It might at first glance seem unusual to write a play about asexuality—the lack of sexual attraction to others. What does it mean to write about a lack of something? Wouldn’t an absence of attraction be a private concern, not a basis for conflict or political solidarity? Despite its seeming association with lack, asexuality has become an identity and a queer social movement in the U.S., one that has gained traction in television, on the internet, and, indeed, across the globe. Asexuality has become a felt presence, something that performs.
In 2018, when I was in graduate school at Stanford University, I was looking for plays that dealt with asexual experience. Finding nothing, I wrote and directed my own. I toured the production from Stanford to San Francisco, where it ran to sold out crowds. After that, I let the play sit for a while, not expecting much of it, but the script took on an unexpected life. Students and educators across the U.S. have contacted me every other month to talk about the play. It has been taught in a dozen schools across the country. And now, I am thrilled for the play to receive a Marathi translation for the first time.
This play, Can I Hold You?, emerged from a specific geography and cultural context, which makes translation a fascinating prospect. The term “asexuality” was popularized on the internet in the early 2000s through web forums and articles, and today it has a place in the LGBTQIA acronym as a sexual orientation like any other (Bogaert 38-39). However, there are traces of asexuality from different cultures and histories—from the mukhannathun poets of seventh-century Arabia who occupied asexual social roles (Hayem 133-134) to Queen Elizabeth I, who was known as “the virgin queen” (Taha). In 1948, the American sexologist Alfred Kinsey created the famous Kinsey Scale which positioned heterosexuality and homosexuality on a spectrum and charted people’s desire between the two. In his studies, he marked with an “X” those who lacked sexual attraction to others, who today we might see as asexual (Waters). In 1972, radical feminists in the U.S. penned the “Asexual Manifesto” to push back against the objectification of women in heterosexual culture (Waters). Our twenty-first century understanding of asexuality builds on these resonances (Przybylo and Cooper) but tends to imagine asexuality as a more solid identity, an essential part of self. Asexuality has often followed the path of gay and lesbian activism in the West fighting for visibility, recognition, and legal protections.
When I wrote Can I Hold You?, cultural awareness of asexuality in the U.S. was still relatively low. At the time, I would talk to everyday people about asexuality and mostly be met with blank stares. The play hoped to do some of that work of raising visibility and offering recognition for a largely invisible community. In 2017, I started attending a social meetup group in San Francisco for people on the asexual spectrum and met a group of attendees—mostly from the millennial generation—sharing their experience trying to date, feeling left out of nightlife, or being pressured into sex. I had just come out as asexual a few years before and was coming to terms with how that experience made me different from the sexual world around me. I had conversations with other asexuals as we spoke about the early representations emerging on television on series like Bojack Horseman. I asked people what they might want to see in a play about asexuality, and a year’s worth of discussion wove their way into the play I wrote. Key ideas were the importance of platonic relationships—not just sexual ones—and the challenges of navigating asexuality while also at the intersection of other identities including race and gender. Members of the group attended an early run-through and offered feedback. In this way, the ethos that birthed Can I Hold You? was quite local and community-based, which lends it many of its particular cultural references and political sensibilities.
What does this localness mean for translation? And how might the play’s asexuality resonate differently in Marathi? Can I Hold You? speaks to a dynamic resonant in many cultures—what asexuality studies scholars call “compulsory sexuality”—the social institutions and norms that equate the sexual with being human and imagine a lack of sexual attraction as a problem. Compulsory sexuality expresses itself in many ways—the expectation to get married and have children, the threat of sexual violence particularly to women and sexual minorities, and economies built around sexuality and the need to be attractive. Each culture is going to have its own manifestations of compulsory sexuality. “Asexuality” gives us language to name these pressures and form political solidarities among those who feel isolated by them. I am interested in asexuality as both an identity and a cultural force that challenges the premium placed on sexual desire.
