Asexual Chic: Everybody's Not Doing It

By Arthur Bell

It wouldn't surprise me to see a rash of asexual non-dating bars opening on First Avenue and the waterfront in the near future—places where people of different asexual persuasions stare at each other and keep their rocks on. Because sex is so accessible—in art as well as life—it figures that the plugged in are plugging out. With Koch as mayor and role model, perhaps asexuality is the wave of the future.

To test the water, I ask revelers in our intense environment what makes an asexual. are they spotable? Are they crabby? Serene? Spacy? Are they all Jewish? Do they own lap dogs?

"We're everything. We're everywhere," says a noted designer at Lenny Bloom and Gary Topchik's housewarming party. At the same bash, Dorianne Beyer, co-publisher of Christopher Street, mentions that a friend of hers is in group therapy where five of the eight are asexual. "They're either actors or dancers."

A motion-picture publicist tells me that he thought Liza Minnelli was asexual. Why? "Because she doesn't look like a man or a woman."

"But that's unisexual," I reply.

"Okay. Then Jackie Onassis."

"Why?"

"Because she's spent all that time and energy pulling herself together and you just know she doesn't want to get messed up."

But is it bad? Is it good? And what is asexuality, anyway?

Dr. Stuart Berger, who, at 24, is the youngest resident psychiatrist at Bellevue claims that "asexuality means nonsexuality, and nonsexuality doesn't exist. But why people don't have sex is up for grabs. Diabetes mellitus can cause impotence. Dexedrine often works against erections. Depression decreases sexual drive. Any kind of psychogenic disorder will do it.

"It is not unreasonable to believe that someone in politics or business today is so anxiety-ridden that he can't have sex … it might be a totally appropriate response to an intense environment."

Apparently, whatever it is, the sexual act is getting to be unpopular. Andy Warhol's not doing it. Bob Weiner would like to do it, but often can't find anyone to do it with. Patricia Elliott has discovered, through yoga and meditation, that she doesn't have to do it. Dr. John McNeill is thinking about it, but won't do it because his church says he can't. Larry Flynt has been saved by Ruth Carter Stapleton and is doing it "clean." Yasir Arafat leads an ascetic life and wouldn't dream of doing it because he's "married to the Palestinian people."

In films, the two biggest hits are Close Encounters of the Third Kind, about a transcendental experience and Star Wars, about two robots are are "just friends." On Broadway, Annie, Golda, and Dracula are, all combined, less lustful than The Boys from Syracuse.

Just before the smear campaign erupted, a reporter acquaintance from The New York Times, phoned and asked if there were truth to the rumor about the mayoral candidate. Not having been to bed with the man, I couldn't answer from experience, but said there was no evidence, nothing concrete though the gay grapevine, and surely these ears would have heard if there were any dilly-dallying.

"Poor Ed," Sighed the Times reporter. "That's what I was afraid of. If only he were gay, or something, or anything. Our next mayor, I fear, is asexual."

In the weeks that followed, Bess Myerson told us in New York magazine that "I share a part of Ed's life that is politics and most of his life is politics." And The Advocate reported that Carmine DeSapio had once had Koch followed for two weeks, "attempting to find out his sexual activities. DeSapios's intentions were frustrated when his private eye discovered that Koch did nothing but campaign and sleep."

Poor Ed. The dirt is that there is no dirt. Koch may be what every Jewish mother hopes her son will grow up to be—asexual and a mayor.

At the Columbia Records party for Jon Peters and the vocalist he lives with, an ad copy writer admits that she went through a long period without sex. She was married then, and the sexual situation was a difficult and unhappy one. To dull her misery, she worked three jobs. At night she retired at odd hours to conflict with her husband's schedule. There were no dreams, no masturbation, and no sex for a period of six months. "When I got into this state, I wasn't very attractive to people," she says. "I wasn't aware of being unhappy. In fact, I wasn't aware of anything.

"I think of that time now as a period of sublimation," she whispers, adding that I must not, under any circumstances, use her name.

Well, I'm not suing her name, but it's interesting that the majority of asexual I've talked with have asked for anonymity. Some of them are professional "walkers" (witty, charming men who escort women to society parties and opening nights, often with the blessings of their husbands because the husbands themselves are too bored or too busy and they know their wives are "safe"), several proclaim homosexual feelings, and one said that he's given up sex because "It hurts."

Photographer B. B. Bronstein, who is not asexual, urges that I differentiate between impotence, which is not being able to get it up; celibacy, which is self-afflicted abstention; and dry periods.

Presently, there is no asexual liberation front to put out pamphlets underscoring variations. Mention the Stonewall riot to a celibate and he'll yawn in your face. Generally, asexuals would rather not switch or fight. They refer to keep their mouths shut.

Most support comes from the sexual community. Writer Shaun Considine swears that he'd give 20 years of his life to be an asexual.

