The End of Sex

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WHAT CAN I say: My boyfriends made me wet. “Doused” does not feel like an overstatement. Slick, and eager, gushing and excited and ample.

“I love how wet you get,” my last lover said, actually laughing with disbelief.

“Feel how wet I am,” I said to some idiot I was Frenching at a bar in my thirties, my back against the wall outside the bathrooms like a cliched movie scene, because even he was making impressive amounts of liquid pour forth, despite telling me that my mouth tasted like baby golden beets and Marcona almonds.

Having smoked a hundred cigarettes that night, I said: “I doubt it.”

I guess sex is like certain styles of mustaches, or soul-killing careers; just because you can doesn’t mean you should—let alone must. Because, having finally embraced my truth, the thing I’m most excited about in life is never having sex again.

THE NIGHT I finally accepted I was asexual, I surrendered peacefully.

I was sitting on the floor of my living room in 2020, the darkness of a California fire-blackout outside, my deck door open wide to silhouettes of oak trees and a full moon. I had been thinking about something else entirely when I heard it—felt it—inside me again.

I’m asexual.

I’d been through this so many times over several years already, with huge amounts of emotional fallout each time. But still, I experienced the same knee-jerk resistance. NO. Really? Not really. Not ACTUALLY. But this time, I had it for only a moment. Then I said, to myself, to the moon: Okay.

Okay, okay. I wasn’t going to fight it anymore.

At least, not for two weeks! Seventeen days later, I panic-texted someone I’d met one time who was sexual but had an asexual partner, asking them to please talk on the phone. When we did, I acknowledged that I had a question betraying some very sad beliefs on my part. But I asked it anyway: “Why would you stay with them? Like, what’s in it for you?”

“I love this person,” they said. “They are my person.”

Here was (one of) my problem(s): I wanted to get married. I had been married, twice; after I left the first marriage, I tried again, and after leaving the second, I ended up with a boyfriend who brought it up again. Everything I had heard and learned about boyfriends and husbands was that you had to have sex with them to keep them, or for them to want to keep you. So have sex I did.

The sexual who was graciously fielding my freakout on the phone told me that their connection with their ace partner eclipsed all other connections they’d ever experienced. They were ready for—no, actively desiring—permanent partnership with this person. To them, this person was the most special person, regardless of sex. So here, I guess, was my bigger problem: I couldn’t believe anybody could love me like that.

IT’S NOT MY fault. One of my own parents was a sexual predator whose love hinged on unfettered access to my body, so I was explicitly raised to believe that that’s how love worked. But the thing is, so was everyone else.

“Oh, yeah?” a health care worker responded once when I told her I had a boyfriend but didn’t have sex. “I didn’t know that was an option.” Western culture sexually grooms everyone. Statistically, people are having less sex right now, but not getting around to it or not feeling like having sex are not the same as being ace.

In the 2011 documentary (A)Sexual (which isn’t great), there’s an interview with Dan Savage, supposed spokesperson for queer sexual liberation. “And then you have the asexuals, marching for the right to not do anything,” he says, with a mocking smirk, as though Dan Savage has never spoken to or heard of, say, women, who have to fight still for the right to not have sex when they don’t want to. He’s somehow also unaware that the expected sex-partner accrual in cis-fag culture is crushing to many gay men. And that relentless sex positivity in queer culture pressures its community members to push their own boundaries all of the time. And that straight cis men, too, suffer oppressive expectations of hypersexuality, and make us all suffer in turn.

That asexuals, in short, are actually the vanguard of sexual liberation. Not the opposite of it.

“I’ve never heard of an asexual gay man,” a gay man said to me once, after I told him I was asexual. “Is that even…Can that even be?”

In 2018, when I was 38 and my transition age was 1, I realized, with a burst of body-wracking sobs during an ayahuasca ceremony, that I was asexual. The year prior, I’d gotten divorced, and I’d spent the interim time questioning, for the first time in my life, whether I even wanted to have sex. Was I just doing it out of socialization and habit? Couples on TV had sex. Recently I watched Puss in Boots, and the fucking cartoon children’s-movie cats were having sex. Even my abstinence-based Catholic-school education taught me to have sex, just after marriage; the only acceptable reasons not to were if you were a nun, or a priest—or homosexual.

