Straight (4 page)

With this in mind, we can proceed to take a look at the history of heterosexuality. As we should, because whether we like it or not, the idea of heterosexuality is embedded in each of us, in our actions and reactions, our emotional responses, and our intellectual assertions. We can see its distinctive imprint in the things we believe about love, in the ways we pursue pleasure, in the things we expect from our relationships, our work, our government, and our genitals. This concept we call “heterosexuality” doesn't just shape our sex lives; it shapes the ways we understand the world to work and, consequently, the ways it does. Heterosexuality reaches too far beyond the merely personal, and in too many profound and pervasive ways, for us to write it off as a simple matter of biology or nature or even Divine plan. It cannot be reduced to economics, the search for pleasure, or even to true love. It certainly cannot be reduced to a few checkboxes on a clinic form. All of these things may play a part in what we think of when we think about heterosexuality, but none of these things
are
heterosexuality.

One of the “top ten new species” of 2007, according to the International Institute for Species Exploration at Arizona State University, was a fish by the delightful name of
Electrolux addisoni.
But was
Electrolux
actually new? The ornate sleeper ray was familiar to the scuba divers and snorkelers who were sometimes greeted by it as they swam its home waters off the South African coast. Doubtless local fishermen had known about it even longer. But in another sense,
Electrolux
was genuinely novel. It became “new” on the day a biologist confirmed that it hadn't previously been documented, gave it a name, and triumphantly added it to the rosters of official, openly shared, systemic human knowledge.

As the case of
Electrolux
demonstrates, there is a difference between simply
being
and
being known.
No one would attempt to argue that this fish had no existence prior to the time it was given a scientific name. Yet suddenly, in 2007, it was “new.” Written documentation of a particular kind, by an authority figure of a particular kind, was what turned
Electrolux addisoni
from a thing that just
was,
whether anyone knew about it or not, into a thing that
was known.

In the nineteenth century, a similar thing happened to heterosexuals. Prior to 1868, there were no heterosexuals. There were no homosexuals either, for that matter. For most of human history, love might have been romantic or platonic, brotherly or maternal,
eros
or
agape,
but it was definitively not heterosexual or homosexual, straight or gay. The names did not exist, nor did the categories they now describe. In the mid-nineteenth century, Western people in general were only beginning to think or speak in terms of there being different types of human beings who were differentiated from one another by the kinds of love or sexual desire they experienced.[
1
]

Specific sexual behaviors, to be sure, were named, categorized, and judged. This was nothing new. They had been for more than a thousand years. The most famous example of this is the term “sodomy.” As a term and an idea, if not as a practice, “sodomy” arose from the Catholic Church, which for much of Western history was the highest authority on matters of behavior and morals (among rather a lot else) in the West. The Catholic Church has historically disapproved, on principle, of all sexual activity that is not potentially procreative. This is the broadest definition of “sodomy.”

Sodomy was sodomy no matter whom it involved. Sodomy could take place between a man and a woman, two men, two women, or some other combination of participants. A “sodomite” was not a kind of person but a person who committed a particular type of sin. In the same way that a usurer committed the act of moneylending or a murderer committed the act of killing, a sodomite committed the act of sodomy. It was not an identity label but a rap sheet.

Part of the Catholic understanding of “sodomy” was an awareness that sexual sin was something that could happen to anyone. Simply feeling desire put one at risk. Sexual misbehavior was not a marker of some sort of constitutional difference but merely evidence of temptation unsuccessfully resisted.

This sensibility is a large part of why, prior to the nineteenth century, Western culture did not include the concept that all people were split into two sexual camps. It is also why there does not seem to have been much sense, prior to the eighteenth century, of people thinking in terms of a hierarchy of sexual “types.” The tendency instead was to think in terms of people who, openly or covertly, occasionally or habitually, engaged in a variety of sexual acts. Some of those acts were more sinful than others. The only sex act that was not considered sinful in the eyes of the Catholic Church was potentially procreative
penis-in-vagina intercourse performed within the context of a valid marriage, and even that had to be performed in particular ways and limited to specific times.

