Author’s Note: Names have been changed to protect privacy.

It may come as a surprise to some that the first action item of the group of ace-identifying friends known as the Asexuality Caucus (Ace Caucus, for short) was to go to a play party. And yet, here I am, decked out in black lace, chained to a St. Andrew’s cross, getting my ass beat by an impact top and their impact apprentice.

We’re in a shadowy basement (that just so happens to be on the building’s third floor), and all around people are engaged in all manners of depravity. There’s a corner set up with plastic sheets for blood play; just to my left someone is midway through getting fisted 30 times for their 30th birthday; leggy dommes are walking around their silk-clad subs on chains and leashes. As for me, I grasp at the restraints around my wrists and grit my teeth as the flogger makes contact with my soft flesh. Finally, I let my mind go blank.

***Maybe I didn’t always know I was ace, but I can’t say there weren’t signs. In middle school, on the day we learned about birth control, our health teacher put a condom on a banana and I, in an elegant display of radical prudery and bad feminism, promptly passed out. “You must be sick,” the nurse worried. I went home, too embarrassed to protest. I sat pale faced next to my mother in the car, alone with the awful truth: I must be sick.

This feeling of sickness, brokenness, wrongness followed me into adulthood. On my first day of college, I wrote in my journal: “I hope it’s just that I haven’t met the right person and when I do I’ll desire those things, cause I want to desire those things but I don’t.” So distant was I from any sense of sexuality I couldn’t even bring myself to define what “those things” were. For years, I felt so alone and ashamed of my lack of sexual attraction. Then I joined the Ace Caucus.

The Ace Caucus formed maybe by accident, maybe by fate when a handful of friends found ourselves sitting together at a potluck. It was Rosh Hashanah, the start of a new year, and instead of celebrating being reinscribed in the book of life, we were talking, as so many do, about sex. But rather than the giddy gossip sharing or forlorn longing I was used to hearing, this conversation took a more detached tilt.

“Sex? I could honestly take it or leave it,” said River with a shrug.

“Me too, like lowkey I usually just get bored,” I added.

“I like sex,” Cal chimed in, “but I need to know the person really well first.”

Only one friend in our little circle looked on with confusion.  Confronted with an allo (non-asexual) perspective, we recognized each other anew. “Well, I’m ace,” Em offered, followed by a chorus of ace-spectrum affirmations. Suddenly, like multiple pointing spidermen, we saw ourselves in each other, registering our connection with shock and delight. The Ace Caucus was born.

At the very first meeting, several of us shared we were interested in going to a play party.

“I wanted to explore my own desires, and I thought observing others could give me a sense of what I might like,” Ace Caucus member George tells me.

“I was interested in a space where I could focus on sensation instead of worrying about the pressure to feel pleasure,” River adds. For me, a play party offered a controlled environment for exploration, without the nebulous expectations and one-on-one intensity of a tinder date.

It may seem like a contradiction, but much like a basement on the third floor, to those in the community, asexuality and play parties go together naturally. At a play party, everything is pre-negotiated, meaning each participant has control over whether things will go to a sexual place or not. There is an emphasis on consent and communication with the understanding that a scene can be stopped at any time for any reason. There are plenty of options for play partners, which for me takes away the fear of disappointing someone if our desires are misaligned. While it should be the case everywhere, at a play party I feel especially safe in knowing my boundaries will be respected and that I will have support if for some reason things go awry. But it’s not only about eliminating fear and pressure.

“You actually like this?” asks my friend X as they run a Delrin cane down my back before laying it across my now red and pulsating cheeks. It’s a playfully curious question, not aimed to shame. “Yes,” I answer, with a giggle.

After spending so long consumed by self-hatred over what I didn’t desire, it’s nice to admit I do actually like this. I really do. Truthfully though, it’s still somewhat hard to explain why. After all, I am quick to declare my general lack of interest in sex, yet some of the things I like could look sexual from the outside. At one party, I found myself on my back with binder clips on my nipples and bruises from a flicked pencil on my inner thighs. Was that sexual? At another, I made out with two strangers and we took turns sensually massaging each other’s backs. Did that count as a threesome? Earlier in this night, I helped organize a spontaneous wrestling tournament. Was it exhibitionism when I pinned my opponent, throwing the full weight of my body onto theirs, laughing maniacally to the crowd as I grasped their wrists and pressed my knee into their thigh? What about when I was pinned and flailed helplessly, humbled by a toppier switch?