But in the year after my second divorce, I didn’t have it. And, I did not miss it. Before that, I hadn’t gone more than a few weeks without having it since I’d started consenting at 14. When I was non-consensually having it before that, as a child, I don’t think I ever got a break that long. Still, when ayahuasca tried to show me, then told me in no uncertain terms, that I was asexual, I cried one of the hardest cries of a hard-crying life. I could handle being gay and trans, albeit after lots of crying about those things, too. But asexual—that was a bridge too fucking far. It seemed not just as disruptive to my existing relationships as my transition had been, but catastrophic for any to come.

The morning after the ceremony, without sleeping at all, I stood on the deck of the ceremony house, redwoods towering around me, as dazed and disoriented as I’d felt when I’d first Remembered my sexual abuse. Both had ripped my worlds apart.

Or, as I finally understand it now, open.

“THIS RELATIONSHIP IS not sexual,” I dutifully informed a prospective boyfriend via email a few months later, after our second date. It took me all day to write it; I had to keep stopping to hyperventilate. “I wanted so badly to be close to you,” the email said. “And sex is how people do it. Sex is how I have always done it.”

I’d learned to like it. To focus on the pleasure in it. When I started having sex by choice, people told me I was excellent at it, a validation I craved after being told as a child that I wasn’t and then imbibing a Pacific Garbage Patch worth of cultural trash that my worth as a person assigned female at birth depended on it. But. If you could get people to take their shirts off and lie down with you and talk for hours without sex, I started asking everyone I knew in that post-divorce celibacy, would you still want to have the sex? “Despite my resistance,” said my email to this new, beautiful man in my life, my questioning had “already provided the very clear answer that I don’t.”

From the moment I saw him, this now-ex, my soulmate—pro tip: soulmates can be part of karmic cycles that need to be broken—felt like breathable air when I was suffocating. His company was electric relief, hours in easy conversation, like in college, except sober. He was gorgeous, and smart, and charismatic, and trans: a dream.

But the days leading up to our first date, I’d pictured myself frenching him, the only output I knew for the feelings of excitement and attraction I had to this human, and each time, I’d felt: No.

“Is this a friend date, or a date-date?” he asked when we got to the Ethiopian restaurant. If there wasn’t going to be any frenching, it had to be the former, as far as I knew, so I responded, “It’s a friend date.”

“Shoot,” he said. “I was really hoping it was a date-date.” I’d assumed he’d want to just leave after dinner then. But he suggested another place we could go, and then another. This was actually what I wanted from him: devoted attention, desire for closeness. And: He gave it to me.

Still, after the date ended and we parted, I spent the whole night lying awake, drawing up urgent, elaborate mental plans for all the places and ways we’d fuck. Overtired and nerve-shot by dawn, a voice broke through from inside me, amplified, by my spiritual guides.

You are STILL asexual, it boomed.

I cried like someone had just died, all over again. Staggering into a Walgreens later that day, I approached the automatic sliding doors in a weepy haze. I could not be gay and trans and a sex-abuse survivor and asexual. There was truly no place in this world, I felt, for me. Though I’d already told the date we were friends, there was clearly something else happening for both of us, even if I lacked a word or indeed concept for it. So after we went on a second date that felt very romantic, I wrote him the email reiterating that there wouldn’t be sex.

I waited. I was sick with dark expectation that my fears would be confirmed: he’d treat me differently. He’d be disinterested. But instead, when I ran into him that night, he approached looking shy and smitten and said, “Hiiiiii. You’re so cute. Can I walk with you a bit?” And then asked me out again.

It took me five years to stop feeling shocked that this happened. And that’s with very actively processing it and working on my self-worth the whole time.

As we continued to date, he told me he’d stopped seeing other people; at another point, nestling on blankets on my bedroom floor one night, bodies turned toward each other while we watched The Crow on a laptop at our feet with our fingers interlaced, he said, “This is my high dream.” Another night, when I was practically panic-yelling at him, “WHAT IF I NEVER WANT TO HAVE SEX AGAIN?”, he said, “This relationship doesn’t have to look any kind of way.”

