Ace & aro folks show us there’s much more to relationships than just sex...

[Jessica_Rose ✅]

Ace & aro folks show us there's much more to relationships than just sex & romance

https://www.lgbtqnation.com/2025/12/ace-aro-folks-show-us-theres-much-more-to-relationships-than-just-romance/ 🔗

Greg Owen (5 Dec 2025)

Asexuality as a sexual orientation reaches back to the first humans. But as an area of scientific study, it's relatively new. And its orientation cousin, aromanticism, is even newer on the scene: The first documented references to asexual-related behaviors appeared in the mid-19th century.

One such reference came from Prussian human rights activist and journalist Karl Maria Kertbeny, in a 1869 pamphlet in which he coined the terms "homosexual" and "heterosexual." He referred to people who pleasure themselves primarily as "monosexuals."

In 1884, American sexologist William Alexander Hammond published Sexual Impotence in the Male, writing of two longtime male patients with a condition he described as "original absence of all sexual desire."

And in 1896, Magnus Hirschfeld, the German sexologist responsible for groundbreaking research on transgender identity, linked people without any sexual desire to the concept "anesthesia sexual" (or absence of sexual sensation). Hirschfeld's contemporary, German activist Emma Trosse, came close around the same time to the term we use today when she described a "contrary-sexual" as "asensual."

It wasn't until 1907, however, that the term "asexual" was recorded, when the Rev. Carl Schlegel, a German immigrant living in New Orleans, was found guilty by church elders of "homosexualism, so-do-my, or Uranism." Schlegel was quoted in church minutes as advocating in his defense for "the same laws" for "homosexuals, heterosexuals, bisexuals, asexuals."