"Think of al the time and energy spent in the search and consummation—and the hangovers of sex. Think of the books I could have written, the photographs I could have taken.

"Sure, there have been terrific moments, but when you boil them down, they amount to 30 seconds, all told. My fondest wish is to be an asexual."

It is the day before New Year's. It also happens to be the day before Frank Langella's 38th birthday. The actor is wrapped in a thin blue bathrobe, nothing underneath. Like everyone else in town, he is sniffling and coughing. He asks his assistant to tell the 20 young women who are waiting at the stage-door entrance with stars in their eyes and Kodak Instamatics in their hands that he will not be leaving his dressing room between the matinee and evening performances. He pours himself a grapefruit juice, retires to a cot, pulls a blanket over his sinewy frame, and signals me to sit in a chair beside him. I swear in blood that there'll be no puns about fangs.

Defiantly, he begins by stating that Dracula is enormously sexual but avoids sex. What keeps the customers panting is the suggestion that women can cheat on their husbands without cheating, without the fear of actual penetration. If Helen Gurley Brown were to analyze Dracula, I'm sure she'd say that no sex is sexy.

But, because Count Dracula uses his teeth in lieu of his penis, he is the dream over of every shopgirl who'd rather rhapsodize about it than do it. I ask Frank Langella if he thinks that Dracula moves in the directory of asexuality.

"Dracula asexual? Certainly not," snaps Langella. "He has a penis but just doesn't happen to use it between 8 and 11 p.m. at the Martin Beck. The play is about a man who is totally in love with a woman whom he takes in this own unique way. Adolescents find it enormously romantic. They find it white-satin clean, like a fairy tale. Their knees shake."

That several sleeping princesses are quivering outside the theatre proves his point. Langella is matinee-idol material—he has a commanding stage presence, especially when he spreads his cape. Offstage he's newly married, sort of old-fashioned on the subject of sex. For instance, Plato's Retreat, the backroom bars, whips, and chains, dismay him. He believes that the farther you get away from simple romance, the farther you get away from yourself. "Asexuality," he says, "is the first step you take when you decide to become nonhuman. The penis, vagina, breasts exist. If one wants to use them, one must have sex.

"I would be more sad to find that Koch was an asexual than if I knew he was gay. Still, a politician's job is not to show us the way to sexuality. Beame didn't do it. Koch shouldn't have to, either. His job is to get the subways uncrowded, among other things.

"But maybe we are headed toward an asexual society. Look at the top media figure in the country—Farrah Fawcett Majors. She personifies the regular, normal, healthy girl. She's not sexy the way Marilyn Monroe was lasciviously sexy. She runs around New York with her mother as chaperone. And look at our newscasters—one pretty girl and boy after another—blonde and boring. All asexual-looking people. None of them are luscious. All sexually safe.

"As for the act of sex, the more you do it, the more you do it. I'm not sure there's a unified effort not to do it. But it's like smoking, once you get over the first three or four weeks, it comes easy."

Teri Garr is a blonde, blue-eyes cigarette-smoking actress who's recently been playing the kind of roles that Ruth Hussey and Evelyn Keyes used to play. She's John Denver's wife in Oh, God, and Richard Dreyfuss's wife in Close Encounters of the Third Kind. Both films are among the top dozen grossers of the year, according to Variety; neither is about romance, sex, or love; either is explicit, pornographic, or vulgar in the traditional sense. They are as wholesome and healthy as Ed Koch on Inaugural Day.

The actress does not like interviews, but does like The Voice, despite Andrew Sarris's unkink words about her role in Close Encounters. She admits her part was drastically scissored. But there was a script cut she was pleased with. In one scene, Richard Dreyfuss was to have ripped off her nightgown. Both she and Dreyfuss thought the sequence would cheapen the film. They convinced directory Steven Spielberg, who agreed, and dropped it.

"I don't know what I'd have done if Spielberg had decided to go through with the scene," sighs Garr, thankful that "the days are gone when an actress would have to remove her blouse and show her boobs to a directory."

But are they? And is there a reason why filmmakers are getting away from sexuality? Can she explain why Julia, Turning Point, and Pete's Dragon are limiting them up at box offices throughout the country?

"Because the public is wise to the fact that the open-leg porno stuff on screen is a perpetual lie about the man and woman situation," she says. "Moviegoers are bored with exploitative sex. They want to see something special, like a space ship coming down, and laser beams—they want to experience fear and mystery."

If we're heading away from sex in movies, does it follow that we're forsaking the primrose path in real life, too?

The question takes a lot of thinking. Teri Garr apologizes for sounding like something out of a woman's liberation manual but suggests that, on a personal level, "Career takes away from sexual energy. You can either have a nice sex relationship or be completely selfish about your work. You can't have both.