I didn’t believe him. That’s partly the reason we soon commenced having sex one zillion times over the next few years. But partly, it was because of the responses in my own body. When we touched, heat bloomed upward from my tailbone and downward as wetness that soaked clear through my underwear; being turned on, according to everything I knew, meant you were supposed to fuck. And so, after a couple of months of closeness and holding and a few kisses, we did. It was my call. “Sex is energy,” I said something like, sitting with him in my living room one day. “If the energy is already here, we’re basically already having it anyway.” It’s a string of logic that would not pass fact-check, or a beginner’s tantra workshop, but I couldn’t make sense of our connection—or his wanting to be around me—any other way. Even my own father had insisted on having sex with me. I could not believe that if I didn’t climb on top of my boyfriend, he wouldn’t leave me for someone who would.

Trans-on-trans sex is a beautiful force that rips necessary, glimmering holes in the stifling fabric of our world. And asexuals can and do choose to have sex. But: My having sex fed a validation addiction that eroded at my soul. I was only the more devastated when it turned out he was lying when he said our relationship didn’t have to involve sex. When I regained my resolve and said I finally wasn’t going to have sex anymore, I saw something proud and supportive bloom in him.

But soon, it devolved into his starting regular fights and crying about his inability to believe I really loved him if we weren’t.

WHEN I MADE plans to kiss my first boyfriend, Ian O’Neil, in sixth grade, I decided, when we were actually together, that I didn’t want to do it. He didn’t notice, or care; he was twelve, and mostly enjoyed reading encyclopedias. When my second boyfriend, Mike, tried to kiss me, I avoided being alone with him for weeks, eventually resorting to making up a story about why I was afraid of men. Those fears were real, but they weren’t my issue with this attractive teenage boy. The truth seemed too fucking crazy to admit, even to myself.

I just didn’t wanna.

But I gave in eventually, of course. In Angela Chen’s extremely necessary book, Ace: What Asexuality Reveals About Desire, Society, and the Meaning of Sex, she talks about the complications asexual sex-abuse survivors raise in destigmatizing asexuality. Of course some of them wouldn’t wanna, people think. Of course: because terrible, genital-related things happened to them!

I recognize the complexity I raise by acknowledging that when I finally gave into both internal and external pressure to make out with Mike Dargaj in 1992, I was still being raped by my father at night and repressing it like my life depended on it—because it did—during the day. And I recognize that it’s impossible to untangle that my body went staticky with a combination of recognition and denial the first time Mike lay on top of me from the fact that I also wasn’t enjoying the sensations themselves.

Partly, it’s that I’m not that into cis dudes. But despite this thoroughly uncompelling introduction—my god, I had so much sex after this. Some of it was for protection, or for the type of re-creation that trauma survivors often engage in: My father, in his penchant for combining rape and suffocation, killed me once, before performing rib-crunching resuscitation, and I don’t know how many murderers most adults choose as sex partners, but I’ve chosen two. I’ve dated abusers. I made out with the highest-level peace officer in the world, and I married a low-ranking one. I wrote an entire book about trying, struggling, and often failing to get through sex with the latter. I had PTSD from my reporting career, which I blamed for the trouble, and so did everyone else: Not one therapist, friend, or even reader ever said to me, in the five years of this incessant battle, “Maybe you just don’t want to.”

Because there was no cultural space for that. Because supposedly, everybody wanted to have sex unless there was something wrong with them.

That was more than ten years ago. The culture hasn’t evolved much since. In 2023, Stonewall UK announced a research project to “better understand” ace people, who under UK law have not a sexuality but a disorder. A few years ago, my editor at New York magazine offered me $10,000 to write an essay about my asexuality, saying, “We have a long history of publishing stories about deviant sex. We famously published a story about a guy who has sex with horses.”

Not boning enough in your marriage? There’s something wrong with either you or your marriage. Boning enough in your marriage, but not enthusiastic enough about it? Ditto. Not boning as a single person, by choice or not? Your interpersonal skills or emotional availability need work. Not wanting to bone and having a history of sexual violence? That’s a no-brainer that there’s a problem. The problem is you.

It was my trauma that made me dislike both having sex with my husband and his constant harassment about not having enough sex, though I was having it multiple times a week. It was true that I had noticed, pre-diagnosis, that the very first night we kissed, I liked it for about one minute. It was new (it’s not every day you french a hot French soldier who doesn’t speak any English at a hotel in Port-au-Prince). It was connecting, and pleasant in my mouth, like soft overripe fruit—and then after that minute, I didn’t love it. I kept doing it anyway, despite my disengagement that night, and the next time we made out, and all the way into matrimony because I loved him. And because the only story I’d heard was that either you liked having sex or you were broken, and I was determined to not be the latter.

