postscript: an interview with Justin Ancheta
the voices behind my asexuality feature for Sojourners magazine
Hey everyone,
There was no way I could fit everyone I interviewed into my feature story with Sojourners, as much as I wanted to and tried. Regardless of whether some interviewees were quoted once, a couple times, or not at all, everyone I spoke with meaningfully shaped the article with their insightful perspectives.
I think it’s important to lift up voices of asexual people and people who study asexuality for Asexual Awareness Week, so I’m taking some of the interviews and posting abridged versions for y’all to read. I have permission from Sojourners and each interviewee to do so. As another disclosure, my publication of their views doesn’t mean I endorse all of them. These are discussions, not debates.
My fourth interviewee is Justin Ancheta: an experimental writer who is biromantic and demisexual. Here is my conversation with him …
JOEY THURMOND: Tell me a little about yourself. How would you describe yourself to people?
JUSTIN ANCHETA: My name is Justin Ancheta and I live in Toronto, Canada. I’m a literary writer. I’m working on projects that relate to reading the Waite-Smith Tarot Deck through my identity, and another about my experience as a stutterer as an ace and racialized person. I’m a professional Tarot reader as well, which I got into after discovering that I was asexual and queer while revamping my own personal Christianity and relationship to it. I'm also a bit of a tech nerd and space nerd. I basically started trying to read everything out there regarding the nuts and bolts of asexuality to figure out how it applied to me. Part of that too was not just discovering my “aceness,” but also being bi and how that intersects with asexuality.
Asexuality isn’t a monolithic identity, but a galaxy of different identities and nuanced ways aceness interacts with “alloness.” [Writer’s note: “Allosexual” describes the experience of feeling sexual attraction.] And that's what led me to demisexuality. I feel very alienated from discussions of sex, like, “Is this person hot or not? Who would you wanna bang?” But I've had relationships; I've experienced very powerful sexual attraction to women and men. Trying to understand that better led me to that particular part of the ace spectrum with demisexuality. If I were to introduce myself to an ace audience, I use the labels biromantic demisexual. The trouble is that when one deals with jargon microlabels, it can a little thorny to explain. So, for most people I just say I'm ace — or I'm bi and ace.
I get it. I don't go around telling anyone, “I am a homoromantic asexual!” I say I’m either asexual or gay ace. I understand not wanting to explain depending on the context and whom you're talking to.
It ties into a very common experience among aces. I try not to speak in generalities, but it’s the experience of meeting people and having to always put on your educator hat and expend emotional labor with a random person. When they're like, “Oh, what's that?” Then you have to go into a one-hour thing and break out your PowerPoint slides. It's important work, but it's tiring.
So, how would you define asexuality?
I've actually struggled with this for a while because, we all know the AVEN (Writer’s note: The Asexual Visibility & Education Network is one of the first major organizations to kickstart asexual advocacy on a popular level since the early 2000s.) definition at this point: experiencing little to no sexual attraction. Other places say it’s a lack of sexual attraction, but these didn't really connect with me until I saw a tweet on ace Twitter that said it’s difficult having a definition that stresses the negative — a lack of something. Something's missing from you. A particularly resonant definition comes from Lisa Orlando's 1972 Asexual Manifesto, where she called it “sexually relating to no one.” I probably would adjust that to include the broader nature of AVEN’s definition and extend that to say, “sexually relating to little to no one, or few to no people.” That’s more fulfilling and empowering to define myself in terms of who I am as a person.
Asexuality is also about a sense of freedom. It is realizing that I don't have to feel like I'm trapped or confined by expectations of what I'm supposed to do with my life. Who I date or marry, how many kids I’m having — all of that.” If I don't want that, that doesn't have to be my life. I can live a life that is truer to what I feel and what I know within my own body to be real. And I think part of it is also (in a very political way) being in a state of rebellion against so many factors that influence how we think of sexuality and relationships. It's countercultural to the idea that to be valid, you must be in a conventional sexual relationship. Your validity as a person, spiritually as well as materially, has to be defined in terms of generating children, getting married, and following all these various life paths and goals that your church, family, and society has laid out for you. Elizabeth Brake coined the term “amatonormativity” to talk about that.
