Asexuals Unite

What do you do if you're a self-proclaimed asexual and you fall in love with another asexual?

You cuddle and kiss and talk a lot. You go to dinner parties, bicker over movies, sleep in the same bed. Maybe you even snuggle up and spoon, the two of you curled up in a cozy double-S.

But it does not occur to you to make the beast with two backs. Your sexual congress is permanently adjourned. You're in love, you're just not making any.

That's more or less the explanation given by Paul Cox, a 21-year-old Long Island University student. While organizing meet ups of New York asexuals last year, Cox met a young woman from the Brooklyn group and started spending a lot of time with her. All his time, actually, and for months, until she pointed out that their friendship had blossomed into a romance. Cox didn't even realize what was happening. "She's the one who dragged it out of me and drilled it into my head," he says, still sounding a little baffled.

Sounds like normal male-female relations. Cox says everything about them is normal. "It's kind of amazing how little of a difference it makes that we're not actually sexually attracted to each other," he says. "The longer we're in this, the more trivial it seems."

The Asexuality Visibility and Education Network couldn't have said it better. In a flurry of media attention that began with the March 24 airing of a segment on "20/20," Cox and other AVEN members have appeared on CNN, Fox News and MSNBC's "The Situation" with Tucker Carlson to make the case that asexuality is as valid, normal and healthy as heterosexuality and homosexuality. They've booked engagements at universities and conferences. The exposure has brought hundreds of new members to the 8,000-strong network.

"Sexuality is like any other activity," says David Jay, AVEN's 23-year-old founder. "There are people for whom skydiving, chocolate cake and soccer are their world. But some people don't like skydiving, chocolate cake or soccer. There's no reason to focus your energy and attention on something you feel no reason to do anything about."

Asexuality is not celibacy, abstinence or escapism, Jay says. "Whatever sexual orientation is, it works like that. It's not something we choose. It's something we intrinsically feel."

But questions remain -- big questions. Mainly: "Are you sure you're not gay?"

An open-ended view of (a)sexuality

Not long ago a gay friend surprised me by declaring his belief that bisexuality doesn't exist. You're straight, gay or lying, he said. It struck me as unnecessarily restrictive. Who's to say there's no gray area between the homo- and heterosexual poles?

But I'm guilty of same. I remember a discussion among friends about a mutual friend, a man, who has never dated anyone as far as any of us knows and who emanates no detectable sexual vibe. Confounded, we ruminated over the possibilities, dragging theories and evidence out for scrutiny. "There's no porn stash," offered one who had stayed at his house. "I think he visits prostitutes," another confided. A third asked the inevitable: "Do you think he's gay and repressed?" We agreed that asexuality was a possibility, at least in theory, but we couldn't decide whether it actually existed.

Underlying that conversation was incredulity that a human being -- especially a man -- could lack a sex drive. In hindsight that seems as narrow as my friend's dismissal of bisexuality. Why shouldn't there be a whole range of intensity of desire, from zero to 10? I know couples in sexless marriages who are utterly devoted to each other, and women who don't care if they never have sex again.

Apparently we are poor judges of each other's sex lives. "There's a wide assumption that everybody's engaging in a lot of sex, and it's just not true," says University of Wisconsin's John DeLamater, editor of the Journal of Sex Research. "Even people who are engaging in sex aren't doing it as frequently as other people think they are."