The older I get the more I find myself losing patience with explicit love scenes in books. Not because I am intensely disgusted or turned off, or even affronted, but because I believe that you can have love without sex and that sex is made way too much a big deal of and is absolutely meaningless without love.

Not that I know this personally...I am a virgin and most likely always will be. I believe, really really believe that I am asexual and I only become more and more convinced of this as the years go on.  

This can be a problem in dating, no matter what your orientation, but it especially seems to be a problem in the lesbian community. It is both sad and funny (not ha-ha funny, it should go without saying) that far right Christians have such an odd fascination with the sexual aspect(s) of being gay that that is all they see and that many lesbians will often run the other way if you confide that you are a romantic asexual...meaning you want the cuddling and kisses and hugs that can come with romantic love but NOT the sex.

Asexuality is a theme that still has a _long_ way to go in being represented in lesfic (or any fiction), but I am pretty satisfied with what I have discovered so far and only hope that someday soon there will be lots more...not only because I really dislike reading graphic sex scenes, but because, on a deeper level, it is nice to know you are not alone in being an 'oddball.'

If I could have any superpower in the world (after being able to turn invisible at will) it would be to have complete control over my emotions and to put chains around my heart. 

But since I do not have any superpowers and it is up to ME to figure all of this out myself I will start here:

https://www.wikihow.com/Control-Your-Emotions

and also by realizing it is not what people say or write, but what they do and how they communicate with their body language that tells you how it really is...I think I am finally ready to move on with how I have been feeling about someone and if I do have a broken heart, well, maybe that is a good thing and next time I will not be so incredibly, incredibly stupid. From now my heart is going to be much, much more locked up and less foolish.

If I had read this book up until a few years ago I would have absolutely despised it and had nothing but bad things to say. As it is there ARE mostly bad things to say about Desperate Asylum (and it is most definitely not 'brilliant'), but I cannot deny that Fletcher Flora (a very underrated writer) got some things right and there were times I was reading this I became convinced he must have written under a pen name during his career as a writer. If you are of a certain age (or live in an area that is still very much behind the times in accepting gay people) many parts of Desperate Asylum (especially the self-hatred gay men and women constantly can live with) will ring true for you. If you have been blessed enough or strong enough and have never lived with feelings of intense self-loathing then there really is nothing here that will resonate with you. Desperate Asylum is a never-ending flow of outdated ideas and beliefs and is not at all ready to accept gays or lesbians as anything but abnormal. And it does not help that one of the main characters, Lisa, is a walking, talking stereotype and not at all likable. One thing that kept cycling through my mind as I read this was the thought that even nowadays there are some of us who would desperately do anything not to be gay and yet know that there is no way not to be.