So that's what asexuality means to me. It's rebellion. Freedom. It's an understanding that there is something in me that is different. Not normal. That is queer. And that's lovely and wonderful. Some other folks on Twitter would say imago Dei — we're all made in the image of God; there is an inherent divinity and holiness to us all. Our queerness — our asexuality — is then something special, something important. Blessed, holy, significant.
As I was exploring my asexuality, I grew up in a borderline fundamentalist evangelical church. I thought my lack of straightness and having a “normal” experience of sexual attraction as broken, even sinful. You were talking about accepting your stuttering as a disability. What do you think about the intersection of asexuality and disability? Or are they distinct? In other words, is asexuality a disability or not?
Angela Chen has an excellent chapter where she goes deeply into that issue. The very question “Is asexuality a disability?” is something I wanna go beyond. Who's asking that question and why? Oftentimes, when people conflate sexuality and disability, there's an agenda there — usually to medicalize asexuality. People will point to the DSM4 and say, “You have HSDD. Hypoactive Sexuality Disorder.”
A legendary piece of media that I have not touched in a while is that House episode where the husband's asexual and the wife is asexual and, plot twist, the woman was lying and the man had some kind of medical issue. It's supposed to lead you to think asexuality is innately broken — something that can be cured or fixed. Either in its mildest form through therapy or medication, or in its most extreme form through corrective assault, I'll say. “Corrective sexual assault.” Very heavy air quotes.
For example, I thought I was always locked in this kind of battle with my stutter. My mind fighting my own body to get the words out and express myself fully. Through a lot of reflection, I just came to realize that my stutter is just part of the complex mosaic of what makes me who I am. It has informed my view of the world and my view on relationships in pushing me to think about speech and language and relationships in a very expansive and open way. That's helped me to think about other things in that manner like asexuality. After a period where relationships were just blowing up in spectacular fashion, I was trying to make sense of what I'd done. Is there something wrong with me? Is there something fundamentally wrong with how I'm attracted to people? How I feel?” Just like my stutter, I realized, “No, there's nothing wrong with me at all.” It's just a function of who I am as a person innately. And there's nothing to be fixed, but rather something to investigate and approach with a spirit of wonder and curiosity. What can we learn about ourselves and the assumptions that have dominated most of our lives? What can we take that is healthy and nourishing and uplifting, while hopefully teasing apart and getting rid of what’s toxic?
I'm still in that discovery phase myself, being still quite new to disability politics and the philosophy of disability. What I do know from the people in my orbit who do have disabilities and have hearing impairments, vision impairments — it's not a deficiency. It's something that has informed and influenced them in a way that makes them incredible human beings. My stutter is a disability not as a negative, but a disability as a positive. It’s a struggle that challenges me to learn more about myself. I can't speak for everyone who's disabled, as it can get quite nuanced, and heated in some places.
What can also make it challenging is that it’s an invisible disability. I think about a friend of mine who is blind. They have a cane and guide dog. That poses a whole bunch of challenges and issues that they face uniquely as part of that community. With stuttering, some days I can talk fluently. Some days, the stutter is so bad to the point where I effectively cannot talk. Because my body says no, my mind also says, “No, not happening.” Sometimes I can't even say my own name because of what's happening in my body. I'm still thinking about this. I wrote an essay in Carte Blanche Magazine that’s my interrogation of that.
