INTERVIEW WITH ANONYMOUS

INTERVIEW WITH ANONYMOUS by Janus the Fox

So, what are your activism efforts in your country?

My efforts now have spanned about 8 years, erm and have actually gone way out of the country at this point, i’m fortunately been able to do a lot of activism and advocacy work internationally at this point, i mean even physically, so for example, i had the opportunity to do some work on Asexuality in counties such as Czech Republic, in Sweden, in London, in New Zealand, in US a couple of times and even in Sri Lanka. All of this was physical in the pre-pandemic times. So i did this by bringing up asexuality as a subject to be explored in conferences. These conferences were sexuality conferences or LGBTIAQ conferences, human rights programs and events and other kinds of things, and so on, you know. For example the first time i did this was all the way back in 2017 at the world association for sexual congress which was being held in Prauge. I submitted my paper on asexuality which was considered luckily and i presented that paper at the conference, i also had that paper published in the journal of sexual medicence. Turns out this was actually the first time any such academic on asexuality that had ever come out of my country, and then in 2019, so i don’t know if you know about ILGA, ILGA is this is huge old orginization that has been working on LGBT causes for a really long time and they have these things called ILGA world conferences. In 2019 they held it in New Zealand where where i conducted my own workshop on asexuality and i also noticed they had the asexual flag in their poster, only to later find out that this was the first ever time that they had actually included the asexual flag in their world conference posters ever in their entire history and this this was also the first time that had a session being done on asexuality which means that if i hadn’t of submitted my proposal to the workshop and if i hadn’t travelled all the way to New Zealand, they still wouldn’t have done it, the flag still wouldn’t have been included, i mean what gives, but that’s the work that i’ve been able to do internationally, and then of course at the regional level, even

at the very outset when i was staring work, in fact that was the entire reason i started doing this because their was zero work being done in Asia back then.

I started in 2014 and i started looking in 2013, so there was just no work back in those days and all activism around asexuality was concrentated in the USA and later to some extent, the UK, but it was definitely not seving any other geography’s. I knew that i really needed this kind of movement to be organised, and so at some point i just decided to not wait for somebody else to do this and just went ahead and took the leap myself and over the years it also became very very apparent that while there’ many commonalities between the movements in different parts of the world, there are some very stark differences between how american asexuality movements have been shaped and the ones in asia, and there are some very interesting similarities between asian counties, social culture similarities, which kind of lend a very unique brand of asexuality activism to this part of the world which is very different from western counterparts and that’s how in 2021 i started orginising the PANasia conference which is the asexuality asia conference and last year was the first such conference we ever had and hopefully we’ll keep doing it, but it’s at the national level which is the question that you had actually asked, where my activism had actually started and i continue to remain quite focused on that. It started all the way back in 2014, we do awareness campaigns, workshops, even speed dating events and many other community events and campaigns on social media, so for example for IAD, we have set up campaigns to invite people to give contributions, to leave terms related to asexuality in their own local languages. One branch of this is for Indian languages which are published on Indian Aces, and the other is for all Asian languages which is on Asexuality In Asia

How did your organisation start, either founded by yourself, or the history of your organisation?

Like I was saying, it started all the way back in 2014, as a simple facebook page, which by the way is still very much active. At that point however I had never thought that it would grow to the extent that it has. I did not expect this work to become so important to me and I could never have foreseen the kind of impact that I now know it creates. By now i’ve of course orginised hundreds of events under Indian Aces, again more that you can add under the activism, the efforts of Indian Aces, that in 2018-2019 over the span of many months, almost more than a year actually, i travelled across my country, conducting workshops and creating meetups for the asexuality community and the asexual cause. Across ten cities, I literally travelled physically to ten cities.

What organisations or activism are you part of?

The 3rd question is what organisations or activism are you a part of. I don’t know if i understand this correctly but i have again over the last 7-8 years ended up doing a lot of smaller organisations as my work has expanded, so now i have Humans of Queer, there is Indian Aces, there is Platonicity, there is Subhar, which is Sexual And Mental Association India and there’s PANasia, so these are all the orginisations that i have right now and that’s about all.

What difficulties has been raised in spreading knowledge of the existence of asexuality?

Oh so many, i could write about this, i could speak about this for about an hour even but in brief, some challenges that i have faced at the beginning are now simply gone and they’ve gone forever now, for not just me but for anybody else in this country actually. You know, like turning the wheel for the first time is just the hardest right, it’s our enemy as people who are starting a movement. One the wheel of course gathers some momentum, it’s easier to keep it going than to give it that first turn. Thankfully that day has passed and I’ve been able to overcome that initial fear. Now that the movement has gathered, a lot of pace in this country to be honest, there’s no looking back now, there’s no way this can ever be undone.

If I were to reflect back on those times, apart from the many other challenges, I think the interesting thing that I used to notice was how no one believed that this was actually worth doing or nobody understood why I was doing it. They didn’t understand as a medical graduate why i would spend so much time, so much effort, so much energy doing this instead of, you have to understand that, i can’t even explain in words the amount of effort it took, especially as i was doing this all by myself. I started this by myself. I just got tired of waiting for somebody else to support me. Now things are a lot easier in many ways, one of the challenges, now that we have become a little more aspirational about things, is to overcome the language barrier that exists within the country. India uses over 100 languages

within the country itself, even in terms of volume, it’s really hard to get translations in the first place but then the more important thing is, for me at least, personally, is to have accurate translations and that i think is even more challenging because there’s a lot lost in translation and i just don’t want to do any kind of disservice in haste,i don’t want to forgo the conceptual clarity, like doing justice to the cause is important to me, so it’s still very hard but i’m trying. Having said that there are actually two challenges that i can say that i am yet to overcome, first the very beginning of this work that i started doing, it can be summed up under how to make this movement completely self sustainable without me having to fuel it with my own energy, my own funds and so on and so forth. Now how i sustain it is by organising some kind of fundraising event once in a while and then utilising those funds to have people join me on ad-hoc basis, as interns, sometimes volunteer, so on and so forth, and that’s how i’m able to get the resources, how i’m able to generate the resources. Having been the sole person, driving this, without any sustained external support, it’s been exhausting honestly, and now i’m trying to rework the entire structure of this in such a way that i can take a breather and i don’t have to put in my energy, my time, my money into the movement and that all of this can be generated by the movement itself, so Indian Ace’s i wanted to become completely self sustaining, itself sustainable without me having to pull it myself.

In your efforts, how far do you know its spread in your area, how many people do you think your activism has reached?

So honestly, directly i know through me interacting with people i have already raised thousands, tens of thousands of possibly through various pride walks and workshops and meetups and talks, and online talks that i give, instagram lives that i do and so on and so forth. I don’t know how else to put a number to this. I don’t know if this is relevant but my efforts were also recognised by the BBC in 2019 which meant that Asexuality got a platform at a global level in a way that it probably hadn’t had before. Then of course i’m sure that it’s reached tens of thousands of people through word of mouth, social media and all of the online campaigns that we do.