Most of the sex I’ve had in my life was to stay in relationship. Neither of my husbands, whom I loved—and so badly wanted to want to have sex with!—would have chosen me without it. Nor any of my romantic partners before, all the way back to seventh grade. There was no question that I was going to have to kiss Mike Dargaj eventually if I wanted him to keep holding my hand at the mall and talking to me on the phone for hours every night, and I did want that. When we hung out with our friends, he did what Boys Are Supposedly Supposed To Do: maneuver to get me slightly alone, pulling me back to let them walk ahead of us at the tour of James A. Garfield’s house, inviting me outside the candy store we were all browsing to sit on the bench in front of it. Then he’d wrap his arms around me or look at me intently, patiently waiting for me to become still enough to put his mouth on mine.

Eventually, I did.

Incidental Misogyny Playlist

That thing when Spotify queues you up somethin’ creepy.

The Faggot-Witch WheneverGabriel Mac

AFTER MY SOULMATE and I finally broke up, one day, I accidentally inhaled a lungful of California cannabis so deep that it became psychedelic. There, on that casual Tuesday, during an accidental (or was it??) psychedelic excursion, I revisited my whole history of consensual sex, which spanned 25 years and some two dozen people. From my high school boyfriend rubbing me off in movie theaters when I was 14, to the older queer I started sleeping with on-and-off when I was sixteen and not for the last time until I was thirty, to two husbands, a string of serious boyfriends, both cis and trans, a few women, few of whom ultimately identified that way—I saw most of it, in sequence. I saw the part of me that was excited about trying it: the explorer, the connector. In an earlier trip, with huachuma, I spent several hours listening to a tree, who at one point said, essentially: Hey man, I’ve got these parts, you’ve got those parts—you tried ’em all out. In my marijuana-facilitated retrospective, I could see how my life would have gone in a less sexually compulsive world.

I’d have tried it all out.

And then, early in that process, probably before I’d even turned twenty, I would have moved on.

I’m not saying I’d never have had sex again. I may have opted into trying out these newer parts, as the tree said, when I transitioned. But I had sex thousands of times in between. Sure, I had a lot of orgasms: I made them the goal, turning my powers of hyperfocused productivity toward achieving them. And I didn’t just have wetness, but drive. As vast as the inner well of self-loathing I was desperately trying to fill was the ache of emptiness between my legs. Having grown up convinced my penis would grow in someday, then grown up without it ever happening, I ground hard against those of other men—whether cis penises, or the fingers non-cis men used as sexual extensions. It didn’t work—the ache never went away; like any addiction, it needed constant resupply.

But having grown up unloved and unaware of the possibilities, like that there were indeed surgical centers where I could get a penis, as I finally did when I was forty, or like that there were people who would later love me “even” as an out trans person, what the fuck else was I supposed to do? Sex was the only path I thought I had. When I contemplate the energy that went into my sex life and the harm that came from it, either because I was doing something I didn’t deeply truly want or because the circumstances or men involved were shitty, it makes me literally sick to my stomach.

“Doesn’t it feel like a relief?” asked the nice sexual I’d called on the phone that fire-blackout night, when I was still trying, for two years by then, to accept that I was ace. I could sort of barely sense it way out there on the distant horizon: A future of relief. Behind me, I could see visions about the night I first had sex with my eventual second husband, where I replay the encounter and instead of taking my pants off I say, No, thanks, and my whole body goes relieved indeed. I could see the afternoon I went to a conference and a speaker mentioned some famous scholar was celibate, and the way my whole body responded brightly, lit to the word, which I drew a smiley face next to as I took notes.

But in the present, I was still being pulled under by the current of eternal promised loneliness.

“I’m not there yet,” I said.

A year and a half into my relationship with my soulmate, I’d invited him a few times to lie down and open wide to each other without sex, our bodies facing in bed, interlacing sometimes just a single finger, breathing, slowly surrendering to each other’s energies. For me, it was like so much accidentally overinhaled indica, like psychedelics, our spirits intuitively finding their way to parallel but completely connected journeys, where we understood one another without speaking.

