Straight: The Surprisingly Short History of Heterosexuality - Hardcover

Blank, Hanne

Hardcover

ISBN 10: 0807044431 ISBN 13: 9780807044438

Publisher: Beacon Press, 2012

Synopsis

Like the typewriter and the light bulb, the heterosexual was invented in the 1860s and swiftly transformed Western culture. The idea of “the heterosexual” was unprecedented. After all, men and women had been having sex, marrying, building families, and sometimes even falling in love for millennia without having any special name for their emotions or acts. Yet, within half a century, “heterosexual” had become a byword for “normal,” enshrined in law, medicine, psychiatry, and the media as a new gold standard for human experience. With an eclectic scope and fascinating detail, Straight tells the eye-opening story of a complex and often contradictory man-made creation that turns out to be anything but straight or narrow.

About this title

About the Author:

Writer and historian Hanne Blank is the author of Virgin:The Untouched History and seven other books that explore the intersections of sexuality, gender, the body, and culture. 

Excerpt. © Reprinted by permission. All rights reserved.:

From the Introduction: Sexual Disorientation
 
Every time I go to the doctor, I end up questioning my sexual orientation. On some of its forms, the clinic I visit includes five little boxes, a small matter of demographic bookkeeping. next to the boxes are the options “gay,” “lesbian,” “bisexual,” “transgender,” or “heterosexual.” You’re supposed to check one.
      You might not think this would pose a difficulty. I am a fairly garden-variety female human being, after all, and I am in a long-term monogamous relationship, well into our second decade together, with someone who has male genitalia. but does this make us, or our relationship, straight? This turns out to be a good question, because there is more to my relationship—and much, much more to heterosexuality—than easily meets the eye.
     There’s biology, for one thing. My partner was diagnosed male at birth because he was born with, and indeed still has, a fully functioning penis. but, as the ancient romans used to say, barba non facit philosophum—a beard does not make one a philosopher. neither does having a genital outie necessarily make one male. indeed, of the two sex chromosomes—XY—which would be found in the genes of a typical male, and XX, which is the hallmark of the genetically typical female—my partner’s DNA has all three: XXY, a pattern that is simultaneously male, female, and neither.
     This particular genetic pattern, XXY, is the signature of kleinfelter syndrome, one of the most common sex-chromosome anomalies. XXY often goes undiagnosed because the people who have it often look perfectly normal from the outside. in many cases, XXY individuals do not find out about their chromosomal anomaly unless they try to have children and end up seeing a fertility doctor, who ultimately orders an image called a karyotype, essentially a photo of the person’s chromosomes made with a very powerful microscope. in a karyotype, the trisomy, or three-chromosome grouping, is instantly revealed. as genetic anomalies go, this particular trisomy is not a cause for major alarm (aside from infertility, it causes few significant problems), which is a good thing, since it is fairly common. The estimates vary, in part because diagnosis is so haphazard, but it is believed that as many as one in every two thousand people who are declared male at birth may in fact be XXY. at minimum, there are about half a million americans whose genetics are this way, most of whom will never know it.
     What does an unusual sexual biology mean for sexual orientation? is it even possible for XXY people to have a sexual orientation in the way we usually think about sexual orientation? What about their lovers, partners, and spouses? “heterosexual,” “homosexual,” and “bisexual” are all dependent on the idea that there are two, and only two, biological sexes. What happens when biology refuses to fit neatly into this scheme? if I’m attracted to, and in love with, someone who is technically speaking neither male nor female, does that make me heterosexual, homosexual, bisexual, or something else altogether? Who gets to decide? and, more to the point, on what grounds?
     Some would argue that genetics aren’t as important as anatomy and bodily functions. after all, you can’t see chromosomes with the naked eye. but here, too, I run into problems. Part of what makes a man, as we are all taught from childhood, is that he has a penis and testicles that produce sperm, which in turn are necessary to fertilize a female’s egg cells and conceive a fetus. The ability to sire a child has been considered proof of masculinity for thousands of years. This is something my partner cannot do. his external plumbing looks and acts pretty much like any genetically typical male’s, but, in the words of one of my partner’s vasectomied coworkers, “he shoots blanks.” in my partner’s case, no vasectomy was required. his testicles do not produce viable sperm. They never have and never will. This is part of the territory for most people who have XXY sex chromosomes.