Some people say that they've had their stutter cured and they're completely, totally fluent. I've had decades of therapy of speech therapy, or at least more than a decade. I still stutter, and with that intersecting with asexuality, there’s this theme of liminality — being between two states. I don't think this is an official term, but for me, I think of it as a liminal disability: being someone who's normal and able bodied, yet I have a perceived physical dysfunction. I see my asexuality as a liminal space as well because one of the great challenges in processing my own asexuality. I don't feel purely asexual in having zero or almost zero sexual attraction because I've had sexual attraction to people, but in very specific circumstances and very specific situations.
I've tied that into my own experience as a racialized person as well. In that I'm a visible minority in my country, and yet I was socialized “Canadian.” A lot of air quotes because I thought of myself as being an ordinary Canadian, but it wasn't until I ran into behaviors and ran into obstacles in my life that had a clear racial basis that were clearly based off of the appearance of my skin. I began to realize that I'm not Canadian, but I was born here.
There’s also the liminality of someone who has increasingly found themselves with one foot in Christianity, and one foot out of it. For a good part of my youth, I had a lot of evangelical friends. I immersed myself in evangelical culture because all of friends were into that. But I was raised Catholic, and I’ve noticed there’s a strange difference in culture with Protestant churches. However, I didn’t feel like I belonged in Catholic circles because some teachings on sexuality and gay people was really off-putting, along with the gender stuff and political stuff too. Evangelical fundamentalist Christianity was not different as something I couldn't fully connect with, even though I really tried. I read Joshua Harris’ I Kissed Dating Goodbye. I think I had a copy of Boy Meets World. I think someone gifted me a copy of Wild At Heart, too. But I definitely read that and had misgivings I couldn't really quite verbalize.
Somehow, I escaped a lot of those books. But I grew up observing it, and in retrospect, seeing how it influenced some of my churches’ standards with dating, marriage, etc. Also, you were talking about BIPOC identities being related to liminality. I’ve had to remind myself to pursue other perspectives outside of white ace folks because … that's what you see most of the time. It's why authors like Sherronda J. Brown are essential to listen to.
Brown says so many things that we've needed to hear for a while. She hits the zeitgeist of where we are in the era of Black Lives Matter. Post-2020, we’re confronting anti-Black racism and violence. I speak as a Canadian, but there is so much cross-pollination between American and Canadian culture. I see the asexual community starting to change and recognize the value of intersectionality. Because, in my limited look at the history of our community, it has always been about, “I'm visible; I'm asexual, look at me!" But I wanna see ace characters in TV shows and movies. I wanna be more than just Todd Chavez in Bojack Horseman or a little five-minute character cameo on the Netflix series Sex Education. We're growing into a wider discussion about how asexuality intersects with race, gender, and disability, which helps us better understand ourselves and better speak to the wider structures that influence amatonormativity. The ways we experience amatonormativity as asexual people, or as aromantic people, is deeply tied to capitalism and white supremacy. Colonialism.
When you're in a liminal space, it challenges you to reexamine binary assumptions that have been ingrained in you. If you're not having sex, having babies, then you're clearly celibate. You're clearly destined for the priesthood. Being ace tosses all of that out the window because you’re forced to realize, “I’m not really sexual, and I don't look at my sexuality as being a choice or God-ordained. It's just who I am.” It is part of God making me who I am. But the point is that more marginalized voices must come to the fore. I'm hoping to see more trans aces’ voices.
You connected queerness to the imago Dei earlier. Where do you see God in asexuality?
It's love for myself and seeing myself as worthy of love. This understanding and acceptance informs my attitude that I don't have to put up with people who don't accept or love me — people who don't cherish who I am at my core, which I think is a universal experience for all queer people. When we have been told time and time again that we are broken or that there's something wrong with us … it's deeply painful. When we are told time and time again how awful we are, it goes against … okay, I'm going into woo-woo territory here, but it goes against how we are all beings of light and love; we are all born children of God. We all possess a part of his essence within us. And Christ is a guide that reconnects us with that and God himself.
