Straight (2 page)

It was an invention whose time had clearly come, for it took less than a century for “heterosexual” and “heterosexuality” to leap out of the honestly rather obscure medical and legal backwaters where they were born and become part of a vast and opaque umbrella sheltering an enormous amount of social, economic, scientific, legal, political, and cultural activity. Exactly how this happened is a complicated, diffuse story that takes place on many different stages at roughly the same time, over a span of time measured in decades.

We need not, however, labor under the delusion that “heterosexual” became such a culture-transforming success because it represented the long-awaited discovery of a vital and inescapable scientific truth. It wasn't. As we shall see, the original creation of “heterosexual” and “homosexual” had nothing to do with scientists or science at all. Nor did it have anything to do with biology or medicine. “Heterosexual” (and “homosexual”) originated in a quasi-legal context, a term of art designed to argue a philosophical point of legislature.

 

Perhaps this should not surprise us. Indeed, it can be argued that the biomedical business of sexuality has nothing to do with sexual orientation or sexual identity anyway. The materials and physiology of sexual activities are, on a strictly mechanical level, a separate problem from the subjective mechanics of attraction or desire, as rape—something that can and does happen to people without regard to biological sex, age, condition, or consent—attests with such brutal efficiency. Separate from human sexual orientation or identity in a different way are the chemistry and alchemy of human conception, which can, after all, take place in a petri dish. There is, biomedically speaking, nothing about what human beings do sexually that requires that something like what we now think of as “sexual orientation” exists. If there were, and the attribute we now call “heterosexuality” were a prerequisite for people to engage in sex acts or procreate, chances are excellent that we would not have waited until the late nineteenth century to figure out that it was there.

“Heterosexual” became a success, in other words, not because it represented a new scientific verity or capital-T Truth. It succeeded because it was
useful.
At a time when moral authority was shifting from religion to the secular society at a precipitous pace, “heterosexual” offered a way to dress old religious priorities in immaculate white coats that looked just like the ones worn among the new power hierarchy of scientists. At a historical moment when the waters of anxiety about family, nation, class, gender, and empire were at a rather hysterical high, “heterosexual” seemed to offer a dry, firm place for authority to stand. This new concept, gussied up in a mangled mix of impressive-sounding dead languages,[
3
] gave old orthodoxies a new and vibrant lease on life by suggesting, in authoritative tones, that science had effectively pronounced them natural, inevitable, and innate.

What does all this have to do with me, my partner, and the unanswered question of which multiple-choice box I should tick? Plenty. The history of “the heterosexual” lurks unexamined not just in our beliefs about our inmost private selves, but also in our beliefs about our bodies, our social interactions, our romances, our family lives, the way we raise our children, and, of course, in our sex lives. Virtually everyone alive today, especially in the developed world, has lived their entire lives in a culture of sexuality that assumes that “heterosexual”
and “homosexual” are objectively real elements of nature.

As a result of this pervasiveness, heterosexuality is like air, all around us and yet invisible. But as we all know, the fact that we can see through air doesn't mean it can't exert force, push things around, and create friction. In the process of asking questions about my own life, I have had to learn to think about heterosexuality like an aircraft pilot thinks about the air: as something with a real, tangible presence, something that is not only capable of but is constantly in the process of influencing if not dictating thoughts, actions, and reactions. If I, or any of us, are to be able to decide whether or not we or our relationships qualify as “heterosexual,” it behooves us to understand what that means. This history represents the attempt to begin to comprehend what exactly this invisible wind is, where it comes from, what it's made of, and where it might be pushing you and me and all of us.

 

For something that has such a monolithic aura of inevitability and authority about it, it often seems that we have a difficult time saying for sure exactly what, and who, is heterosexual. Recently we have witnessed a wave of loudly, politically heterosexual Larry Craigs, Mark Foleys, and Bob Allens all neck-deep in scandal over secretive same-sex liaisons. In 2004, the phrase “on the down low” entered the national vocabulary thanks to Oprah Winfrey's bully pulpit, instantly familiarizing and frightening a generation with the phenomenon of the heterosexually identified married man who has surreptitious sex with other men.

