Inside the Growing Asexual Community
Lisa met Derrick when they were both extras on the set of Amy Poehler's Parks and Recreation. The two exchanged numbers, and Lisa made the first move. But as much as she liked Derrick, she was reluctant to let herself fall for him. At some point, she knew she would have to reveal the secret that had unraveled several of her former relationships: She's asexual. In fact, she says, she's "sex-repulsed."
At her New Jersey high school, Lisa, now 30, was "one of the unpopular kids," she says (she asked that I not disclose her full name). She felt alienated from her peers, and didn't realize her complete aversion to the idea of having sex wasn't typical. "When I got to college, I thought that if I dated a guy and told him that I didn't want to have sex, he would just say okay," she says. But her sophomore year, she realized "that it was normal for most people to want sex, and that a very, very, very small percentage of people didn't." When she shared her new awareness with her then-boyfriend, he abruptly stopped speaking to her. "He never actually broke up with me," she says. "He just disappeared."
Romantic intimacy without sex might seem inconceivable. But for Lisa and a small but growing segment of the population that identifies as asexual, sex is simply not part of what attracts them to other people. The clinical definition of an asexual person is "one who does not experience sexual attraction." But it's more complicated than that: many asexuals sit on a spectrum between sex-repulsed and sex-neutral. Some are "demi-sexual": they need to form a strong emotional bond before they feel passion. Others are "gray asexual": they feel amorous on extremely rare occasions. Many are aromantic, meaning they don't experience romantic attraction, while others are hyper-romantic. One woman I spoke with described herself as a "crush-whore," but without yearning for sexual intimacy: "I get crushes so much," she says. But "once genitals get involved," she adds, "I'm out."
The U.S. Census Bureau doesn't collect data on asexuals, and there are no large-scale studies on asexuality, but the few that exist point to an increase in people who identify as asexual. When the Asexuality Visibility Education Network (AVEN) was founded in 2001, 1,500 people joined; 16 years later, that number has increased by more than 8,000 percent to 125,000, making it the largest asexual—or ace, as asexual individuals call it—community online. In 2004, Anthony F. Bogaert, a sex researcher at Brock University in Canada, found that of 18,000 British subjects, 1 percent of them self-identified as asexual. In his 2012 book, Understanding Asexuality, he calls asexuality "the fourth orientation," alongside bisexuality, homosexuality, and heterosexuality.
The numbers may be hard to pin down, but asexuality has also gained cultural prominence in recent years. In 2014, USA's Sirens included an asexual character, and on Netflix's BoJack Horseman, the character Todd Chavez (voiced by Aaron Paul), came out as asexual in 2016 to an enthusiastic response from the ace community. "To not only have my obscure orientation depicted on a mainstream show, but also to have it be an entirely accurate representation of my experience, was nothing short of mind-boggling," one blogger wrote. In the episode, Chavez explains "his deal" to Emily, a close friend who's in love with him: "I'm not gay. I mean, I don't think I am, but I don't think I'm straight either. I don't know what I am. I think I might be nothing." This year, a controversy erupted when the showrunner of CW's Riverdale, based on the Archie comics, decided to delay the revelation of Jughead's asexuality (Jughead has long been considered an ace icon).
The ace community sees these recent gains as necessary steps toward increased tolerance. "If someone says that they're 'not sexual,' what people hear is that person is not capable of intimacy," says David Jay, founder of AVEN. The belief that sex is the highest form of intimacy facilitates the notion that asexuals are "mechanistic and inhuman," he says, "like we're missing something fundamental, a part of our humanity." That isn't true, of course. Intimacy can exist without intercourse: ace relationships often include physical affection, like holding hands, hugging, cuddling, kissing—and sometimes, some form of sexual expression (mutual masturbation or oral sex). As a compromise, some asexuals will have sex on occasion to satiate a sexual partner. Four ace-identified people sat down with ELLE.com to illustrate the ace spectrum and give nuance to our simplistic, and often flawed, understanding of what it means to be asexual.
NOREEN QUADIR
In her early teens, Noreen Quadir felt a looming divide between herself and her classmates. "I saw everybody around me developing crushes, having hormonal rages, and a curiosity and interest in sex. And I was just not feeling it," she says. At 15, she came across the term asexual for the very first time after Googling "sexual orientations." "It described me perfectly," the 29-year-old New York City-based actress says, "so that's how I started identifying."
Today, she's often confronted with disbelief when she reveals her orientation. "People will say, 'Oh, you haven't met the right person yet.' Or, 'How do you know you don't like sex if you haven't tried it?' Or, more crudely, 'That'll change once you've been with me.'" When she's asked out on a date, she usually fibs and says she has a boyfriend. Ironically, it's men who know she's asexual who sometimes persist in their pursuit. "They'll say: 'Are you just saying that to reject me nicely?'" Some men, she says, are especially bewildered by her asexuality because she presents as traditionally feminine: "There's a weird confusion between my gender expression and my orientation."