Growing up reading through the Bible, I remember thinking on a gut level, “I can feel and see God in other people. My friends, the kindness of random people — that's where God is. That's where I most feel God's presence. There's a lot of literature written by Catholic theologians and Jesuits about that. It's why when I see, in evangelical circles, God reduced to being the Bible, or God only being in this church. That feels very alien. My background is in evolutionary biology, and I remember times where I was out doing field work, standing in the middle of a forest. Feeling God amidst all of that nature and diversity. It’s really powerful and overwhelming.
I have some friends who’ve had experiences like that in nature. I think of Christian mystics like Howard Thurman, and how he found God in the trees. I don't really have religious experiences like that. Neither with hymns or prayer. But I do tell people that where I've experienced God the most is in my friends. Having deep connections with people outside my family … it’s expansive. I can find God not just in the Bible, but in everyone.
It’s liberating because it does bring an expansive dimension to who and what God is, and where their place is in my life. It affects how I view myself. Going back to challenging binaries … that’s what God does, right? Binaries are such a limited human view of things. If God truly is as infinite as we say they are, then God must surely exist outside of whatever our human minds come up with to make sense of our reality.
Trans theologians have helped open my eyes to that. Queer theology can actually help us engage with the mystery and complexity of God. There's this worship of certainty in evangelicalism where we try to fit God in these boxes with our theology, and anything outside of those can't be God. To me, it doesn’t sound very Christian to say we can define God exactly.
Queer Christianity speaks to how much “more” Christianity is — how more God and Jesus are. For a lot of people, uncertainty is frightening. If you're not certain about where or what you are, and what your place is in the world — most can't handle that. it's just outside of their mental models. When I started to move out of that, my faith and encounters with God have been much more fulfilling and rewarding.
When I was in university for my undergrad, I had a lot of friends who were Muslim. Sikhs. I had a couple of Wicken Pagan friends. Interacting with them, learning about how they approach divinity and spirituality, was so beautiful and spiritually rewarding. At that time, I was thinking, “Why is it that I am so spiritually charged talking to my Muslim friends? In the binaries I'd been brought up in, they were not Christian. “You don't talk to those people. They're not like you. They believe in different things.” But interacting with and learning about them taught me so much more about my relationship with God and who I was in a way that being with other Christians had not.
When I grew up, I was told to be careful around secular people and not befriend them. “They're not of God and you don't have much in common.” Bad company corrupts good morals, and all that. But I have had wonderful relationships with them, and beautiful conversations about religion and spirituality with people who don’t share my faith. With your faith communities, how did family and church influence your understanding of things like marriage and sex?
For me, it was very normative. My parents were maybe a little less overtly queerphobic than most, but there was the general idea growing up, “You're a boy. You like girls. You're gonna marry a girl. Make sure you marry a nice Filipino girl who will be a good wife to you and cook you dinner.” That was generally from going to church and hearing people expound on Paul. The two must cleave together, become one flesh — all that stuff. And nothing outside of that reality was in my mental space. But I always thought, “Is that really all there is?” You're supposed to have sex in a Christianly responsible way. My mental model was this: You have a conventional Christian relationship with someone where you court them first, and then you marry them, and then you have kids, and that's how you become happy. That was the template for how I approached relationships up until I became conscious of my sexuality.
I remember having a discussion about meeting and seeing God in other people; learning to love God through loving other people. They said, “But other people fail you, other people are broken, and you have to love God.” There was this separation of God from the person. You love God; you don't love people. You love God; you don't love the world. You're in God; you're not in or of the world.
What was a pivotal moment that helped you discover your asexuality? And what was that experience like for you?
Looking at other people's experiences, I think mine is somewhat atypical. Because other people talk about that lightbulb moment. For me, it was an evolution — a very slow and gradual process where I was reading and gathering information, and then reflecting on it, grappling with it, internalizing it, digesting it, and then reading some more. After my previous relationship ended, I was out in my own little personal wilderness. Where I was going to cafes, or self-dates, as I like to call them. I don’t know, a more spiritually refined version of naval gazing. Just thinking how I was with my partner before and said that I wasn't asexual because asexuality looks like my close friend who's been out as asexual for years, but when she talks about her sexuality, so much of it resonates with me. But I'm not asexual because I have relationships; I do feel sexual attraction to people. Where does that put me?