     So if heterosexuality is by definition, as some of our right-wing brothers and sisters like to claim, about the making of babies, then there is no possible way for my partner and me to be construed as heterosexual. but even the bible recognizes that infertility exists. The notoriously procreation-fixated Catholic Church permits marriage, and marital sex, between people known to be infertile. Curiously, whether or not reproduction is a cornerstone of heterosexuality seems to depend on whom you ask, and in what circumstances.
     Not that it really matters in practice. at this point in time contraception is more the rule than the exception for sexual activity between different-sex partners throughout the first world. Many people, including members of committed male/female couples, don’t have children or plan to have them, yet somehow this doesn’t stop them from feeling quite certain that they know what their sexual orientations are. They consider sexual orientation as being rooted in a calculus of subjective attraction and biological sameness. The greek “hetero” means “other” or “different,” after all, and biological men and women do differ from one another. We make use of these biological differences every day without thinking every time we look at people and identify them as either male or female, ask whether a baby or a dog is a boy or a girl, or determine the sexes of the members of a couple we spot on the street and assign them sexual orientations in our minds.
     Surely such informal, man-in-the-street diagnostics ought to apply just as well to my partner and me. Or perhaps not. as an XXY individual who has chosen not to take hormone supplements, my partner’s naturally occurring sex hormones take a middle path. his estrogen levels hang out a little lower than mine, his testosterone levels a little higher. as a result, my partner, like other XXY people who don’t take exogenous hormones, has an androgynous appearance, with little to no facial and body hair, a fine smooth complexion, and a tendency to develop small breasts and slightly rounded hips if he puts on a little weight.1 When we lived in a lgbt-heavy neighborhood in boston, my partner and I were often identified by others as lesbians. We were regularly referred to as “ladies” by shopkeepers, door-todoor Mormons, and parents trying to prevent their kids from crowding us at the zoo. lesbian couples we encountered in passing often shot us little conspiratorial smiles of recognition. (We always smiled back. still do.) but it wasn’t all pleasantries. Once while walking together we had bottles thrown at us from a car, its occupants screaming “Fuckin’ dykes!” out the windows as they sped away. assumptions of sexual orientation are never merely innocent perceptions, because these perceptions shape behavior.
     Assumptions about biology and gender are complicated, fraught, and by no means clear or unambiguous. The ways people have identified my partner’s biological sex, and therefore not only the nature of our relationship to one another but also our respective sexual orientations, have run an extraordinary gamut that might be distressing if we hadn’t long ago learned to laugh at it all. My partner’s physical androgyny—the minimal facial hair, refined complexion, and elegant, long-limbed build that are common side effects of his genetic anomaly—has led some people to assume that he is a female-to-male transsexual who is early in the transition process, still more hormonally female than male. I have heard him identified as a “passing butch.” Once, at a party, I overheard a woman stating with assurance that my partner was a very feminine gay man who had “made an exception” for me. at other times I have been assumed to be the one making the exception, a “hasbian” who turned from dating women to seeing a gentle, feminine straight man. by the same token, these reactions have changed as we’ve aged and our styles of dress and grooming have changed. For the past several years, with my partner usually dressing in corporate-office menswear and sporting a dashing haircut modeled on the young Cole Porter’s, we have typically, though not always, been read as heterosexual. if the range of responses we’ve had can tell me anything about what my sexual orientation is supposed to be, it’s that other people don’t necessarily know what box I should be checking off on those clinic forms either.
     My own sense of sexual identity is, incidentally, no help. I have no deep personal attachment to labeling myself in terms of sexual orientation, nor do I have the sensation of “being” heterosexual or homosexual or anything but a human being who loves and desires other human beings. I have been romantically and sexually involved with people of a variety of biological sexes and social genders over the course of my adult life. When pressed, I am most likely to declare my “sexual identity” as “taken.” This option, however much it might be the best fit, is not available to me on most forms that ask this sort of question.
      I could, I suppose, resort to legal documents to sort out the question of what my orientation is, and what the orientation of my relationship with my partner might be. here at last it is uncomplicated. based on our birth certificates, my partner and I and our relationship could be defined as uncomplicatedly heterosexual. but there’s a caveat, and it’s a big one: our sexes were diagnosed at b...

About this edition

• Publisher: Beacon Press
• Publication date: 2012
• ISBN 10: 0807044431
• ISBN 13: 9780807044438
• Binding: Hardcover
• Number of pages: 264