Much has changed. We are now so used to thinking of sexuality in terms of orientations and identities, “deviant” versus “normal,” that it hardly occurs to us that there might be workable alternatives to our customary ways of thinking. But history shows that there are actually many such alternatives. The desire for sexual activity has been thought about, as in classic Catholic dogma, as a manifestation of the unruly appetites of the earthly body, possibly goaded on by forces of evil. But the desire for sexual activity has also been imagined simply as a biological function, like eating or elimination, a common concept in both Classical thought and in the neoclassical thought of the intellectual eighteenth century.

Our modern habit of interpreting sexual desire as a manifestation of our identities, part and parcel of our individual human selves, is merely one more option. But since the nineteenth century, this has been the option our culture has chosen more than any other. As French philosopher Michel Foucault famously put it in his
History of Sexuality,
a particular sexual type became “a personage, a past, a case history, and a childhood, in addition to being a type of life, a life form, and a morphology. . . . It was consubstantial with him, less as a habitual sin than as a singular nature.” This is the view upon which the existence of “heterosexual” depends.

This was not an overnight shift but a process. Although it had its roots in earlier changes in philosophy and science and law, the nineteenth century became the era in which the decisive shift occurred. By the end of the nineteenth century, Western culture had learned to view sexual desire and activity not as a unified field on its own, but as a collection of specific and distinctive desires and activities, each of which had a role to play in helping to define a specific and distinctive subtype of human being. Many different desires and acts were given official names in this period, making the momentous shift from merely
being
to
being known.
As these desires and acts were defined and characterized and written down in the right authoritative ways by the right authoritative people, they were used to help create another
set of known entities: sexual types. Of these, the most powerful and important, and certainly the most enduring and culture-altering, were “homosexual” and “heterosexual.”

Because the terms have become ubiquitous, we forget that “homosexual” and “heterosexual” come from this very particular time and place. Every era has its own catchphrases and neologisms. Our world is not static, and as new ideas and objects enter the culture so do new words and phrases, even as old ways of thinking and outmoded vocabulary fade. We happily and knowledgeably chat about computer geeks and geneticists, but no longer about alchemists or natural philosophers. We would consider it rather stilted to speak of bluestockings, jesters, and foundlings, but we are quite comfortable speaking of women intellectuals, comedians, and children who have been put up for adoption. Such changes in language can convey far more than just dictionary meanings. For instance, “Negro,” “colored,” “black,” “African American,” and “person of color” could all technically be used to refer to the same person. But their historical freight gives each of these words different associations, so much so that we have strong preferences about which ones we would willingly choose. Words and the ways we use them are always rooted in time and in place.

This is particularly important when we consider “heterosexual.” What Jonathan Ned Katz has called “the invention of heterosexuality” took place at a specific point in history, in a unique intertwining of historical and cultural streams. Put simply, these terms came to exist because a need was perceived to identify people as representatives of generic types distinguished on the basis of their tendencies to behave sexually in particular ways. The story of how this need arose is a story of industrialization and urbanization, the rise of the middle classes, the complications of empire, and the scientific and philosophical legacies of the Enlightenment, all of which contributed to creating a world in which the idea of a type of human being called “heterosexual” made a specific and useful kind of sense.

SEX AND SIN IN THE NEW CITY

In the nineteenth century, the cities of Europe and North America began to swell at a previously unimaginable pace. By 1835 London reached a population of one million, while its nearest Continental rival,
Paris, hit the million mark in 1846. Urban growth took place at exponential rates: New York City boasted 60,515 residents in the 1800 census . . . and a whopping 3,437,202 in 1900.

Behind the urban explosion lay newly mechanized and rapidly growing industry and its rapacious appetite for laborers—not to mention all the goods and services that a swelling population requires. The promise of steady work and steady pay lured the rural working classes out of the hinterlands by the hundreds of thousands in a twin process of urbanization and corresponding rural population drain that continues around the world even today. It is impossible to overstate, and nearly impossible to imagine for those of us who have always lived in a world with enormous industrialized cities, how dramatically the modern metropolis has altered human culture.