After reading countless blogs and taking online quizzes, I thought, “Wow, that's me! That is definitely how I experience attraction.” All of the people who I've dated became best friends I’d spend hours and hours talking to about gender and sexuality and politics and society and the economy and religion and the nature of God and philosophy. Yet when I was single and thinking about getting on dating apps, I thought, “I can't do that. No.” Friends would talk about hooking up with people. I'm just like, “No. Good for you, but no.” For a long time, I conflated that with my evangelical Christian ideals of dating because you don't date. You court people with this song-and-dance where you're supposed to only date a Christian person. All of this culminated with one of those self-dates where I thought, “I'm gonna order a flag pin because I finally know who I am.” Ordering that, and just looking at the demisexual flag on the Wikipedia page … I figured out that one big missing piece of the puzzle in trying to understand myself better. That was just one moment as part of a whole range of little individual ones.
What do things like marriage, romance, and attraction mean to you? How do they relate to your own Christian faith?
In the beginning, I thought of these in terms of rules and regulations. God through the church institutes these very clear ideas of what you’re supposed to do and how. Then, you get your fulfilling and happy relationship. As I experienced relationships in the real world, that didn't match up to my reality. Exemplifying Christian virtues and morals in my relationships still resulted in falling woefully short. A lot of people attach purity culture to fundamentalist Protestant communities, but it's also very much at the heart of Catholic morality when it comes to relationships and sexuality as well. This idea of keeping oneself pure and chased; the idea of being perfect but expressing that pursuit of perfection through very toxic means. I originally thought of this as a very uniquely Catholic thing — this self-flagellation where I hated myself for not matching up to the Christian ideal; I hated myself for mistakes I'd made and people I'd hurt. Not being in this state of perfection. I think that is probably one of the most lasting wounds that I still am healing from, where I wanted to be perfect as my Heavenly Father is perfect. I had to leave that atmosphere where that message was amplified. I had to find messages where I was told, “You are who you are, and the most that you can do is the best that you can do. Keep learning to be open to your mistakes and trying your best. Love yourself in spite of all that.”
All of this began to change as I encountered more queer people. Reading their stories and seeing beautiful, wonderful, fulfilling relationships completely outside my mental model of “Christian heterosexual marriage with Christian kids.” There was a girl that I met in university who married her girlfriend, and they have three kids. I can't think of a family that I've known for so long that radiates so much love and warmth and acceptance and positivity. Christians and our societies aggressively value and prioritize marriage and romantic partners at the expense of our close friendships. I didn't really see my relationships with my partners as relationships per se, but more like, “You're a best friend that I'm super, super friendly with; our friendship transcends what you would think of normally.” That can be every bit as powerful and every bit as significant as a conventional marriage or conventional relationship.
What do you think people of faith can learn from asexual people and do for them in their churches? Do you have any thoughts on how asexuality can inform popular theology and Christian sexual ethics?
Asexual and aromatic Christians are a very important part of a very important puzzle. On one level, there is a rising amount of newer generations (Gen Z) who are identifying as LGBTQ. And it's not because of some social contagion, but because our society has changed to the point where more people are becoming aware of queer identities. Not just outside the church but inside the church as well. On that level, queer Christians really are the future of the church. They're in the church. They're beginning to discover who they are and realize that they don't need to suppress, hide, or fight who they really are as human beings.
On another level, there’s challenging binaries of what sexual ethics should and could be. It challenges us to think in terms of community — what we can do for each other. It challenges us to think more about power, and where power imbalances lie in our relationships. In challenging power inequalities, we can make life better for everyone — queer and non-queer alike, Christian and non-Christian alike. It’s something that we really need if we want Christianity to remain relevant as a spiritual force for good.
