Straight (27 page)

A few decades ago, it probably would've been a pretty good bet. When a man's allegiance to the patriarchal status quo is clear and seemingly genuine—husband and father credentials are particularly relevant—there is a tendency to look the other way if, upon occasion, he indulges in a same-sex liaison. Pledging allegiance to patriarchal standards can take many forms, including that of the role the man takes vis-à-vis his male partners. From ancient Rome to present-day Latin America, men who take the insertive role in sex with other men are more likely to be perceived as masculine and sexually respectable, “normal” men who are merely making an exception in terms of the type of body on which they are doing sex. Men who take the receptive role with other men, on the other hand, are vilified for bending over, for giving up power, for being effeminate faggots. It is a crude shorthand, but demonstrative.

Such demonstrations of allegiance need not be so direct, let alone genital. For many decades, until his death from AIDS forced the issue out into the open, actor Rock Hudson successfully concealed his gay identity from the general public. Hudson's leading-man film career, and particularly his roles in the three sunnily heteronormative romantic comedies in which he was paired with the wholesome Doris
Day, lent credence to a heterosexuality in which the public clearly wanted to believe. Similarly outed by his eventual AIDS death was legendary conservative lawyer Roy Cohn, best known for his roles in prosecuting the case against Julius and Ethel Rosenberg and as chief counsel to Joseph McCarthy during the Army-McCarthy hearings of 1954. During his life, Cohn was sexually active with other men, but he effectively silenced any attempted revelations of his homosexuality through staunch conservatism and a pattern of going after, in his role as McCarthy's attack dog, “communist sympathizers” who were actually often less communist than they were simply homosexual.[
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Such privileged immunity, however, has its limits. Neither Hudson nor Cohn would be likely to pull off their double lives quite so easily today. The growth of a distinctively LGBT culture—that is, a culture created and primarily participated in by people who self-identify as some variety of non-heterosexual, and a corresponding successful creation within mainstream culture of a doxa of gayness—has made it more difficult than it used to be to enjoy the advantages of a “wide stance.”

In the past fifty years or so, Westerners as a culture have come to believe that the quality of “being gay” exists naturally in a significant proportion of the population. We may be divided about the cause, or whether there even has to be one, but contemporary Westerners are reasonably firm in our belief that heterosexuality and homosexuality exist, and are neither chosen nor voluntary. People who are gay, most Westerners now believe, are not being willfully perverse, nor are they deviants. They are acting according to their natures and are, for lack of a better phrase, just being themselves. This rhetoric disguises the complicated ways that culture, doxa, experience, and relationships work together to shape our personalities, desires, and beliefs. But this is not new either. We have a long tradition of blaming (or crediting) who we are to more or less numinous, arbitrary forces like God, Nature, or Freudian psychodevelopmental mechanics. The “just being yourself” mantra is no less confounding. It implies that the development of selfhood is an unmediated, and thus authoritative, closed loop. It creates a doxa of sexual orientation that asserts that the “authentic” sexual self simply is what it is, organic and spontaneous, and whether expressed or suppressed, will always be the same.

We also have acquired a doxa of the closet and of the phenomenon of “coming out,” further testament to the effectiveness of LGBT activism and visibility. The closet has become a common idiom, used to describe any secret allegiance that seems somehow shameful or contrary to public image; currently, some members of the American political Far Right seem to adore accusing President Barack Obama of being a “closet Muslim.” The fact that “closet” is now shorthand for hiding means that it has become doxic. It works because we all know what the closet is, we understand how it works, and we know what it means: to be closeted is to deny one's authentic self, an unhappy experience that any sane person would want to avoid. More to the point, we believe that life in the closet is hypocritical.

Thus when someone who has self-identified publicly as heterosexual is revealed to have engaged in same-sex activity on the quiet, the very fact that he attempted to conceal it is instantly meaningful. The doxa of gayness and of the closet means that the revelation of a same-sex liaison appears as the revelation of a true self. Anything less than an open admission of gayness, or at least bisexuality, on the part of the person at the center of such a revelation is understood implicitly to be an instance of “the lady doth protest too much.”

