Brandi George

“To concede that there are two forms of desire—cross-sex and same-sex desire—is to recognize the analytic possibility of at least four kinds of persons. These include: (1) those who harbor cross-sex but not same-sex desire; (2) those who harbor same-sex but not cross-sex desire; (3) those who harbor both forms of desire; and (4) those who harbor neither form of desire. Yet even those who acknowledge that orientation arrays itself on a continuum spanning the first three categories often ignore the fact that the continuum fails to represent the fourth.” (Yoshino, 2000)”
― Julie Sondra Decker, The Invisible Orientation: An Introduction to Asexuality

“An anonymous gray-asexual panromantic person’s perspective on the gray areas: “Imagine full sexuality as a glass of soda and asexuality as a glass of water. To the person with the water, it tastes like plain water, and they’re happy with that as long as soda-drinkers don’t insist they should like soda. Likewise, the people with various flavors of soda will be happy with them and be able to identify them as soda, even though some of them might be ‘mixed flavors’ of varying percentages that are hard to pick out. Some may even have some ice melted in them, but as long as it’s not much, well, it’s still a soda. But my case is like having a glass of water with a little bit of soda poured into it. When I taste it, I can’t really tell what’s off about it. It doesn’t seem like just water, but it’s definitely not a cup of soda. I might not even be able to identify the off taste as soda. Maybe it’s not! Some-times I think I taste it more than others. But I’m not sure I like the taste of it. It’s confusing, and it might be easier if I just had a glass of plain water, but I don’t really have any control over that. But overall, I still feel like what I have is much more like water than soda, especially since I can’t always even identify the added ingredient as soda. So I’ll call it water. Just not plain water.”
― Julie Sondra Decker, The Invisible Orientation: An Introduction to Asexuality

“Any mixture of sexual orientation and romantic orientation can exist, though asexual communities are probably the places you’ll see it the most because they tend to be one of the major groups that almost always needs to separate their sexual orientation from their romantic orientation to make sense of it.”
― Julie Sondra Decker, The Invisible Orientation: An Introduction to Asexuality

“Have you ever cannonballed into a cold lake? The shock of an old memory is kind of like that; every neuron singing a bright hosanna: here we are. You forgot about us, but we didn’t forget about you.”
― Cassandra Khaw, Nothing But Blackened Teeth