This shouldn't have shocked anyone, really. We've known full well since Kinsey that a large minority—survey numbers vary, but Kinsey claimed 37 percent, and other surveys have agreed that it is at least that high—of men have at least one same-sex sexual experience in their lives. And even this should have been predictable, given the vast evidence from centuries past of married men who were known to enjoy sexual liaisons with other men. Indeed, they were often punished for it, which is how we know.

There have, in other words, been hundreds of thousands, probably millions of married men whose intimate lives could be characterized
as simultaneously straight and not. The question is, Are these husbands heterosexual? And how do we decide?

The answer, of course, depends on where you draw your lines. In turn, where we draw the lines is not a legal question or a medical question or a scientific question or even a moral question. It's a social question. There is no ultimate high council in charge of heterosexuality, not even an
Académie française
whose uniformed experts determine its official usages and rules. No act of Congress or Parliament exists anywhere that defines exactly what heterosexuality is or regulates exactly how it is to be enacted. On the subject of the parameters and qualifications of straightness, the International Standards Organization has been conspicuously silent. What heterosexuality “is” is not handed down to us from on high, and it is far from concrete or monolithic.

Historically, what heterosexuality “is” has been a synonym for “sexually normal.” Early in the history of the term, it was even used interchangeably with the term “normal-sexual.” And there, as they say, is the rub. “Normal” is not a mode of eternal truth; it's a way to describe commonness and conformity with expectations. But what is most common and expected, in terms of our sexual lives or any other aspect of the human condition, does not always remain the same.

Sexual expectations and behaviors, like all other social expectations and behaviors, change over time. Within living memory there have been massive shifts on questions like whether women were supposed to feel sexual desire or have orgasms, whether sex outside of marriage could ever be openly acceptable, and the permissibility and desirability of sex acts other than penis-in-vagina intercourse. Casting further back in time, historians have tracked major shifts in other aspects of what was considered common or “normal”
in sex and relationships: Was marriage ideally an emotional relationship, or an economic and pragmatic one? Was romantic love desirable, and did it even really exist? Should young people choose their own spouses, or should marriage partners be selected by family and friends? Even assuming that we speak only of interactions and relationships between males and females, these relationships have simply not always been the same, nor have the people participating in them been expected to do, think, feel, or experience the same sorts of things. What “normal–sexual” is, above anything else, is
relative.

A similar situation holds in regard to the beliefs that are held about why it should be that women feel desire for men and vice versa. Beyond the old tired tug-of-war over nature and nurture, there are numerous other contestants vying for pride of place as being The One True Reason that men and women want anything to do with one another in the first place. The religious often make claims that different-sex attractions are “God-given,” others that they are “universal.” With an eye to sexual dimorphism, some determinists announce that an interest in a different-sex sexual partner is “biological.” Dozens of scientists and pseudoscientists in dozens of fields have hurried to supply their own, ever more specialized, hypotheses. The cacophony of opinion on this does not appear to have reduced anyone's faith that there must, inevitably, be a right answer to be found. Having decided that heterosexuality exists, we maintain a correspondingly unshakable faith that it exists for a reason. Hardly anyone seems to notice or care that we go back and forth, and then back and forth some more, about what that reason might be.

Nor do we seem to achieve consensus on where to place heterosexuality's limits, or even how best to police them. Often, points of damage or destruction—the places where a thing becomes not
this
but
that
—are useful places to look for the boundaries that limn definitions. Not here. At various times and in various places, people have believed that heterosexuality (or normal-sexuality) could be destroyed by, among other things, becoming a Catholic monk, reading novels, not moving your bowels often enough, cross-dressing (including women wearing pants), too much education, not enough religion, divorce, improper ejaculation, masturbation, the abolition of slavery, women's working for pay, and too much leisure time for anyone.

