the illusion of redemption in sexual and romantic desire. While aroace people might seek intimacy in platonic friendships and partnerships, many others believe it can only in be experienced in its truest form in romantic and sexual partnerships. "I think many people are scared of the term intimacy [in the context of friendships],” Apeksha added. “There's this fear that oh wait, are you falling for me? Are you hitting on me?"
For her, asking to hold someone’s hand because the moment feels good is an uncomplicated gesture of platonic intimacy, to others it can be a sign that she is feeling romantic or sexual desire.
For those of us who find ourselves on the aroace spectrum, arriving at the point of acceptance is a deeply personal journey because it requires grieving the lives we will never have and desires we will never experience. Like many other aroace people, I have also spent a considerable part of my life wondering if something in me is broken. I had the privilege of having access to the internet when I had questions around sex or sexuality, but accessing knowledge about who I am isn't the same as accepting that this is my lived reality and there is no exit route.
I had been promised a certain script of life — one in which sexual and romantic desire were written heavy-handedly. And I was assured that at the right time, they would arrive. Except they didn't. I had to mourn that promised life before I could reach a point of acceptance.
But I am still left with the daunting task of writing an alternative script for my life. How does one even begin to imagine life as an aroace person? Even in queer imaginations, sexual and romantic partnerships play a pivotal role. For decades, queer political movements have fought for the recognition of the various ways in which humans experience romantic and sexual desire for each other. Where does the absence of romantic and sexual desire figure in this struggle for liberation and freedom?
In October 2020, I, along with a fellow ace friend, started an online support space for aroace people. The group was started for purely selfish reasons — we wanted a space which would help us have conversations around aroace identities and since we couldn’t find anything like that at the time, we decided to create it.
Through that space, for the first time in my journey, I felt understood. Other members, who also experience invisibility within the larger queer community, resonated with this feeling too. "I can't believe a space dedicated to aroace people exists," was a common refrain.
Counselling psychologist Nethra Menon, who identifies as demisexual, also runs a virtual support space for aroace individuals to combat the isolation and invisibility that aroace people feel. "The social position of a person that identifies as aroace makes them doubly oppressed,” she said. “Not only are they a minority community in comparison to cis-het people but also in relation to the other more known queer factions such as being gay."
This double marginalisation underscores the need for support spaces exclusively dedicated to aroace individuals. Nayak believes that such spaces enable vital discussions on the lived experiences of aroace people which are otherwise invisible because of societal norms surrounding romantic and sexual relationships.
I wear the label of absence awkwardly because it is not that I don't experience romantic or sexual attraction — I experience an intensity of desire that cannot be narrowed down to sexual or romantic desire. When I spend time with my aroace friends and community members, I am surrounded by love, acceptance, joy, and a lot of laughter. I am also surrounded by shared grief and loneliness of knowing that the lack of sexual and romantic attraction is inherently what we don't feel, and that it will still define us even though we will spend our whole lives resisting it. All of us, aroace or otherwise, are cut from the same cloth of desire but some of us wear it differently.
Priyanka (she/they) is a lawyer, trained peer supporter and a writer in the genre of creative non-fiction and essays. They are a neuroqueer person who is passionate about building and co-facilitating safe spaces for asexual, aromantic and other neuroqueer individuals.
Mia Jose (she/they) is a non-binary illustrator from Kerala whose work highlights personal stories marked by gender, body experiences and their south-Indian heritage. While not lost in their sketchbook, they can be found devouring all things camp and horror.
Visvak (he/him) is a writer, editor, and teacher based in Goa.
Ankur Paliwal (he/they) is a queer journalist, and founder and managing editor of queerbeat.