That was the intimacy I wanted. That, I could easily do all day. As much pleasure and alchemy and connection as I have developed the capacity for in sex, it also drains me in some ineffable way. My soulmate felt the same about connecting without sex. “That took a lot for me,” he said, crying, and so we went back to having—and then fighting about not having—sex. Our sex life, however transcendent, required the subsumption of my asexuality. And my asexuality was sacred.

THE FIRST DAY I felt accepted in my asexuality—not just accepted, embraced—not just embraced, celebrated—I was at a gay orgy.

It was a Beltane celebration in 2023, a large, outdoor gathering where sex was copious, but not obligatory. Celibate since my soulmate breakup the year before, I’d gone knowing I wasn’t going to have any. As people were arriving on the land to set up camp, I was making my way toward an outdoor shower when I looked up to see dark stubble and a firm chest—on a man who turned out to be filled with deep sweetness. We were friendly from the start. We were friendlier still when I told him I was trans, not because he was creepy or exoticizing but because he can feel, I could feel, how sacred trans is. We talked during meals and drinks, and he made me a necklace, and on the third day, after a communal vat of sacred mushroom tea had been shared, I approached him in the early afternoon daylight and told him plainly what I wanted.

“I have a desire,” I said, “to lie down in a not-at-all sexual way with you and spend time together.”

When I was in sixth grade, I wrote out the logistics to my ideal date with Ian: He would come over, hopefully with one other couple—that would normalize what we were doing, and set the romantic-but-not-sexual scene—and each pair would sit close together in front of our fireplace wrapped in red-plaid, flannel blankets. On my logistics list: Find two other 12-year-olds who might possibly be into this (I had a shortlist of potential candidates, though I worried they weren’t mature enough—and that Ian for that matter wasn’t, either); acquire red-plaid, flannel blankets. And all we would all do was feel the warmth of the fire and our significant others, and talk.

Twelve is too young to want to make out for some sexuals, I understand. But this doesn’t feel to me like the sweet inklings of a developing child. I’d been violently sexualized over the span of nearly a decade by that age, and had not been a child in a long, long, long time. To me, it feels older than my years in its sexlessness. Not younger.

When my flannel-blanket dreams were never realized with Ian, it’s possible that I thought an older boyfriend—enter the aforementioned Mike, who was four years older than me when I started dating him before I turned 13—might be more likely to possess the sophistication of my vision. Instead, no one will be surprised to hear, he just came with more sexual expectations than my sixth-grade, encyclopedia-obsessed one. Yes, Mike was very down to sit very close to me. But being close came with an attendant cloud of pressure to be doing something more.

Being close always came, in romantic contexts since then, for the rest of my life, with the personal and global pressure to be doing more.

The night that Mike put his hand on my hand to put my hand on his crotch at a party at my house, I remember not wanting to, then searching for a good reason to not want to as I told my best friend and my older sister’s best friend about it later. That’s a ridiculous thing for him to think a 13-year-old would want to do, right? I appealed to them. I remember being indignant. I remember needing to be indignant; the alternative—that I inherently wasn’t interested, or, worse, that I wasn’t interested because rape had ruined me—was absolutely terrifying. That was why I didn’t want to, right?, because it wasn’t appropriate for my age? They both responded, reasonably, that a mature 13-year-old may or may not want to touch their boyfriend’s crotch through his clothes, depending on the person. But all I heard was that there was something wrong with me because I didn’t.

Earlier that year, my father had taken me to a horrific, utterly depersonalizing forced abortion of the fetus he’d impregnated me with. I bring it up not so you’ll understand why I don’t want to have sex. I bring it up despite knowing that if you know what happened to me, you’ll be inclined to write off my asexuality as the result of damage. But it’s the other way around: Trauma was what kept me having sex. While I politely withdrew my hand from Mike’s over-the-clothes crotch urging that night, I would bring myself around to all manner of sexual activity within another year and a half, though I wasn’t, it turned out, more innately enthusiastic about the ongoing touching of my next boyfriend’s crotch, or my first transmasculine partner’s at 16. But after having been treated as a non-person so extensively, so thoroughly, there is nothing I wouldn’t have done to be a person. To feel like a person. To seem like a person.

And people have sex.

“I stand in front of whole rooms of people for work and tell them I’m gay and trans,” a friend told me a few years ago. “But I don’t want to tell anyone I’m asexual.”

