trying to figure out how jon would realistically relate to his queerness is a bit of a never ending conundrum, because, on the one hand, he’s a super emotionally repressed and ashamed person who spends a lot of his arc at turns feverishly adhering to and trying to free himself from a highly gendered performance of class. his instinctive response to feeling vulnerable is to cover up his emotions, deepen his voice, exaggerate his accent, and make it look like he’s above all those weak-willed credulous idiots to disguise the fact that he very much feels like a weak-willed credulous idiot. he’s so used to ignoring his emotions that he can’t even figure out what they are when directly asked by his dearest loved one, and he’s got a, shall we say, Bad relationship to his body and his feelings of ownership over it.
on the other hand, he uses terminology like “male presenting” in his own private notes, he exclusively wears his ex gf’s clothes for two months without batting an eyelid, he has basically no reaction at all to finding out other people in his social circle are queer, he dgaf about experiencing homophobic microaggressions, and his romantic relationship with a man is potentially the only thing in the entire show that he isn’t paranoid about fucking up and losing. to me this paints a picture of a person who has manged to internalize really quite crushing and life-altering queerphobia about everything except, somehow, for his actual queerness. he thinks he’s a lily-livered spineless wimp and an inhuman heartless abomination but that has nothing to do with his biromantic asexuality.
#i do think the knowledge that he Doesn’t Fuck is important #i think a not uncommon repressed experience is Fucking and Not Liking It #<- repressed ace specifically #there’s just a small glimpse of like. i don’t know do you guys know what i’m talking about #it’s really really really easy to be ace and ashamed and have sex you don’t want to be having bc of shame #and can take a fair amount of strength to Not do it #so that he’s Not doing it says something. i don’t know #oh canon asexuality how important you are to me (via @wormsdyke)
hope you don’t mind me copying out your tags here because Yes Exactly. this shows that he respects himself in relation to his sexuality enough to both have realized that this is a preference he has and to have verbalized it as a boundary, which I think is notable because he barely ever does that about, like, anything else. he puts himself through a lot of physical and emotional toils to try and please the people around him and prove that he’s worthy, and one might think that that could be reflective of something in his relationship to sex, but once again it’s almost like the internalized acephobia beam just bounces right off his actual asexuality and somehow hits the rest of him instead.
I like to think the reason for this is Georgie, actually.
This is just a headcanon, but I can imagine Jon starting a self-discovery journey during his relationship with her in uni. Georgie is a very self-assured person. I think that may have rubbed off on him, specifically in relation to his Queerness and his respect for it. She’s bisexual too, so seeing her confidence probably made it easy to internalize that example. It’s easier to respect yourself when the people around you are respectful to you. And of course, although it’s never stated in canon, Georgie doesn’t strike me as the kind to make a problem out of his asexuality. Matter of fact, I can easily see her talking through it with him. Their relationship being a romantic one initially, it makes sense for them to have centered his queerness in discussions about their relationship and their potential future together.
Even if we don’t hear much in canon about the end of their relationship, we DO see in-text how much of a priority mental and emotional health is for Georgie. And we all know Jon is the Least emotionally balanced guy Ever.
Because him and Georgie didn’t last, Jon didn’t have the chance to continue leaning on her while he applied that self-acceptance lesson to the rest of his identity, traumas, and emotions. His healing journey stopped when his relationship with Georgie stopped… and that was why they couldn’t last. He was too dependent on her to guide him through that journey. Having been that person for someone else myself, I know how exhausting that can be. It’s ended several relationships for me. Maybe I’m just projecting, but I could see Georgie ending their relationship for the same reason.
And of course, Jon being Jon, I can easily see him stopping dead in the middle of his healing process because of the breakup. Whether out of spite, pride, hurt, or sheer inability to metabolize his own emotions without outside assistance, he just… never confronted it again. He didn’t regress or start hating himself for his Queerness. But he sure as hell didn’t accept any *other* parts of himself.