Asexual Film Review: Dear Luke, Love, Me

I’m delighted to share an explicitly (“on-the-page”) asexual feature film with you today — a queerplatonic love story. The world could use more of these, since compulsory sex and romance serves exploitative systems.

What is “queerplatonic”?

Queerplatonic: Not friendship, not romance as socially sanctioned, but some other, third thing. I don’t want to say it’s something “in between” because it’s like the non-binary of gender — queerplatonic relationships refuse to be defined by existing societal definitions at all.

Dear Luke, Love, Me (2025), written by Mallie McCown and directed by Guillermo Diaz, is an American independent film which offers insights into how it feels to be young, and in a queerplatonic relationship.

The film itself doesn’t use the term “queerplatonic” but it’s right there in the tagline: “We were never JUST best friends” and also in the logline:

Spanning over a decade, soulmates Penny and Luke struggle to maintain their queer-platonic significant-other relationship while dealing with societal pressures to find something “normal.”

— Logline at IMDb, which uses the more widely understood concepts of “soulmate” and “significant-other” alongside “queerplatonic”, which is a word common in queer aroace circles.

The minimising phrase “JUST friends” dogs asexuals and aromantics the world over. First, it minimises the importance of friendship. Second, although asexuality is defined by one’s non-normative experience of sexual attraction, it is so much more than that. A feature of “asexual culture” is a rejection of relationship hierarchies, which consistently positions friendship as less important than romance. This is not simply a political position — though it does tend to become one once you realise the forces pushing you towards romantic partnerships — but is a typically aroace way of experiencing the world at an intuitive level.

Aces will likely recognise themselves in these characters. Allosexuals new to the concept of relationship anarchy may be encouraged to reflect on which parts of their own friendships they reluctantly set aside once they became officially an “Adult”.

I recommend watching this film with your closest friend/s. You’ll likely want to talk about it afterwards…

AFTER WATCHING

Here are some post-viewing questions in case you’d like some to kick you off:

1. How do you define “queerplatonic”? Have you ever experienced it yourself? Do you think queerplatonic relationships are common? And do you think this film is a realistic example of a queerplatonic relationship?
2. Do you identify with either of the main characters? If so, do you identify more with Luke or with Penelope? Does the film itself encourage identification with one character over the other? If so, how?
3. How does this love story compare to genre romance (in structure, tropes and characterisation)? Where does it deviate the most?
4. Did you find yourself frustrated by Penelope and/or Luke’s reactions/decisions at any point? If so, what did you find yourself wishing what they would do/say instead?
5. Do either or both of these characters seem Autistic to you? If so, how so?
6. This film messes with linear time. What effect did this editing decision have on your viewing experience? How did it affect the storytelling?
7. Who changes more over the course of the story, Penelope or Luke? How do they change?
8. Insofar as Penelope and Luke came to understand themselves, what in their environments and social milieu helped them grow and change/stay the same?
9. How would you classify the ending? (Happy, happy-for-now, tragic, or some other thing?)
10. Think of other on-the-page asexual stories you’ve seen or read. How do they compare? differ?

VARIOUS THOUGHTS

***This section contains spoilers***

Where are all the asexual men?

The ace community is known to skew strongly female and genderqueer. In fact, there are more non-binary aces in asexual communities and surveys than there are cisgender men, and of course, non-binary/agender people are rare in the wider population.

No one fully understands why so few men identify as asexual, but it’s easy to ask the wrong question: “Why are most asexual people not men?” when the real question is, “Where are they?”

I don’t for a second believe there are fewer ace men than other genders. I simply think they’re invisible (and invisibilized). An oriented attraction is unfortunately requisite for entry into (hegemonic) masculinity. Cis men are not encouraged to investigate any queerness. That’s just for starters. But just as we are learning the Autistic population is nowhere near as male as once thought (it’s evenly distributed between men/women, and much higher among genderqueers), we will get to the point where we are including masculine versions of asexuality, whatever that looks like.

I believe Dear Luke, Love, Me is an excellent film portrayal of what cisgender masculine asexuality often looks like.

