New Article: 'We Are Interlopers'

[mayve]

Don't know if it's come up yet but here it is:

http://www.edgeboston.com/news/national/150437/%E2%80%99we_are_interlopers%E2%80%99

[LionRoar]

I'll inform SwankIvy that her article got mentioned on AVEN. In any event, the reporter really messed up the article.

[swankivy]

I shared this on Tumblr earlier this week when it dropped on South Florida Gay News:

http://swankivy.tumblr.com/post/63505757498/we-are-interlopers-south-florida-gay-news

I posted it with its series of issues, so I'll share them here too:

I gave this interview to my home state’s gay paper and there are some decent things in it. However, I’m disappointed in the shoddy editing (at least a dozen typos, including one in my name, though it's corrected in the Boston Edge version), and the bizarreness of some of the phrasing, especially some of my orphaned quotes.

Notes:

• I don’t know why the author is calling asexuality an ugly stepsister. What does that even mean?

• The article doesn’t make it clear that I couldn’t Google things when I was 17 because there was no Google when I was 17. The Internet was in its infancy.

• Stuff about “my partner” is handled really murkily. I told the interviewer I’d had a boyfriend as a teen, and that I’d been honest about my lack of interest in him, but hadn’t done anything to “raise awareness” about it because I figured hey, I’m probably the only one, and I don’t really care if I’m alone.

• I don’t think he grokked my “moving the bar” example. It wasn’t really about being normal. It was about what people expect you to try before they’re willing to leave you alone.

• Odd typos like “late boomer” (should be “bloomer”) and “the same king of levels of prejudice” (should be “kind of levels”) really muddy the message sometimes.

• The “We are interlopers” phrase was connected to a discussion of how some LGBT people who don’t want us in the queer community regard us—as invading where we don’t belong. Orphaned from the context, it looks like I called us interlopers for no apparent reason, when in reality I said that’s how we’re SEEN by people who don’t think we belong in their spaces. That bothers me.

• And the quote about me hoping sex isn’t the most important thing in a relationship was in regards to people telling others what they should value and gauging the legitimacy of their relationship by whether they have sex enough, not to say sex should never be important to people who treasure it.

But I’m glad the article absorbed my discussion of alternate asexuality definitions and pointed out that some LGBT people don’t want us and some of us don’t want them without making it seem like we’re all at odds with each other, feuding, or trying to scratch each other’s eyes out.

[Celestine]

I puzzled over the "ugly stepsister" line for quite a while, trying to figure out exactly what the writer was trying to imply. o_O