I
LAURA JAY/COURTESY OF DAVID JAY
T WAS 2002. David Jay was a freshman at
Wesleyan University. Confused and alone, he had long
grappled with questions about his sexuality and sexual identity.
“I started using the word ‘asexual’
when I was about 13 or 14... Everyone around me was experiencing things that I wasn’t, and it was
scary and disorienting,” said Jay,
now 31, as he sipped coffee at a
Brooklyn cafe on a rainy afternoon.
“I assumed there was something
wrong with me. Something broken.”
At the time, asexuality, beyond
a purely biological definition, was
almost completely unheard of —
not just to Jay, but to most of the
world. Without an asexual community to draw support from,
adolescent Jay had to discover his
asexuality on his own terms.
David Jay,
the founder
of Asexual
Visibility and
Education
Network.