These hugely increased, unprecedentedly dense populations transformed urban experience. All sorts of common but unorthodox sexual activities like prostitution, sexual violence, and same-sex eroticism seemed suddenly more frequent, more random, and more out of control than they had been when the cities and their populations were both much smaller. Certainly, by comparison to rural towns and villages, the cities seemed like hotbeds of sexual misconduct and excess. It also appeared to many that people not only engaged in more sexual misconduct in the cities, but that they were more likely to get away with it. This was often true, since city populations frequently lacked the social unity and interdependence of the smaller villages and towns, making community enforcement of proper behavior both less possible and less likely. Some rural modes of policing sexual behavior survived in the cities, at least for a while. The charivari, a gritty mob of people banging pots and pans, tooting horns, and singing gleefully filthy songs under the windows of an illicit couple, for instance, survived in both the United Kingdom and the United States until at least the First World War. But neither rowdy noisemaking nor shotgun weddings, nor even the odd spot of vigilante justice, could conceivably address all of the sexual crimes that took place in a big city.

This might, in theory, have been a job for the police. In reality, policing as a branch of civil service was still in its infancy, with City of London police chartered by statute in 1839 and New York City forming a police force only in 1845. The responsibilities and reach of city
police forces took time to work themselves out, and the law and the courts would similarly scramble for decades to catch up with the regulatory and disciplinary needs of the swelling cities. To those who lived in cities—and even to those who only heard stories about them—the urban world was a frightening, dirty, dangerous place, especially from a sexual standpoint, full of prostitutes and predators.

Urban sexual misconduct was typically, if inaccurately, blamed on the lower classes. Because the fastest-growing groups in the new city were the working class and the poor, it often appeared that the rising rates of sexual misconduct reflected the socioeconomic class of these new urbanites rather than merely the larger overall population. The middle and upper classes, who prided themselves on their moral rectitude (and had the additional advantage of enjoying all the discretion money could buy), had no trouble ascribing disproportionate, even innate, degeneracy to their socioeconomic inferiors.

This was not a new idea. Western Europe had long held to the idea that all creatures belonged to a grand overarching hierarchy. Since the medieval era, a central notion of Western thought was the idea of the
scala naturae
or Great Chain of Being, the concept that all living beings had a place in a strict hierarchy that led inexorably upward from dirt to plants to animals to humans to the angels and ultimately to God. As one ascended this natural ladder, one ascended in perfection. Wealth, health, moral uprightness, and social dominance were all considered proofs of superiority, while inferiority betrayed itself in poverty, sickness, immorality, and powerlessness. All men were automatically higher than all women, white-skinned people automatically higher than dark-skinned, and Christians above those of other faiths. The Great Chain thus furnished a conceptual framework that would be important later: the idea that inherent or quasi-inherent “imperfections,” such as particular sexual habits, could be part of the intrinsic makeup of whole classes of people.

As the nineteenth century wore on, the Great Chain of Being acquired a sort of slantwise sibling in evolutionary theory. Charles Darwin himself never asserted that evolution represented the same sort of grand ladder of ascending perfection. Indeed, the fact that the notion of progress toward an ultimate Godly perfection was entirely excluded from Darwin's characterization of natural selection was part of
what made his theories so controversial. But this did not stop people from applying the teleology of the Great Chain to the principles of natural selection and evolution. In particular, the “science” of eugenics recasts the basic principles of the Great Chain onto natural selection in a particularly poisonous way. (Eugenics and Darwinism were related in a literal way as well as a figurative one: as a field, eugenics was pioneered by Darwin's cousin, Sir Francis Galton.) Eugenicists believed that human evolution had a goal, and that this goal was to produce ever better and fitter human beings. Therefore, they reasoned, a lack of moral or physical virtue directly reflected a hereditary deficit. For instance, the “moral imbecile.” “Moral imbeciles,” in the eyes of eugenicists, were simply born without the ability to feel or act morally, just as an imbecile—what we would now call a developmentally disabled person—was born without the ability to think or reason normally. Eugenicists saw both kinds of imbeciles as examples of evolutionary error, and of undesirable clutter in the gene pool.