Luke confides his asexuality to Penny, but there’s no evidence he has come out to anyone else, even including the normie* woman he ends up choosing to spend his life with. She’s so very normie she’s even a tax lawyer — a socially sanctioned, lucrative, safe, normie career. Towards the end of Pen and Luke’s relationship, Luke and the tax lawyer embark on their normie life together. Has Luke told her he’s asexual? We don’t actually know, but we can put the pieces together: No. Given all the other things we can deduce about this cishet tax lawyer who has likely (explicitly or implicitly) banned her husband from keeping in touch with his old friend from uni, she would not have pursued a relationship with Luke had he told her from early on that he will never find her sexually attractive and actually, can she please not show him her naked body.

(By the way, normie is short for normative, not normal.)

I believe the vast majority of asexual men are married-with-kids types, leading straight-passing lives, identifying as straight because they are romantically interested in women, and are highly rewarded in their partnerships with women. They are not rewarded to nearly the same extent by proximity to queer subcultures. That’s where the missing asexual men are. That’s why almost all the “male” asexuals are non-binary/agender and/or queer in other ways as well.

As for their wives, they may tell a different story. But we don’t often hear those stories, because straight women are not supposed to be the more desirous partner, or the consistently initiating partner. While their woman friends complain that their husbands always want sex, they will be sitting quietly and ashamed, wondering what’s wrong with them that their husband doesn’t seem to want them. Don’t all men desire sex constantly?

Note: It’s possible — and not even rare — to be both asexual and also the more desiring partner. There’s more to desiring partnered sex than the presence of person-specific attraction. Testosterone in particular influences libido, and for those who’ve been through a testosterone-fuelled puberty, libido can encompass almost every aspect of desiring. Also, the dominant culture teaches learned responses to specific female body parts.

In short, it’s possible men like Luke marry cishet women and they both enjoy their sex life together, especially if his partner does not need to be found sexually attractive in any overt way. No one can keep that up over the course of a lifetime together.

But… I don’t think Luke will enjoy a normative sex life with his normie wife. I don’t think that’s what happens to the vast majority of invisibilized aces irl, who ignore their own desires (including the desire not to have partnered, unclothed sex etc.), choosing instead to seem ‘normal’.

Note that although asexual men are invisiblized in real life, on screen the situation is reversed. We see a disproportionate number of male aces in fiction, especially in TV and film. (The Ace Couple does an annual count-up while critiquing the GLAAD report.)

Dear Luke, Love, Me offers some insight into how and why a man like Luke chooses as he does. But mostly, the story focuses very much on the microworld created by Penny and Luke, separated from the wider cultural forces at play. This storytelling decision works, because we all know what those are.

At least, aces do. And this is a film for the ace gaze.

The Autistic aceness of Dear Luke, Love, Me

What is ace culture? I’ve written in depth about it already: Asexuality is all about pleasure, actually.

Due in part to the overlap between the ace and Autistic communities, asexuals tend to take joy in many things other than sex. We see that play out here, when Penny and Luke — as uni students — embrace their childlike natures, refusing to cast aside their joys in favour of appearing grown up, mature and responsible. I loved this aspect of the film, and when Luke loses this side of himself, casting the playful Penny aside in the process, the story now becomes a love tragedy, by my reckoning. Not just a love tragedy — a personal tragedy.

See also: What Asexual and Autistic communities have in common.

Dear Luke, Love, Me is an Autistic-culture film as much as it is an asexual film. I have no idea if this was a deliberate writing choice — that doesn’t really matter. But Luke in particular seems on-the-page Autistic, especially when they’ve left the zoo without seeing the exhibition they were particularly wanting to see, because Luke can’t cope with a change in circumstances. My read of that scene is that Penny had a classic “meet cute” moment in the aquarium after bumping into another guy, and Luke felt inadequate. But whether it was a ‘change of plans’ or that moment which prompted Luke’s bad feelings that day, Penny’s advice to roll more with changes rather than expecting everything to be laid out in advance indicates a broader pattern.