There's a book that I read that really influenced me a lot, and it's called Bi: Notes for a Bisexual Revolution by Shiri Eisner that challenges our conservative Christian binary view of the world and relationships. A lot more people should be aware of it because it was such an important read for me.
You talked about the tarot earlier. What do you think about using “worldly systems” and ways of thinking to inform Christian faith?
The traditional Christian belief system around relationship and sexuality wasn't working for me, but tarot was a new, fresh, empowering wave of self-understanding grounded in a lot of Christian iconography and mysticism. There was this period of time where I was obsessed with reconciling my Christianity with my love for the tarot when there’s been such a historic demonization of tarot within conservative Christian circles.
One of my favorite decks is the Smith-Waite tarot deck made in 1909. Because it was created by people who were part of The Order of the Golden Dawn in the Victorian times, there was a lot of Christian symbolism and imagery. For example, the Ace of Cups has the communion chalice with the communion wafer going into it. The historical origins of the tarot itself with the French card makers in medieval southern Italy, northern Italy, and southern France, there's a rich tradition of interplay and interface with Christian culture and Christian symbolism. But the tarot is historically cisheteronormative. You have male cards that exemplify male energy and male roles, and vice-versa. I'm going down the rabbit hole here of Jungian psychology, but we exhibit aspects of the feminine self and the masculine self. Self-actualization, what I would call healing and true self-love, is understanding those male and female aspects of ourselves and learning to harmonize them — bring them into balance. There's such a strong connection to the queer experience. There's such a strong connection to the queer experience, too. What does it mean when we have male-presenting people that have an innately female nature or vice versa?
Tarot helped me reconnect and arrive at a more genuine notion of what Christianity feels like to me. I'm at a stage where I’m not bound to specific doctrinal ideas. Having grown up Catholic, there was always this top-down idea of what and who Christ is. Through the tarot and queerness, my Christianity has evolved into a much more personal, mystical experience that prioritizes personal experience over external doctrine and dogma. And that's really scary having grown up with dogma that’s basically a matter of spiritual life or death. My soul yearns to be free from all of these people camping down and pushing down on my ability to express and ask questions of myself — to better understand myself and other people.
I think there's a parallel to your story in the furry community. I’m aware of the immense social stigma they have, even in queer communities. What more pure form of self-love and self-expression and connection with your own personal divinity, with your own personal relationship with God, could you have than expressing it through a furry persona? A lot of people talk about the dangers of worldly things, but I think of worldly tools as just tools. They're things we can use to help understand ourselves better, either as mirrors or magnifying glasses.
I like to think about Paul saying how everything that God created is good. What matters is the ends that they're used for. If anything, applying our faith to the “tools” that we use is a sign of livingit out in a holistic, all-encompassing sense. Could be anything from tarot to fursonas. You should bring your convictions and virtues into all spaces. Not with direct evangelism but celebrating the things you value with your faith.
Do you have any final remarks?
If anyone reads our conversation, I would want them to take one thing out of it: everything is connected. All queer people are connected having a shared experience of existing outside of traditional visions of what sexuality and gender should be. When we work together to free ourselves of that, when we work together to dismantle all of those structures, it's not just for queer people. We're helping all people. Everyone stands to benefit from queer liberation — from feminist liberation. Wouldn't it be great if we didn’t have to live in obligation towards purity culture? If we didn’t have to worry about what people think if we don’t get married and have kids by the age of 40? Even outside of Christian culture, there's this pervasive notion that you're someone lesser in value for that. We'd have a much healthier society, and a much healthier view of gender and sex and relationships, if we did away with all of that. Queer Christians, ace Christians, are a huge and important part of that ongoing project.
You can follow Justin Ancheta on Twitter and check out his Medium blog. You can check out some of his published pieces on his Linktree page.