Happy Sunday, friends!
Today Lawrence Winnerman and I had a great conversation about this story I wrote about demisexuality:
Why I Don’t Identify as Demisexual — Even Though I Could
Have you ever had a chance to sleep with your favorite rock star?
But really, it was a conversation about much more, including...
When does something cross over from being a modifier to an identity?
Do neo-identities like demisexual belong on the LGBTQ+ continuum, or are they taking up space where they don’t belong?
Is identity immutable?
Does it harm tweens and teens to identify as asexual or demisexual, because they apply a label that might be hard to escape over time?
How can asexuality be a spectrum, when the “a” prefix means “not” or “without.” No means no, right?
Then we ended the live with our weekly picks for Substacks to follow. I recommended Jacqueline Dooley, a memoirist who writes beautifully about living with grief, and Lawrence recommended Füsun Aydın, who he believes will be “capital f famous” as a memoirist and novelist one day for her lyrical prose.
We’d welcome your thoughts.
And we thank Polly Walker Blakemore, Peter William Murphy, Damon Kenner, and many others for tuning in.
Join us all week long at 10am ET/7am PT for The Daily Whatever here on Substack.
Love you mean it!