I began this reflection by stating that asexuality performs, and here I want to emphasize that the term “asexual” is a tool to do things in the world. As we think about asexuality across cultures, I want to emphasize that not every environment needs to do asexuality the way we do in the United States. To act otherwise would turn asexuality into a colonial import, an accusation that regularly haunts other LGBT identities in the Global South. But folks find ways to make concepts their own and refashion them. Scholars of queer studies and transgender studies today often speak of queering and transing as verbs (Warner xxvi; Chaudhry and Stryker 199). Queer and transgender are certainly identities, but they are also hammers with which to reshape the world. I hope that asexuality and its translations similarly allow compelling pathways for thinking and doing in the world. Local organizers have built asexual groups in India (Asexual India), Chile (AseArro Chile), Vietnam (Asexual in Vietnam), Poland (Stowarzyszenie Asfera), and Bangladesh (Bangladeshi Asexuals Association), among many other countries, each with their own angle and politics.
I am grateful to Ashutosh Potdar for taking on this translation and navigating the many challenges that its linguistic specificity poses. How does one translate terms like “asexual” or “queer” into Marathi? How does one handle nonbinary characters who do not identify as a man or a woman and instead use “they/them” pronouns, especially when Marathi has only masculine and feminine forms? I am moved by how acts of translation often open new possibilities beyond how terms have resonated in English.
For example, Arab activists with the group AsexArab have translated “asexuality” into Arabic as لاجنسية “laajinsiyat”—a term which literally means “without sexuality” (“laa” + “jinsiyat”)(AsexArab). However, the second part of the term, “jinsiyat,” can mean both “sexuality” and “nationality.” Its root, “jins” means “type.” Thus, asexuality in Arabic could mean “without sexuality” or “without nationality.” The Arabic language discourse around asexuality opens up a possible resonance that to be asexual could challenge national borders. Indeed, asexual lives often pose challenges to the nation state and its pressures to birth future generations of worker-citizens.
A similar magic happens in the Spanish language around nonbinary gender identity. Spanish has masculine and feminine word forms, often with masculine words ending in “o” and feminine words ending in “a.” Activists around trans identity have proposed a gender-neutral word ending of “x.” So “Latino” and “Latina”—terms for those from Latin America—become “Latinx.” The “x” becomes a kind of cancellation or perhaps a crossroads. In fact, the “x” was the theme of the Hemispheric Institute of Politics and Performance’s conference in Mexico City in 2016 and is the theme of this year’s Performance Studies International (PSi) conference in Fortaleza, Brazil. In other words, transgender identity’s translations have opened up meanings beyond their original English usage.
I hope that this translation of Can I Hold You? can similarly offer you ways to use the play and its language beyond how I could imagine. Take what’s useful. Ignore the rest. Make it your own. Even in the U.S., this opening to resonance has been a key part of my experience as a playwright letting Can I Hold You? out into the world. When I first premiered the show in San Francisco, after each performance, audience members would come up to me and say that the play had helped them discover that they might be asexual. This was a beautiful impact. However, as importantly, many people would say that they don’t think they’re asexual but that they saw themselves in the play and its account of being pressured into wanting more sex than one actually wants. Thus, the play was both a catalyst for asexual identification and its resonances.
The play’s title, Can I Hold You?, is a question. On one hand, it is an invitation to a nonsexual form of intimacy, a platonic holding. On the other hand, it asks if a person can ever possess another and their desire. In this way, the play imagines a kind of love that is not a possession, that is more than a privatized form of intimacy advanced by neoliberal capitalism. This is the kind of love I feel for the script, a love that simultaneously holds onto the text and lets go.
With that said, here are some notes on the play’s form and content that offer additional context. I structured the play based on the form of the romantic comedy. This genre—mostly in film—is where culture sends us many of our messages about sexual and romantic love. Those on the asexual spectrum in the U.S. often have a conflicted relationship to the romantic comedy. It offers us many of our fantasies of what romantic love looks like, but it also sometimes creates unrealistic expectations about sex and attraction. With Can I Hold You?, I hoped to use the romantic comedy form to tell the story of a protagonist seeking romantic connection without expectation of sexual attraction. I want the audience to get invested in this romantic storyline, only to miss the protagonist’s platonic relationship with their roommate. With this battle for attention, I hope to expose the way we often prize romantic connections over platonic ones. For this reason, I’ve subtitled the play in English an “aromantic comedy” or a “platonic comedy,” a show that remakes the romantic comedy form around platonic love.
