"Graysexuality is fascinating because we get to watch the process of a new orientation being constructed in real time."

Writes Ozymandias at Thing of Things:

Graysexuality is fascinating because we get to watch the process of a new orientation being constructed in real time.

The Asexual Visibility and Education Network defines graysexuality as the following:

Sexuality is not black and white; some people identify in the gray (spelled “grey” in some countries) area between asexual and sexual. People who identify as gray-A can include, but are not limited to those who:

• do not normally experience sexual attraction, but do experience it sometimes
• experience sexual attraction, but a low sex drive
• experience sexual attraction and drive, but not strongly enough to want to act on them
• people who can enjoy and desire sex, but only under very limited and specific circumstances

Graysexuality can be a very broad term, and it’s easy to misinterpret what people mean about it from a definition. Here are some examples of graysexual experiences people I’ve talked to have had:

• Never experiencing sexual attraction or the desire to have sex, but suspecting they would be sexually attracted to someone in the context of a committed lifelong relationship.
• Two or three brief experiences of sexual attraction over the course of their entire lives.
• Attraction to fictional characters, but no attraction to real-life people.
• An interest in masturbation, but a sense of disgust and repulsion about sex with other people.
• A desire for sex about once or twice a year.
• An interest in sex, but only if it involves a specific complicated fetish that is impractical to do particularly often.
• Thinking they were asexual for decades and then experiencing sexual attraction for the first time in their thirties and being like “…what.”
• Confusion about whether or not they experience sexual attraction....

Graysexual experiences, outside certain communities relatively recently, are viewed as part of the spectrum of normal sexual behavior.... A person who has graysexual experiences may characterize himself as “low libido” or “just not that interested in sex”, but he’s unlikely to consider it an aspect of his identity....

Classifying it as a sexual orientation implies that it is an important category, something that matters a lot for understanding yourself and other people.... Graysexuals are less likely to feel broken or alone. They are less likely to have sex they don’t particularly want or find interesting, because everyone enjoys sex, don’t they?...

Labels can create a pressure to put your experiences in a box, sanding off the rough edges and the weirdnesses that make up every human experience of sexuality, instead of allowing things to be complicated. The pressure to know whether you are Really X can create a lot of angst and anxiety. People can stick with an identity that no longer serves them or describes their experiences, because they have a lot of their understanding of who they are as a person bound up with it....

Interesting — both the category and the analysis of the effect of putting sexuality in categories. Did thinking about the category "graysexuality" help you understand anything about yourself and others?

The use of "gray" comes from the idea of a "gray area," so it defines a category in terms of blurring the lines between other categories ("sexual" and "asexual"). It's an anti-category category, and I think it's there to be used if you find it useful.

I was moved to look up "gray area" in the OED. The earliest use is surprisingly late:

1935 Foreign Affairs 13 704 A form of state lying somewhere in the grey area between socialism and communism.