The degree to which this doxa of gayness has become part of mainstream culture can be gauged by the fact that it is now typically the mainstream media, rather than specifically LGBT media, that leads the feeding frenzy when a same-sex scandal erupts. “Outing,” once the controversial bailiwick of activist journalists from the queer community, has become mainstream. Queer journalists like Michelangelo Signorile, who famously defended the practice as an explicit activist strategy after posthumously outing multimillionaire publisher Malcolm Forbes in 1990, saw outing as a way of forcibly holding the powerful and closeted accountable for their failures to support LGBT rights, which in many cases bolstered their fortune, privilege, and immunity from homophobic criticism. The mainstream media learned from this model, and adapted it to the needs of the status quo. Mainstream media outing is done simultaneously as the policing of normative boundaries and the exposure of hypocrisy.

The hypocrisy piece is critical. Our doxa of sexual orientation includes an interesting and exacting mode of personal honor. Identifying
or being identified as homosexual is for the most part no longer a mortal disgrace in most of the West. The number of countries and US states legalizing same-sex marriage continues to grow. Even in America, which has come to seem somewhat backwards in terms of attitudes to LGBT people by comparison to some of its first-world neighbors, approximately 50 percent now find “gay and lesbian relations” morally acceptable, according to a 2010 Gallup report.[
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] What is now seen as most shameful, with regard to homosexuality, is lying about it. “Coming out” has come to connote a certain degree of ethical rectitude, a willingness to place honesty above convenience. It is a quality many people appear to consider admirable. When celebrities come out as gay, as singer Ricky Martin did in 2010, they are applauded not just by fellow queers, but by a sizeable chunk of the mainstream that values the display of authenticity, accountability, and honesty. Certainly the excuse-making and backpedalling of many of the powerful conservative men who find themselves outed by the media—Craig's “wide stance” or Florida politician Bob Allen's incredible 2007 assertion that he offered an undercover officer money for permission to perform fellatio on him because he was afraid of black men—are viewed in the mainstream media as dishonorable, unmasculine, and ridiculous.

In this way, the mainstreaming of LGBT culture has succeeded in reducing the assimilative power of “heterosexual.” The development of gayness doxa, however, succeeds partly because it too pays allegiance to a philosophy that sexuality is based on the conceit that the human species inherently sorts its sexuality neatly into, as Kinsey groused, “sheep and goats.” This is a gross oversimplification, and it does us a disservice. As University of Utah psychologist Lisa Diamond's work has shown, it appears that, particularly for women, same-sex relationships and desires can genuinely be episodic. Regardless of general tendencies to be attracted to one biological sex or another, it is truly possible in some cases to love and desire a specific person regardless of plumbing.[
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] Because of the either/or nature of our sexual orientation scheme, though, these both/and experiences, which are relatively common, are often erased, both from mainstream acknowledgment and from the historical record.

Certainly the doxa of gayness as it currently exists in the Western
mainstream is imperfect. Its effects are limited, and the understandings it promotes are incomplete. But it is an amusing irony that heterosexuality's ability to take a wide stance with regard to assimilating same-sex liaisons has been undone, to the significant degree it has, by the very institutionalization of a clear split between homosexual and heterosexual. In an era in which we are also seeing an interesting mainstream middle ground coalesce along the borderlines of heterosexual and homosexual—the turf of “bromance,” “bicurious,” and “heteroflexible”—we can see the open acknowledgement of conflicting desires. In one sense, such terms represent nothing more than the same old bid to claim the emotional and erotic opportunities inherent in a “wide stance” while retaining the option of sheltering under the sturdy roof of straightness. In another way, overtly claiming a middle ground (albeit with more than a whiff of entitlement to hetero privilege) is an exciting venture beyond the binary. From the standpoint of what heterosexual has been, and will be, both bear watching.

WHERE
DO
BABIES COME FROM?

