About 10 years ago, Keith Huntington Derrick remembers watching an episode of "House," where a character was diagnosed and treated for being asexual. In the past, some doctors treated asexual people as if they had a mental health condition, something that has changed recently thanks to the efforts of asexual people. The framing of asexuality in the episode, the first time Huntington Derrick had encountered the concept, struck him as negative.
"That sort of colored my perception of it,” the 40-year-old from Atlanta tells TODAY.com. But it did inspire him to start researching asexuality and eventually realize that's how he identifies.
“It did raise a couple of questions in me because for a good three decades of my life, I was forcing myself into relationships I didn’t want to be in, doing things I didn’t really want to do because it was a normal thing to do. I felt obligated to do those things and then I would feel broken," he recalls. Eventually, Huntington Derrick decided to connect with the asexual community and explore asexuality.
“I didn’t know that it was OK to be the way that I was,” he says. “(Asexuality is) a sexuality, a sexual orientation, for people who experience no sexual attraction or very little sexual attraction,” KJ Cerankowski, an associate professor of comparative American studies, gender, sexuality and feminist studies at Oberlin College, tells TODAY.com.
“People also consider asexuality a spectrum.” That means some asexual people neve.
