What I didn't know was what it felt like to want sex without a specific person in mind. To think about sex at all when I was alone. To feel any physical urge for sex distinct from wanting the emotional intimacy it created. [. . .] "I want to be close to someone, physically, even if they're just a stranger," she said [describing sexual attraction]. "I get jittery. I start fiddling with things. I feel warmer."

For [my friends], a word like "hot" could indicate a physical pull of the type Jane had described. For me, "hot" conveyed an admiration of excellent bone structure. Their sexual encounters were often motivated by libido; I didn't even know that I lacked a libido.

I had never experienced "just attraction," a physical impulse--only emotional desire that manifested physically. I wanted to have sex with someone only when I was already prepared to change my life for them, so I did not believe Henry when he claimed that wanting sex with others did not have to threaten me. When he talked about how everyone was sexually attracted to everyone else all the time, I could not understand attraction as anything but how I experienced it: emotional yearning--love, really--overpowering and overwhelming, a disaster for our relationship if targeted toward anyone but me.

Reading more, I understood for the first time that it is possible to lack the experience of sexual attraction without being repulsed by sex, just like it is possible to neither physically crave nor be disgusted by a food like crackers but still enjoy eating them as part as a cherished social ritual.

"Someone who isn't demisexual can generally walk into a bar and find someone they find sexually attractive," explains Lola Phoenix, a thirty-three-year-old writer in London who identifies as demi. "They might not go home with them, of course--there are a lot of different factors that play into that decision--but I can't walk into a bar and just find someone attractive, regardless of whether I'd be willing to sleep with them or not."

The charmed circle illustrates the existence of a hierarchy of sex acts. Inside the charmed circle is everything that is socially acceptable, which traditionally means monogamous, married, vanilla, heterosexual sex in private. Outside these borders would be, for example, promiscuous sex, group sex, and so on. The charmed circle represented the conservative, rigid status quo.
Instead of realizing that the problem is the very existence of the charmed circle, liberals reversed it. Now, much of what was on the outside has become charmed and elevated. [. . .] In other words, the more "transgressive" the act, the more inherently liberated it is from old norms and old politics and the better it is, and the more liberated you are when you do it. New rules are put in place.

"In queer radical circles and in much of the left, the worlds in which I operate, there's a widely held idea that one's political radicalism can be attached to one's sexual practices," writes activist Yasmin Nair.

Toni Morrison, who knew as much as anyone about the power of stories, once proclaimed that from her perspective there are only Black people. "I stood at the border, stood at the edge, and claimed it as central," she said. "Claimed it as central, and let the rest of the world move over to where I was."

I think I am in friend-love with you

Some people feel differently about their queerplatonic partner than about either a friend or a romantic partner. For others, a queerplatonic partnership is less about a unique feeling and more about acknowledging each other's importance in a way that is rare for relationships that aren't explicitly romantic.

The simplest way to capture a meaning of queerplatonic may come from the medical melodrama Grey's Anatomy. Coworkers Meredith Grey and Cristina Yang were never sexually or romantically involved, but their relationship contained a level of trust and commitment not typically seen between colleagues or even many friends. In the pivotal scene, Cristina tells Meredith that she put her down as an emergency contact for an abortion procedure. "The clinic has a policy. They wouldn't let me confirm my appointment unless I designated an emergency contact person, someone to be there just in case and help me home, you know . . . after," Cristina says. "Anyway, I put your name down. That's why I told you I'm pregnant. You're my person." [. . .] "You're my person" isn't tied to official romantic relationship status. Meredith isn't Cristina's person because Cristina can't find someone to date. The women didn't abandon each other once they found boyfriends. Their importance to each other is of a different tenor. Explaining her relationship with Meredith to her boyfriend, Cristina tells him this: "If I murdered someone, she's the person I'd call to help me drag the corpse across the living room floor." She is, not him.

For Leigh, a QPP was not about proving that their feelings for Taylor were the most important of all, stronger than their feelings of anyone else. [. . .] Their QPP was about action and attitude more than entirely unique feeling, in the same way that traditional romantic relationships often work because of an explicit commitment to the partner and bond. [. . .] The QPP was about being vulnerable and boldly asking for something back, about that intense relationship and the security of explicit validation that Leigh had often thought they wanted. [. . .] In friendship, Leigh explains, it can be unclear where you stand. Conversations about emotional commitment are uncommon, and if you don't know where you stand, you don't know your place.

Instead of letting labels like romantic or platonic (or friend versus partner) guide actions and expectations, it is possible for the desires themselves to guide actions and expectations. More effective than labels to provide instruction is skipping directly to asking for what we want--around time, touch, commitment, and so on as David Jay wrote--regardless of whether those desires confuse hardline ideas of what these two categories are supposed to look like. When the desires don't fit the labels, it is often the labels that should be adjusted or discarded, not the desires. If everyone is behaving ethically it doesn't matter if a relationship doesn't fit into a preconceived social role, if it feels neither platonic nor romantic or if it feels like both at the same time.

Hermeneutical justice [defined by Miranda Fricker] [. . .] is about marginalized groups lacking access to information essential to their understanding of themselves and their role in society--and these groups lack this information precisely because they are marginalized and their experiences rarely represented.