Even if we are not inclined to paranoia about heterosexuality's potential destruction by the literary, the constipated, and the apostate, we still have to reckon with situational homosexuality. Sometimes, even the most devoutly heterosexual find themselves in circumstances where their normal pattern of being sexually interested in different-sex partners seems to go right out the window. As unnumbered sailors, prisoners, and boarding-school boys have demonstrated, whether one behaves heterosexually or homosexually sometimes seems like little more than a matter of circumstance. Does the experience
of situational homosexuality fundamentally change whether a person is heterosexual or “normal-sexual”? Unsurprisingly, the answers are all over the map, as are the explanations for why a phenomenon like situational homosexuality should exist in the first place.

Despite the fact that most of us use the term “heterosexual” with enormous (and cavalier!) certainty, there seems to be no aspect of “heterosexual” for which a truly iron-clad definition has been established. There seems to be general agreement that “heterosexual” has to do with men and women and the approved sorts of sexual, emotional, social, familial, and economic attractions and activities that might go on between them, but the overall picture is ambiguous and the details change depending on who you ask and when in time you look. There is a Heisenbergian quality about defining “heterosexual”: the more precisely the term is being defined, the more likely it is that the term is only being defined by the lights of a single moment in time and space.

Similarly telling in their grand and vexing ambiguities are two other things we inevitably talk about when we talk about heterosexuality: gender and sex, both in the sense of “having sex” and in terms of biology.

“To have sex” can mean lots of things. It might mean “to be a creature with a biological sex.” Or it could mean “to be gendered,” as in “androgynous fashions,” “male pipe fittings,” “chick flicks.” It can mean having a libido, in the sense of “oversexed” or “undersexed,” or simply having genitals, as when we refer to the vulva and all its parts as “a woman's sex.” Colloquially, we most often use it to mean “to engage in sexual activity,” but what this in turn denotes is alas far from clear. It could simply mean “to engage in erotic activity,” but it could as easily mean “to engage in penis-in-vagina penetration,” “to attempt to procreate,” or “to engage in erotic activity leading to orgasm.” Any, or indeed all, of these things could be true and relevant when talking about heterosexuality. This is why we can't assume that “having sex” only means one thing, even if we're operating on the assumption that we're talking about sexual activity between partners of different biological sexes. Only one of the many sex acts of which our species is capable, after all, requires the simultaneous engagement of both a penis and a vagina.

When it comes to “sex,” context is king: its three tiny letters wear an awful lot of hats. This is true even within fairly narrow and strict-seeming
fields, such as biology. The thing we call “biological sex” is the diagnosis of physical sex made according to the observation of bodily characteristics, and also the constellation of bodily characteristics that are observed to make that diagnosis. The late Johns Hopkins sexologist John Money identified seven different criteria for a diagnosis of biological sex in humans, including genetic or chromosomal sex, internal anatomy, external anatomy, sex hormones, and the type of gonads an individual possesses. This is extremely useful, as it emphasizes the very real possibility that in any given individual, these criteria will not all necessarily point to the same diagnosis. Sex chromosome anomalies, “ambiguous” genitalia that in some way or other blur the difference between male- and female-typical genitals, hormone levels that are far from textbook, and gonads that are somewhere between ovary and testis are all fairly common and naturally occurring.

There is little agreement, however, about how these atypical biologies should be identified. Nor is there consensus on how they might best fit in, socially and psychologically, to a binary system that traditionally has no space for them. Attempts to force people with nonbinary biology to fit into the binary mold of male and female have had highly mixed results and have created enormous controversy, not least for sexologists like John Money.[
4
] The usual biological sexes recognized by biomedical science are female, male, and, for conditions like my partner's XXY chromosomes, intersex. But, as should be clear from the fact that my partner's body, neither male nor female in so many major biological ways, was uncontroversially diagnosed as male when he was born, even these lines are frequently blurry.