Penny, too, seems disconnected from her peers as she embarks on her new student life at Brown. With help from her friend (and eventual husband) she manages to integrate, but not in a way that comes naturally to most people.

Although the film avoids labels, aside from the macro label of ‘asexual’, Penny describes her own pattern of attraction, and appears to be demisexual. I have argued that demisexuality should be considered the default pattern of attraction for Autistics, until shown otherwise.

I really love, too, the decision to connect Penny and Luke to nature. Near the beginning, they are showing hugging a giant tree. The symbolism here is multivalent:

1. Penny and Luke stand on each side of the massive trunk, physically separated but also connected because they are enjoying the same moment together, simultaneously.
2. The giant tree connects these two humans to the broader ‘Mother Nature’ — whereas aces frequently wince at “sex makes us human” and similar normative sentiments, what makes us human is so much bigger than that — symbolised by the enormity of this tree.
3. By appreciating the natural world, Luke and Penny are having a non-religious spiritual experience — a genuinely grounding, beyond-the-self experience which allosexuals often achieve via sex, but also often fail to achieve via any other means. The symbolism of the tree, when combined with the hikes into the woods over years, serves to remind audiences that there are bigger things than sex.
4. In fact, as ace communities AND solo-by-choice communities would like to remind any smug couples out there, the act of romantic/sexual partnering inevitably involves a shutting-out of the wider world. Sure, it’s necessary for reproduction. There are very real hormonal things happening between couples — pair bonding, yadda yadda. But we can’t all be like that all of the time and ALSO connect fully to our wider communities. There’s a reason why the limerant phase comes to a natural end somewhere between 3 and 18 months. Luke and Pen’s connection to nature symbolises connection to all things bigger than themselves. So, although the camera focuses on their microworld, this couple is both immersed in their relationship and also able to look to the joys that exist beyond it. This, too, is a very Autistic experience of the world: Details plus big picture, but missing the normative middle. If I had to try and describe, in a nutshell, what Autism actually is, that would be it.

Dear Luke, Love, Me is not your typical story structure

I’m all for new ways of telling stories.

Dear Luke, Love, Me has the feel of a romcom at times, but it is not a romance.

There’s nothing wrong with genre romance, although there’s also nothing wrong with asking where some of its common tropes came from.

Or even interrogating the romance genre’s structure — which is by nature linear and hierarchal, in accordance with the common view that romance is more valuable than close friendship, and that if friends turn to lovers and that doesn’t work, then there’s no going back. Even the word ‘back’ is a problem, because that’s not how things need to be at all. In a different social system, we could value all types of close relationships without prioritising and fetishizing sexual ones. Luke and Penny manage to ‘go back’ to being friends… until external forces kick in.

Why am I so confident this film is not genre romance? Well, there are certain things a genre romance must include, and if it doesn’t, the story doesn’t satisfy genre readers, and becomes something else.

Romance often has a love-triangle set up, and we do see this here. Other people come in to Penny and Luke’s lives and, at each encounter, they must decide what to do about their own close relationship. Keep or ditch? However, unlike in genre romance, the stories around the love opponents get very little airtime. When Pen goes out with her ‘gay workmate’, we are shown scenes of the workmate trying to kiss her. We are left with very little of that story — is he really gay? If not, did Penny get that wrong, or was she lying to Luke to pacify him? Are those microscenes flashbacks or flashforwards? None of this is resolved, because it does not matter. This is a love story between Luke and Penny, even though they do not end up together. If this were genre romance, the narrative might focus instead on Penny and the man she eventually marries, with Luke as the ‘third guy’.

As another example, in romance, love opponents meet each other within the first 10 pages or so — probably earlier. This is called a “meet cute”.

There’s no “meet cute” between Penny and Luke. Instead, we see Penny and Luke being silly together. The film opens with Luke wearing Teenage Mutant Ninja Tortoise* make-up all over his face (symbolic of masking more generally, of course) and Penny has green all around her mouth. They’re drunk or high and have just kissed. But it wasn’t sexy, or possibly even sexual.