After the play’s run in San Francisco, my playwriting mentor, Young Jean Lee, the first Asian American woman to have a play produced on Broadway, connected me with a director, Jacob Sexton in New York City. We did a workshop and reading of the play and made significant edits to create the draft that formed the basis of the translation. This new draft created an ending that attempts to break the fourth wall, making more room for utopian possibilities beyond what had been an original unhappy ending.
The play in its original form is admittedly quite educational, and I say that without shame. In 2018, there was so little awareness of asexuality in the U.S. that I had to offer explanations for audiences who had not heard of asexuality. While for some, this metaphorical act of translation for non-asexual audiences might seem to detract from the play’s storyline, it was vital. It was part of creating a world that could hold asexuals within it and make the play accessible to a broad audience.
Since I wrote Can I Hold You?, there has been an enormous culture shift around asexuality in the United States. Now I can speak to most Americans in their 20s or 30s, and they will have heard of asexuality and not question it. I used to encounter frequent resistance to asexuality, even within LGBT community, but now asexuality has firmer foundations. Within theater, too, asexuality is making waves. After Can I Hold You? had its workshop in New York, the director, Jacob Sexton, workshopped his own play about asexuality, Hurricane, at Columbia University, mentored by the playwright David Henry Hwang.Liz Dooley wrote the play Iphigenia in Quarantine, adapting Greek tragedy to speak to asexual themes. I directed a workshop of Dooley’s play at Working Title Playwrights in Atlanta. Ben Jones has written All The Sex I Want for a workshop at the National Queer Theater and The Asexual Romance Fantasy Play for a workshop with the New Cosmopolitans. Maybe Stewart’s All the Wrong Places wrote beautifully about asexuality in a four-person show with characters of varying attraction. This year, asexuality made its debut on Broadway in Branden Jacobs-Jenkins’s play Purpose, which won the Pulitzer Prize and Tony Award for best new play. Asexual spaces in theater are finally emerging.
On a personal level, as someone teaching at a small college in the United States, I have been surprised by how many of my students identify as asexual and are taking asexual representation as a given. The work I sought as a young student and couldn’t find is now out there. With this translation into Marathi, I hope to hold that door open to ever more people. I am excited to see the directions you take with it as readers. May the play perform, not just as a lack, but an active presence in the world.
Works Cited
- AsexArab. “AsexArab.” WordPress. Accessed July 3, 2025. https://asexarab.wordpress.com/.
- Bogaert, Anthony. Understanding Asexuality. Rowman and Littlefield, 2012.
- Chaudhry, V Varun and Susan Stryker. “Ask a Feminist: Susan Stryker Discusses Trans Studies, Trans Feminism, and a More Trans Future with V Varun Chaudhry.” Signs 47, no. 3 (Spring 2022). https://doi.org/10.1086/717737.
- Hayem, Kit. Before We Were Trans: A New History of Gender. Seal Press, 2022.
- Przybylo, Ela and Danielle Cooper. “Asexual Resonances: Tracing a Queerly Asexual Archive,” GLQ vol. 20, no. 3, June 2014, pp. 297-318.
- Taha, Alaa Yaseen. “An Insight Into Asexuality.” TEDx Talk. Baghdad, 2019. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=iNsoNqh4CKQ.
- Warner, Michael. Fear of a Queer Planet: Queer Politics and Social Theory. University of Minnesota Press, 1993.
- Waters, Michael. “Finding Asexuality in the Archives.” Slate. March 6, 2020. https://slate.com/human-interest/2020/03/asexuality-history-internet-identity-queer-archive.html.
Images: Courtesy of Kari Barclay.