***I believe in a queer, expansive definition of sex, so I don’t mean to imply that something is only sexual if genitals are involved. But for me, and for many of us in the Ace Caucus (and many others, ace and allo alike), kink just doesn’t feel sexual. It feels charged, but the charge has to do with intensity of sensation, with the thrill of playing with power dynamics, with sensuality, not necessarily with sexuality.

I don’t know how to explain what the absence of sexual attraction feels like, because I’ve never felt what it’s like to have sexual attraction in the first place. I guess the best I can say is that different people’s feelings of what is or is not sexual are different. Honestly, the question of what sex is doesn’t interest me that much. As a (mostly) sex-neutral asexual person (as opposed to sex-positive or sex-repulsed), I know when an activity is fun for me and when it’s maybe not my cup of tea but I’m willing to participate in it — versus when it’s not and I’m absolutely not interested. At least, that’s something I’m working on. Having the Ace Caucus helps. Claiming the label ace and building a community around it has given me the freedom to listen to my desires more closely and to trust myself more fully to make those distinctions.

In her essay Uses of the Erotic: The Erotic as Power, Audre Lorde describes the erotic as “an internal sense of satisfaction to which, once we have experienced it, we know we can aspire. For having experienced the fullness of this depth of feeling and recognizing its power, in honor and self-respect we can require no less of ourselves.” To me, what this means is I can define my aceness not by absence of sexual desire, but by the presence of finding (even demanding!) intimacy, depth of feeling, connection, and fullness outside of sex and in all parts of my life. I feel Lorde’s erotic all the time. I feel it when I get caught up in the flow of making art, when I take to the streets demanding justice and feel the interdependent solidarity of those marching with me, and I feel it at play parties where I can explore my desires on their own terms, without pressure imposed internally or externally.

As Ace Caucus member KJ puts it: “There’s whimsy to kink. That’s why we call it play! Why we go to play parties and do scenes!” Not to say vanilla sex can’t be whimsical, but there is a certain transformative magic to kink. Sometimes I feel like an anthropologist at play parties, taking in everything around me, conducting experiments like finding the correlation between how loud someone yelps to how hard I slap them. Sometimes I feel like an actor, putting on haughty, controlling airs. Sometimes I feel like a blank slate, wiped clean as I focus on the pain moving in waves through my body. In vanilla sex I often over-think what I’m supposed to do next. I try to stay present, but I get distracted or feel trapped. With a play partner I have the rules laid out for me, and I get to explore creatively within them. With a play partner, the playfulness is the point.

***Later in the night, I connect with someone because we both write musical theater. This is also the draw of play parties: community. One minute, we’re making out, stroking each other’s arms. The next, we’re sitting cross-legged, excitedly discussing our various projects and seeing if we know each other’s collaborators (we do). So much in western society feels pervasively and persistently oriented toward sex. It’s the subtext to much of American media and culture. Even in queer spaces, I feel this underlying sense that to be liberated is to be having mind-blowing orgasms all the time. It’s a relief that, here, people are explicit about what they want from an interaction. In this room, surrounded by fucking and sucking and fisting and cumming, the subtext is gone. If I wanted to have sex, I could. Seeing as I don’t, there’s space to be fully present for whatever I do want — and to decide intentionally, moment by moment.

It’s easy to get wrapped up in intellectualizing all of this, but truth be told, I also like play parties because I like to feel hot. I like the way my vegan leather garters press into my thigh as they hold up my ripped black stockings. I like my arms, my ass, and my chest all covered in bruises and the rainbow of colors they go through as they heal over the next few days or weeks. I like fulfilling someone else’s fantasies and watching them writhe in pleasure, knowing I’m the cause. One thing that scared me about identifying as ace was that I wouldn’t be seen as desirable. Learning about different types of desire (emotional, romantic, aesthetic, intellectual) helped, but not as much as showing up to a third floor basement, surrounded by hotties and looking around thinking I’m a part of this. I’m not sick, or broken, or wrong. I am welcome here, desired here, just as I am.

The impact top pulls out a brutal looking spiked paddle. They ask, “You said you have a high pain tolerance right?” I nod, excited, nervous. “Do you want to try this one?”

I’m so grateful to have found this space. I’m grateful to lean into the Lordean erotic, to connect with others in surprising ways, to not need sex to validate my hotness, my queerness, or my commitment to liberation.

I nod again. “Yes please,” I answer.

Then I stare straight ahead and brace myself for contact.

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