Inside the Archive #68: Reflections on archiving asexuality

In February, I was excited to start a three-month placement (supported by the Arts and Humanities Research Council through the Midlands4Cities Doctoral Training Partnership) with the BFI National Archive. For the last six weeks I’ve had the wonderful opportunity to get stuck into the BFI’s archives and platforms and start to explore how LGBTQIA+ identities are included in these spaces, question whose voices are absent, and begin to consider how we can meaningfully make changes towards better inclusion in the future. In response to my initial explorations, I am now working to bring asexuality’s screen archives to light.

Asexuality is a sexual orientation referring to people who do not experience sexual attraction or only experience rare or circumstantial sexual attraction. However, whilst asexuality is categorised within the LGBTQIA+ community, it has not received the same levels of attention, acceptance, or visibility as other, more well-known queer identities. As such, asexuality is often referred to as “the invisible orientation” as reflected in the title of Julie Sondra Decker’s 2014 book.

Nevertheless, asexuality has been present on British television since the early 2000s through characters who have self-identified as asexual, with earlier examples identifiable through forms of asexual coding or asexual resonance.

In my academic studies, I have spent the last five years retracing a history of asexuality on British screens, uncovering dozens of moments where asexuality has been mentioned, discussed and explored on screen since 2004. The majority of these representations were not easily publicly accessible, often requiring access to archives in order to view these works. This could mean anything from travelling to London for a research viewing at BFI Stephen Street (as I did myself back in 2022) to attending a higher education institution to access other archives, such as Box of Broadcasts. The inaccessibility of these works contributes to a larger problem of asexual and queer histories being lost, forgotten, and potentially erased.

As part of my PhD research, I conducted questionnaires with 200 asexual people living in the UK and Ireland and was surprised by just how few representations of asexuality could be remembered, and how many had been completely forgotten. Furthermore, I was struck – though largely unsurprised, given my own experiences as an asexual person – by the reported negative impacts the lack of asexual visibility in the media had caused, both in the past and present.

Undoing these negative impacts may never be completely possible. For those of us who have grown up without a language to talk about our experiences and have potentially felt wrong, broken, and faced discrimination for the way we are, asexual representation and visibility do not fix these hurts. But this doesn’t make giving visibility to asexual screen histories and highlighting these histories as being ones that matter any less important, at least in my opinion.

I’m now just over half-way through this placement, and it’s a great time to reflect on my journey so far. As an asexual researcher, I started with what I knew best, and I began my explorations by searching for asexuality in the BFI’s collections and archives. However, as I expected, whilst the BFI has done great work in tracing and celebrating queer histories through their collections on BFI Player, BFI Replay, and at the BFI Mediatheque, asexuality has not (yet) been part of these collections.

Indeed, just four works featuring asexual people were available to view at the BFI Mediatheque. A further three works could be found when searching for ‘asexual’ in the BFI collections search – alongside 23 works about biological asexual reproduction – although the BFI does not hold any footage for these titles. Searches for other identities in the ‘+’ of LGBTQIA+ (such as aromantic, pansexual, genderfluid, genderqueer and a-gender), which are also underrepresented in the current BFI collections, similarly returned few, if any, results.

This does not mean, however, that representations of these identities and communities do not exist within the BFI’s archive.

Sadly, like with any archive, if the metadata isn’t there, locating items becomes a more difficult task. I have spent a couple of weeks uniting my knowledge about where and how asexuality has been represented across twenty years of British television history and trying to reconcile this knowledge with what is in the BFI’s archive – although there are still several episodes of Emmerdale and other shows I’m trying to track down. I now have a growing list of works which mention or are about asexuality which are held by the BFI, and even better, I am in the process of curating a collection of these works that will be publicly accessible through the BFI Mediatheque as of June 2026, which will bring together over twenty years of asexual screen histories for the first time!

Curating this collection is something of a dream come true, allowing me to use my research to make asexual histories visible and publicly accessible (with the hope to make some of these works available through BFI Replay, and therefore accessible across the UK through public libraries later in the year). However, while I may have been researching asexual representations for the last five or so years, I acknowledge that I am just one asexual voice among many. Curating a collection of this nature is therefore a daunting task, as my sense of what should be archived in a public collection about asexuality will no doubt differ from that of others.

As such, to coincide with the launch of the BFI Mediatheque collection on Thursday 4 June, and with the support of my colleagues in the BFI Replay and Heritage Programmes team, we will be leading an interactive workshop and group discussion at the Archiving Asexual Screen Histories (and Futures?) at BFI Reuben Library, to come together and discuss how we can shape future archives of asexuality.

We hope to use this opportunity both to share lost asexual screen histories and to learn from asexual community members about their thoughts on archiving asexuality, while also exploring ways in which archives can more meaningfully engage with underrepresented and marginalised groups.

My placement marks a first trial attempt in how the Heritage Programmes team at the BFI National Archive can work with external researchers and archivists in the collections to work towards greater equality, diversity, inclusion and beyond.

The wholehearted welcome I have received so far, as well as the significant ways I have been able to make asexual histories visible and accessible, makes me excited for the rest of my placement, and I hope I can help pave the way for future projects like this.

– Rebecca Humphreys-Lamford, PHD Research Placement

The Inside the Archive blog is supported by the BFI Screen Heritage Fund, awarding National Lottery funding.