"I can't be thinking about sex when I've got an audition tomorrow, when I've got to put cream on my face and rollers in my hair and when I have to be home at 10 to study lines. There's no time for a man.

"Going with someone is fine—but the initial effort takes up 90 per cent of your time. I need time to myself. I'm an independent woman who thinks and makes her own life and I don't want to be that girl picking out detergents. I'm real scared of her."

The time factor also makes Steve Rubell a victim of the late '70s malaise. The 33-year-old co-owner of Studio 54 slouches on one of those couches shaped like a giant condom at his disco emporium. Casually, he announces that he is an asexual. Will he explain?

"To me, an asexual is someone who has no desire for sex. Whether he represses the desire is something else. It's peculiar to people who are involved in work and can't put all their energy into too many sources. If I'm here 16 hours a day, I can't run out and think of fucking."

The tiny, hyperactive Rubell is sniffling. He, too, is getting over an attack of influenza, guzzling orange juice, and wheezing. Instead of resting in bed, where he belongs, he is watching a rehearsal of his New Year's Eve spectacular featuring Grace Jones. Chorus boys in black leather jumpsuits make like demented Katherine Dunham dancers. Smoke erupts from smudge pots. It's all very "now," all very purgatory, all very done before. Nevertheless, to Rubell, it represents a breakthrough in his nonorgasmic dream——a merging of the disco scene with Broadway. "If it works," he says, "we'll do more—bigger, better."

"It all looks sexy to me," I say.

"Sure it's sexy. This is a sexy place. But the people who come here aren't into love and sex, you know what I mean? This is not for pick-ups. If I see something that looks like a pick up, I tell them to stop, but I don't throw them out. Bianca Jagger comes here all the time and has never once left with a guy. She dances with safe partners. Jon Voight was here last week. One of my assistants asked him to dance and he said he wanted to be left alone, to look and enjoy. These people are not like college kids who have time for sex because they've got nothing else to do. These are busy, active people."

Rob Link, the directory of the Grace Jones Show, leans against a sound booth and shrieks that asexuality is not on the way in. "It's already here.

"It's impossible to have a relationship in this perverse disco madness," he says. "How can you get to know anyone in this craziness? You go home with who you came with. Discos are killing sex.

"Punk rock is driving the final nail into the coffin. The punks don't have sex; they talk about it all the time. They're afraid to fuck because they might do something wrong."

It's Patti Smith's opening night at the new CBGB theatre. I notice Stiv Bators, lead singer of the Dead Boys, hovering around the lobby, and throw Ron Link's quote at him.

"I get plenty of sex," he boasts. "I fucked a woman onstage in Kansas City a few days ago. But I know what he means. A lot of kids are bored with it. They know how to do it, they can get it, but they're just not interested. They've had physical relationship since the age of 10, so, by the time they're 15, they're looking for new kicks."

Bators, a graduate of the Harley-Davidson school of music, is usually besieged by fans who want him to hurt them. In Philadelphia, a teenage boy had him rip a safety pin off his cheek onstage. Dozens of young women demanded that he autograph their arms with safety pins. "They like that because they're not getting enough parental supervision as grown-ups. They were beaten as kids—it's how their parents showed love.

A woman comes over to us and hands the punk-rock star a gift—an earring which she has made herself. It is a hand-painted Tampax with a safety pin piercing the middle. Bators thanks her and places the earring in the pocket of his leather jacket.

Later I see the fan surrounded by three friends, each dressed in her own brand of calculated grotesqueness. I ask the fan if I can speak with her. She starts to shake. There's terror in her eyes. "What for?" she asks. I tell her about the article. "Thank God," she says. "I though you were calling me in for illegal possession of Tampax."

She says that she's 23 years old, her name is Junie Wound—an adopted name—and admits that she thinks about it, but doesn't do it. "I swear to God, I'm saving myself for Joey Ramone."

"Sex," she says, "is scary." Her words of advice to those caught in the web are "Find something you love. Find a terrific substitute. And get into it."

While I'm chatting with Junie Wound, a figure from my past who's gone punk spots me and starts jumping up and down like he's on a pogo stick, his fluffy hair waving, tiny squirrel squeeches coming from his mouth.

"What are you doing here?" he squeals. I mention the story.

"Eek. Eeek. Come with me. You'll know everything." He detaches me from Junie Wound, and takes me by the arm and literally forces me down a flight of stairs to the men's room. As he's peeing, burping beer, and talking incoherently about the joylessness of sex, about the Boomtown Rats of London, I think to myself that I've done many Sherry-Netherlands sipping-frozen-daiquiri interviews, but never one at a urinal. I ask him if we can go back upstairs.

"Okay," he says, and spits in my face.

My instincts are to spit back, but I'm too shocked. Instead, I take a hankie, wipe off the slop, and ask him why.

"Because I like you," he says. "Now you know everything."