The Daily Whatever, May 4: Demisexuality

Happy Sunday, friends!

Today

Lawrence Winnerman

and I had a great conversation about this story I wrote about demisexuality:

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!