After college, Quadir joined Ace New York, a local social group. During their meet-ups she heard troubling stories from fellow asexuals who "put themselves in horrible situations," she says, by forcing themselves to engage in a whole range of sexual behaviors to please others. "They think, 'I have to keep trying until it works. I have to beat this out of me'—because they think it's not normal and that it's a problem." Their struggles galvanized her activism: She's worked with LGBT communities to be more ace-inclusive and has participated in panels at the New School, her alma mater, and New York University, to educate students and faculty on the subject. Recently, she says, she "started working with sex educators to help break down sexual myths and create curricula that addresses asexuality." Despite the reigning ignorance on topic, Quadir sees slivers of progress: "We're now included in the Pride Parade and there's an Asexual Awareness week in October," she says. And in 2013, the queer community began adding "IA" (Intersex and Asexual) to the longstanding acronym LGBTQ.
BAUER
Bauer, a 28-year-old who lives in Brooklyn and asked that I not disclose her last name, self-identifies as a "cisgender polyamorous panromantic asexual." Growing up just outside of New York City, she had a large pool of queer friends, but says she was the "odd one out in most things." Because she never dated or expressed interest in sex in high school, a classmate suggested to her in 11th grade that she might be asexual. At first she was taken aback by the idea—"'Leave me alone,' I said, 'I'm not a plant!'" But once she researched asexuality, it resonated with her.
She's dated sexual people, but in those relationships, she realized, she "would end up saying no to sex, and it would start to feel like rejection to the other person." From then on, she was clear with her partners: She wasn't going to have sex with them, but they could have sex elsewhere. "If I had sex with the person once a year for novelty's sake," she adds, "it would set up an expectation I can't fulfill."
Over the last two years, she's been in relationships with two other asexuals concurrently. "Levi and my [other] partner are friends and roommates," she explains, "but I'm the bottom of the V uniting them." (Meaning that her two partners aren't intimate with one another, but are with Bauer.) "Unlike sexual relationships, there are no predetermined expectations of what our relationships are and can be," she says. "We get to create them." They live as a family unit, with Bauer taking the central role in holding the trio together. "It requires communication Olympics," she jokes, "or it won't work." Family rituals revolve around the dinner table: Thursdays are "steak with a side of mac 'n' cheese nights." She makes sure the three spend quality time together via Google Calendar invites, and depending on who needs space or wants company, she bounces between their beds from night to night.
DAVID JAY
Like Quadir, when David Jay was in his early teens in St. Louis, Missouri, he noticed his sexual wiring didn't quite sync with his peers. Unlike his friends, he felt an absence of lust for both genders. "I was off the map," he remembers. "I thought something was wrong with me." The only people he knew who couldn't forge sexual bonds had suffered from trauma. "I was sitting there thinking, 'If I don't want sex, does that mean I don't want to be touched? If I'm incapable of sex, does that mean I'm incapable of love?'"
By the time he entered college, he'd made peace with his asexuality. "I can still love people," he remembers thinking, "I just don't want to be sexual with them." In 2001, he formed AVEN as an 18-year-old Wesleyan student to meet and help others. "I just wanted to find people like me," he says. "I also wanted to let other asexuals know that they didn't have to struggle, like I did."
Before he found an ace community, he managed hook-up culture with a trick he learned in high school. "I hung out with a bunch of queer women, which kept sexual desire at bay," he says. Eventually, he learned how to navigate sexual situations: he would flirt or dance with women at parties, but if he detected sexual tension building, he'd come out as asexual. "That would give them pause, but it would open a space for them to realize that maybe we could be friends," he says. His rare forays into sexual experimentation have been "intellectually interesting," he says, "but it didn't feel like an organic expression of intimacy. Like, there are much better ways for me to do that."
For more than five years, Jay, now 34, has partnered with a 30-year-old asexual woman. They met in 2006 and reconnected at the 2011 New York City premiere of Angela Tucker's documentary (A)sexual. They plan on being a part of one another's lives forever, but aren't interested in labels. They live together but don't share a room or a bed. They also cohabitate with five other people. "There's a lot of community-based intimacy," he says. "The word single almost never gets used in the ace community. A person may not have a primary relationship, but instead has a whole cluster of people to surround and support them. It's like, remember in elementary school when every kid would give a valentine to every other kid? That was really cool to me. You got to express gratitude and affection toward all your friendships." Ace culture, he says, subscribes to a similar ethos.
When Lisa told Derrick that she was asexual, he said he needed time to process. Then "he said he wanted to be with me no matter what," Lisa says. Two years later, Derrick asked Lisa to marry him. In March, they married in a North Hollywood ballroom.
Their union is not without plenty of physical affection: giving and receiving hugs and kisses; holding hands. (Lisa calls herself a "cuddle-slut.") Anything beyond that — oral sex, intercourse, etc. — she finds "repulsive." The compromise they've come up with is mutual masturbation: "As far as navigating Derrick's sexual feelings," she explains, "we basically just do hand stuff. If I'm completely honest, it still does repulse me, but I'm heading toward neutrality." Once the knot was tied, she agreed to have sex for the first time ever. "But he knows it won't be a regular thing," she says.
Listening to Lisa describe her marriage, I'm struck by how little difference there is between asexual unions and those we deem sexual. If you've been with someone long enough, you know the fever wanes. It's easy to measure the decrease in lust as a kind of failure — but perhaps, by helping us dismantle the notion that sex is vital to a successful relationship, the rising prominence of asexuality will free us from the belief that sex is the ultimate sustenance for a healthy and enduring love.
You Might Also Like