AN ASEXY WORLD PRIDE, YEAH!
So we had a very good time. There were far more people there than I have pictures of, David Jay was around and being both used to this sort of thing and American tried to star off chants and dis more than a bit dancing in the streets.
We handed out LOTS of leaflets, the first side ou can see above and the second side looked like this. We had 10,000 of them and though we didn’t hand all of them out, you were hard find to find someone who didn’t have a leaflet by the time you got there trying to hand out your pile. Even though not all of them will have read them enough will that I think we’ve done a lot of visibility work there. Heck, one of the people who saw us and read a leaflet and talked to one of our group came to the conference the day after.
We all had T-Shirts, well, not all of us. Some wore their own and Ninny came dressed up and fantastically showing the rest of us as per usual (second picture). We were handing out condoms and dental dams. Plenty didn’t know what those were though of those who did seemed surprised to see them and more than happy to take some.
Then there was the conference the day after which went really well. Predictably enough things ran late a bit, we started late to begin with but other than that it was fantastic. Some of the people there would already be familiar with some of what was talked about but plenty wouldn’t be. We had people in from Colombia (she’s in the fourth picture), Israel, Italy, America and even more in the crowd. People who knew about this from AVEN and other places and had planned to come for some time, people who found about about it in the Metro or on the march. Asexual umbrella people, allies all sorts. We even had these two elderly women in their 80s, I think they were a couple and both of them were French. Most people were 20s/30s but there were people older and a few younger.
Seemed to be a more diverse affair than the parade for some reason, not sure why cause everyone was welcome to both.
Also, and you’ll like this, we made sure that people knew that we weren’t just from AVEN. I mentioned tumblr more than a few times and even David Jay seemed to be pleased that it wasn’t a monolithic thing and that the community is active outside of AVEN so. It a wasn’t a one forum show, a forum that i know plenty of people on here aren’t fond of (which was also mentioned).
There were also a few smaller work groups after the main conference to look into international work and not just between the English speaking countries, on getting representation into the media of other groups and areas and also creating our own, I was on the last. We have a tentative idea to produce two anthologies of stories, one of real stories one of fictional. Because as has been pointed out, a great way to communicate with outsiders and get them to understand is through stories. And one of the best ways to show that our stories aren’t boring (I’m looking at you Stephen Moffat) is to do it ourselves.
What comes of these groups long term, I don’t know.
But a good time seemed to be had by all. And, most importantly, there was cake!
My tanks to Michael for allowing this all to happen, and my thanks to everyone who came from abroad to speak or simply to attend.
Also, it was great to see David Jay and Nat Titman in person though I’ll admit I didn’t know much about Nat to start with.
Awesome pictures! And I’m very excited about that tentative anthology idea…