A child born today could, as Stephanie Coontz points out, fairly easily have five parents: two genetic parents who donate egg and sperm, a host mother who gestates and gives birth to the child, and two adoptive parents who raise the child and do the practical work of parenting.[
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] This is a dazzling possibility, so foreign to the ways that humans have acquired children for the vast majority of our history that many people would still find it difficult, if you'll pardon the pun, to conceive. Artificial insemination of a human was documented as early as 1790 by anatomist John Hunter and was likely practiced even earlier, but the removal of sexual activity from the begetting of children was a subject fit only for science fiction as recently as 1932, when Aldous Huxley depicted the Fertilization Rooms and baby factories of his
Brave New World.
The first baby conceived via in-vitro laboratory fertilization (IVF), Louise Joy Brown, was born forty-six years after
Brave New World,
to worldwide amazement and controversy.

The Catholic Church has been particularly hostile to nonsexual methods of conception, contending that they, like contraception, separate conception from “the marriage act” in a way that was contrary to “laws written into the actual nature of man and of woman.”[
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] This is not
surprising, since the Church's entire dogma and doctrine of sexuality has, since its inception, been predicated on the assumption that the need for children is the only thing that can rightfully trump the superiority of lifelong virginity and celibacy. But artificial insemination, IVF, and related technologies also seem to threaten many people who have no such doctrinal investment. This seems to be due in no small measure to the fact that reproductive technology exponentially multiplies the chances for people who could not do it otherwise, including same-sex couples and single parents, to have children.

Angst over reproductive technology has gone hand in hand with its medicalization and mainstreaming. Placing semen into a vagina is not exactly a complicated task, and it does not have to be done with a penis. For centuries, some people have quietly chosen a DIY approach to artificial insemination. This very much includes gay men and lesbians, for whom “turkey-baster babies” were a well-known path to parenthood well before the medical establishment was prepared to offer LGBT people access to clinical reproductive technology. Many LGBT parents still choose to handle their own artificial inseminations, surrogate pregnancies, and the like, sometimes incorporating these reproductive arrangements into their extended family structures. I have a nephew whose extended family includes his “spuncle,” the man who donated the sperm and is the child's genetic father.

When clinical-grade fertility technology became available to lesbian would-be mothers, however, much of the general public reacted as if a brand new monstrosity had shown up overnight. When the UK National Health Service opened in-vitro fertilization services to LGBT prospective parents in 2006, nothing less than fatherhood itself seemed at stake. “Fathers Not Needed,” wailed the
Daily Mail
headline, in a
cri du coeur
that spoke volumes.

Outsourcing the begetting and gestation of children, it seems, triggers some remarkable insecurities. On the surface this seems strange, since child
care
has traditionally been handed over to others as a matter of routine, beginning virtually at the moment of birth in the cases of wet-nurses, foundling homes, and indeed infant adoptions. But until very recently indeed for most people, the desire for a child implied the necessity of penis-in-vagina intercourse. Until, of course, it didn't. Overnight, it seemed that women could call all
the reproductive shots: they could choose the sperm they wanted, get pregnant, bear their babies, and raise them, all without having to so much as shake hands with a man. What did this mean for men? What did this mean for heterosexuality?

It is not as if there is no precedent for the fatherless family or the husbandless household. These have always existed. There has never been a time when men have not abandoned women, when husbands have not died, gone to war, or been forced to leave wives and children behind when they went to sea or to some distant place to find work. Common as they have been, however, we have historically regarded husbandless households as anomalies, prone to producing problems like bossy and forward girls . . . or submissive boys effeminized by the lack of proper male role models. Single fathers get an even more focused version of this sociocultural stink-eye, the fact that they do “women's work” not quite excused by necessity. Although hands-on fatherhood and even the “stay-at-home dad” phenomenon seem to be gaining respectability currently (particularly in socially liberal countries like Sweden), the belief that women are inherently more fit to parent is so deeply entrenched that in America many people are under the mistaken impression that the law requires divorcing mothers to be given custody of any children.[
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