Asexuals Have Problems Too!

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February 25, 1971, Vol. XVI, No. 8

Asexuals have problems too
By Harold Nederland

I’m sick and tired of the constant whining going back and forth in your pages between heteros and homos. After all, these people have their sex to keep them warm.

But what about us asexuals? Is there a Merle Miller or an Andrew Sarris around to champion our cause? You bet not.

They must think it’s a big thing to confess how many broads they’ve laid or boys they’ve buggered. Where is the man or woman with the courage to say the whole sex business leaves them feeling like a limp noodle? What we need is an Antonioni of the Organs, and since I am the founder of the Asexual Inactivists, I would like the opportunity to speak my mind.

Does anyone realize the early torment of an asexual? To have his father buy him a bike for Christmas, and when the salesman asks “A boy’s or girl’s model?” his father replies, “It doesn’t matter.” Or to have his father reach the ultimate peak of frustration and scream at him: “Grow up and become something.” Oh, you lucky heaters and homes.

Do you know what it is to grow up in a society polluted with sex? At every turn, the asexual is assaulted with fucking and sucking in movies, music, books, and newspapers. I’m an educated man, but the last film I was able to enjoy was “101 Dalmations.” Music is always mooning over love and advocating “letting it all hang out.” (God, what a disgusting thought!) And forget books! In his latest effort, Norman Mailer has even managed to rocket sex to the virgin moon. NASA and nausea to the critical asexual.

And among newspapers, The Voice is the biggest offender to asexual rights. One is interested in reading about dance, but your terpsichorean Lolita, Jill Johnston, instead recites a litany of the motels across the country she’s balled in. How about a little news from outside — London and the like? All we get in your paper is the mating habits of limey shop girls. Who does Zwerin think he is anyway — Zwerin Sanders? Vivian Gornick and her vaginal vigilantes are more interested in clitoris raising than in consciousness raising. And what about the safe areas of politics and sports? Safe, maybe, in some other publication. But not in The Voice where that boorish Joe Flaherty writes metaphors with his prick rather than his brain. Damn you, you oppressive smut sheet.

And what about the whines of these fathers asking homo or hetero friends not to make advances at their children? Well, would you like it any better if every parent on the block leaving their children with you to mind (including their 17-year-old daughters) and said nothing but “Thanks, good old Harold.” Good old Harold at 31 years old! My house is now known as “Harold’s Romper Room.”

Miller bitched that a faggot is a homosexual gentleman who has just left the room. Well, tough shit is all I’ve got to say — when I leave a room, people don’t even notice.

Then, these dirges are never complete without the heteros and homes rendering us their mauve, maudlin first encounters with sex. Would you like to hear about mine? When I was a teenager, a whore on 42nd Street grabbed me by the cock, and I thanked her for adjusting my zipper! And there was the time I went to boys’ camp and was gang-banged in my bed. I didn’t even realize what had happened until the next morning when my camp counselor told me about it — I slept through the whole damn thing! Oh, you unfeeling cocks and counts out there.

And the social life of an asexual? I am continually invited to orgies to pour the vin rose and roll the joints. (My friends call me a sexual lazy susan.) When a friend’s wife gets drunk early at a party, the husband not only asks me to take her home but queries whether I would mind being sure she gets into her pajamas! And God, the agony of the family Thanksgiving dinner when someone says, pass the mashed potatoes to “it.”

Oh, the hell with you. You’ll never understand anyway. My hatred and contempt for both heteros and homes is so deep I ought to fuck every one of you, but my tragedy is that such desire is not under my realm.

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