Then we see them decorating a dorm room together. Although the pair must have only recently met, it seems to us that Pen and Luke have already known each other for ages. This editing decision works perfectly. Because sometimes that’s how it is — you meet someone and you hit it off right away, and it’s like you’ve known each other forever. If it happens with friends, it can definitely happen with romantic partners — not a ‘love at first sight’ thing, but ‘comfort at first sight’.

Genre romance requires more tension — misunderstandings, rupture and repair. So often, this relies on the love opponents’ poor communication skills. It takes a truly talented storyteller to write genre romance and also to depict mature communication skills. I find genre romance written by allistics to be overall quite frustrating in this respect. If I’m yelling “Just communicate!” at the page, I’m not really enjoying the experience.

Luke and Penny do not have this problem. Their communication is good. Of course, communication requires self-awareness, and that’s the harder thing. Their failures to ‘communicate’ are first and foremost failures to know themselves and what they truly desire. If Luke had stopped just once to ask himself what he wants, the outcome for his life may have been very different. But how many of us fail to ask this very question when we are young? Certain parenting styles, and the entire educational system, teach kids that any personal desires will not be tolerated even if harboured.

How self-aware is Luke? When Luke gets upset over Penny receiving a back massage from a lesbian woman at a party, they take their argument to another room. Within the very same scene, Luke admits that his outburst came from a feeling of deep insecurity. This quick turnaround shows a level of self-insight which waxes and wanes across the film — I noticed the exact same thing about the asexual male character in the other indie ace film I watched recently: Slow, (2023) directed by Marija Kavtaradzė. Both Luke and Dovydas come to the realisation that they are asexual, but then they seem to stagnate. Whereas we never find out what happens to Dovydas after his asexuality leads to the downfall of his mixed-orientation relationship, we do find out what happens to Luke in the medium term — complete rejection of (a)sexual self.

Especially for aces who more roundly reject sex acts, this is not typically what it’s like to be asexual at all. Once you realise you’re asexual, typically the next step is to question your relationship to gender. You might also start to think about your neurotype. Then you might wonder if partnering is something you want (regardless of romantic orientation — which is a separate question.) Newly-identified aces also commonly start to open up options for gender in our partners. If we’re not attracted to specific people, or if we are not genital-focused, maybe we don’t need to specify gender…? And for partnering aces, perhaps polyamory or consensual non monogamy is an option…

However, I’m generalising about aces who find ourselves attracted to ace community — the most visible and vocal of us — the types who write about asexuality online, for instance.

Though they both stagnate in the same kinds of ways, the characters of Luke and Dovydas are believable fictional examples of asexual cis(?) men who decide not to go any further with their exploration of self: Self-examination is painful, it’s hard work and queerness also steals cishet male privilege from them. For such men, the loss of privilege may indeed be more painful than loss of ‘true sexual self’ within the context of a straight-passing relationship. Because of how privilege works in our society, these men are — arguably — making the more sensible, logical life choices for themselves by choosing the normie route.

Rejection of sexual-self is, of course, frustrating to see. But just because a story frustrates does not mean it shouldn’t have been told that way, or that it isn’t saying something valuable. A valuable message of Dear Luke, Love, Me is that queerness exists in places you wouldn’t think of looking — maybe even within yourself. That straight seeming dude you know? He could be ace. Or bi+. Or poly, or, or, or…

I hope allosexual audiences leave this film thinking, “Sexual attraction goes beyond what I assumed at first glance. We can never really know another person or another relationship by looking at them from the outside.”

And maybe, just maybe, some viewers will learn a little something from self-actualised asexuals, reclaiming the joys of close friendship, leaning into childlike pleasures, or super-specific interests. Those joys are too often cast aside once the clamps of romantic partnerships and traditional family-building tighten on us all.

Larre Bildeston is the author of a contemporary (aromantic) asexual romance The Space Ace of Mangleby Flat (2023), set in Australia and New Zealand. (Also an audiobook.)