I've always really liked manifestos. I like writing them, and figuring out the tricky word problems that comes with Saying Something Definitively. Reading a manifesto from history becomes an exercise in critical reading to try and work backwards just to see why the authors chose the words they chose.
Manifestos become so easily dated and incomprehensible, and yet so many of them resonate with people decades later. It's neat. They're also really good primary sources for queer studies. Even if they can't tell us everything, they sort of convey the conflicts at the time and the things people thought about most pressingly. If we were going to be making an manifesto for the ace community now? There would probably be a lot of things that alluded to (but maybe didn't directly mention) ace exclusionists and tumblr queer culture. Hell, the entire exclusionist movement could be reduced to a term we know the meaning of now, but it gets lost to time- despite how much aces have talked about it.
In the inadvertent process of trying to say what the ace manifesto isn't, just in order to convey what it is, there'd be a whole lot focus on things that wouldn't actually tell people about the culture. Orlando's manifesto runs into similar problems. We know a lot about what asexuality wasn't, but not a whole bunch about what it was actually like to identify as asexual. Were there clubs? Pamphlets? Did they make buttons? Was it not even a sexuality, but some other sort of affiliation?
I don't even think we'd know to define all the concepts we'd need to define just to make what it's like to actually be ace transparent. It's also probably not the actual goal of a manifesto, to be a tool to see into the identities of the past. That kind of thing has become popular only recently as queer history has become more important to the communities as a whole and the way it relates to intersectional politics. While it's been something people were interested in a lot longer, the actual attempt to reconstruct (through culture and language shifts) how exactly people really felt about this stuff hasn't had nearly the same priority.
And there's a lot of things while reading Oralndo's manifesto, particularly the bits about consciousness raising and radical feminism in general, that I'd want to make a clear distinction from. That's probably because I've experienced the criticism of those ideas first hand. The idea of allonormativity is framed differently than the way it describes people being super wrong about going to bars to find dates.
. . . which would make the manifesto more about how we see Orlando's manifesto in modern times than anything about like, the modern asexual community itself. But with such an overall awareness about asexual history by modern asexuals, it would be hard not to include the Orlando manifesto in writing a new asexual manifesto.
All Of This To Say, basically, that writing a manifesto itself is very different than it used to be. People weren't trying to make them legible to people in the future, and many of them were made to be circulated as a form of awareness. If we'd made a manfiesto now, we should have a section on history as well as a more current definition so that it isn't super focused on disagreeing with older manifesto(s). Oh, and also a section devoted to talking about the "why" of the document that might make things we don't think to mention transparent to people reading which wouldn't hurt.
Google docs would be perfect for this, but also I have the feeling it wouldn't get done because so many people in the ace community are very committed to naming previously unnameable things. And that makes for a really long document. Probably worth it, but I suspect a more survey-type format would get implemented if it happened just to keep the intracommunity discussion within the document to an absolute minimum.
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