At the gay orgy, after the tea ceremony had dispersed, I’d marched toward the two-room tent of the kind and beautiful gay man I’d been getting to know, taking deep, steadying breaths. I’d resolved the night before, parked in my house on the land, to proposition him. I’d sat down outside the threshold of his tent when I saw he was in it, and had talked to him as he fussed with something in the back.

I have a desire

to lie down

in a not-at-all sexual way

with you.

On this day of this gay orgy, the whole day was free to do anything with anyone, any plant and chemical enhancement Earth can offer, a sea of sexually available, good, good-looking, half-dressed faggots, who’d also been noticing this man’s Richard Madden vibes. (“There are some very hot people here,” someone said to me while looking at him earlier, tipping his sunglasses down his nose to get a better look like a horny character in an ’80s movie.) And this man came up to meet me at the threshold of his tent, where I sat, perched across from me on his knees, and said firmly: “Yes. I want to do that.”

A host of divine guides cleared the way, then. We walked up the path to the sex yurt, and though some people sat chatting inside, the bed in the middle was empty. The whole spacious room emptied—and stayed empty—after we took off our shoes to lie down, him first as he jumped in and propped himself up on his elbow, cozy and attentive with his body facing mine under the big skylight to the trees, his face bright and lit and eager. To not fuck.

If you could get people to take their shirts off and lie down with you and talk for hours without sex, would you still want to have the sex?

This was how I had longed to be craved.

“I really appreciated that moment,” he said about my explicitly asking him to not have sex. He said that he was constantly putting out No energy to circumvent the otherwise constant pressure to screw.

“If someone had told me as a kid that this was an option,” I said, at some point in the hours we lay there, our thighs resting warm and solid against each other at times, but most of the time not, while we told stories, and cried, and told stories, and laughed—until we got up and went to get ice cream, and then to the outdoor hot tub perched above a rushing creek, also magically waiting empty for us on Communal Mushroom Orgy Afternoon—“I would have had less than 1 percent of the sex I’ve had.”

Sex is boring, my ancestors had said to me the morning after my first date with my soulmate, when I’d been up all night manically plotting all the sex we were going to have. MOVE ON.

My sexless orgy date and I spent hours sitting naked in the hot tub and talking. It was past midnight when we finally left each other’s company. Unable to stay awake any longer, we hugged, and kissed each other on the cheek. But not until after he sang me a perfect impression of Kermit the Frog’s “Rainbow Connection.” I walked back to my house feeling full and nourished and buoyed and not at all drained.

When I told the nice gay camped next to me what we’d done, he responded with a brief, surprised silence. “I’m so glad you told me you did that,” he said. “It’s so good to hear how somebody does something different.” When I told someone else, who asked what we’d been up to, he too gave me a blank, speechless stare, before saying he was glad I was able to create that for myself. “That’s probably what a lot of gay men actually want,” he said, but speculated that they didn’t know they could ask—or didn’t even know that they wanted it.

“If I could get to the holding and talking without sex,” said the older homo quoted at the top of this essay, mulling it in real time after saying there was no such thing—wasn’t even allowed to be such a thing—as an asexual fag, “I’d probably have less sex.”

AND THEN I lived happily, harmoniously free from sex for the rest of my life.

Just kidding!

“I’m retired from sex,” I told everyone at the next giant, outdoor gay-sex event I went to, just a few months later. I ended up going on a couple of dates with one of them, sucking his dick, and letting him finger me, even after he already proved himself unworthy of my energy. Soon, I started dating another guy, and had sex with him a lot, for months, and a year later I had sex with yet another guy a few times and may this article be a spell that helps me honor myself because, as I said, asexuals can have sex.

But I. Don’t. Want. To.

It’s been eight years since I first knew I was ace, and that’s how hard and how long I’ve been fighting it, hoping it will become untrue. I still fear it will make people think I’m not a person, or am a broken one. Last month, I was at a queer bar where the MC asked, “Where my asexuals at?” There was silence. For a moment, I didn’t even understand what was happening, it was so unexpected. I realized both the question and my answer with a sliver of time left to appropriately respond, “Whoooooooo!”

But I didn’t do it. While I was ready to recognize it, my self-esteem wasn’t quite healed enough yet to proclaim it. But here I am. Because there is place for me in this world. It’s wherever I make it.