Straight (29 page)

Would lifting the heavy hand of the binary sex/gender system from the law really mean, as conservative critics sometimes warn it will, the end of marriage and the traditional family? It doesn't seem likely that it would. Nor would it necessarily spell the end of heterosexuality. Surely, if male and female are two of a variety of sexes, and masculine and feminine two of a variety of genders, then heterosexual and homosexual are two of a variety of ways to combine them. Egalitarianism, human rights, and civil rights are slowly but surely forcing the hand of the law. The law may not eagerly embrace the complexities of sex and gender, but the more that human beings continue to exist in ways that challenge the borders and dynamics of “heterosexual” and “homosexual,” the more the law will be compelled to find some way to answer.

AND IN THE END . . .

Recently, over the kitchen table, I asked my partner what he thought the answer was. How did he think our relationship should be characterized, in terms of sexual orientation? He prodded his dinner with his chopsticks for a moment, looking thoughtful.

“I think,” he ventured, “it depends on who's asking.”

He's right. Whether we are perceived as heterosexual or nonheterosexual depends a great deal on who's looking at us. How, and even whether, we name the dynamic of our relationship for others depends a great deal on who we're talking to.

It comes down to context and safety. As a couple, we qualify in many ways to identify as nonheterosexual. Individually, we both have our queer credentials well in hand. But as a couple, it's not so clear . . . or so queer. My femmeness tends to make my queerness less obvious; his geekiness tends to make his androgyny less striking. To the casual observer, we may appear to be a few bubbles off plumb, but still pretty safely within the tolerances of “male/female couple, kissing, presumed straight.” The qualities of our relationship that make “heterosexual” a less than completely appropriate adjective are not necessarily obvious to someone seeing us bickering over what kind of salad dressing to buy or laughing together as we walk our dog.

What this means is that, if we want it, heterosexual privilege is ours for the taking. We have the unparalleled privilege of being able to go about our lives without our relationship attracting notice. It may not seem like much, but it is. When you are unlikely to experience any negative consequences for doing what you do and being who you are, you can do what you need and want to do in the world with no more than an average amount of fuss, bother, oppression, and stress. It's what life should be like for everyone, but isn't. For those easily identified as not being heterosexual, it is often invasively, annoyingly, inequitably, harassingly, even violently otherwise. Having your sexuality and your relationships be perceived as “normal” provides unearned privilege. It accrues automatically and invisibly to everyone who is perceived as being heterosexual for as long as they continue to be perceived that way. The phenomenon is so automatic and so basic, both to doxa and experience, that most of the people who have this privilege don't perceive it, let alone perceive it as a privilege. They assume—as indeed doxa tells them—that it's just the way things are.

But of course it's not. Heterosexual privilege is the result of an enormous cultural machine. Parts of the apparatus existed long before the concept of “heterosexual” was so much as a twinkle in Karl-Maria Kertbeny's eye; parts were machined by the urban industrialist
nineteenth century, and still other parts have been cobbled together over time by psychiatrists and statisticians, ad executives, lawyers, and a veritable army of moony, June-y songwriters. It is a complex and frankly monumental cultural inheritance, accreted over decades, filtering in from every direction and thus seemingly none at all. Our art is steeped in it; our media are driven by it. We remember our most classic stories through its tunnel vision—Antony and Cleopatra's tale is a political thriller and a bloodbath, not a swoony romance. Regardless of whom we desire or have sex with, no matter whom we form our households or raise our children with, heterosexuality influences how we keep house, how we spend our money, and how we build our families. The models we have, and the standards we are expected to maintain, come to us via heterosexuality as a normative state. Heterosexuality—whatever the current version of that concept happens to be—is unremarkable because it is the standard by which everything else is measured.
That
is heterosexual privilege.

Whether my partner and I are willing to give up the protective camouflage of being presumed to be straight, therefore, depends on a lot of things. Who wants to know? The waitress at the diner does not care; to her we're just the two-top by the window that ordered the BLT and the Cobb salad. But sometimes people do ask, and when they do we have to evaluate whether their interest seems friendly. Someone who seems like a kindred spirit can likely get us talking openly about intersex issues, femme identity politics, or our adorable baby nephew and his gay trans daddies. We don't necessarily announce ourselves as queer in those conversations, but we don't generally need to. But if questions about our sexuality arrive with sneers or snarls, or we're stared at like circus freaks? That's a little tougher. Sometimes we try to turn it into a teaching moment, a chance to inform and enlighten. Sometimes we swallow our pride and pick up another heavy sack of privileged guilt as we point solemnly to our hetero-passable façade, hoping that the jerk du jour will just go away.

The fact that how my partner and I answer the question of whether we're straight or not isn't cut-and-dried, and that it
does
matter who's asking is what ultimately gives me an answer to my question about my own sexual orientation: if I were heterosexual, I'd only have one answer.

I had hoped, when I set out to write this book, that somewhere in the history of heterosexuality I would find a master key, a one-size-fits-all definition of “heterosexual” that I could use once and for all to characterize my own relationship. What I found instead was a mouse that roared, a modern term of art posing as an eternal verity dressed in Classical-language garb, and an assimilative juggernaut. Trying to determine whether my life partnership was heterosexual by probing the history of heterosexuality was like asking questions of a Magic 8-Ball “Did our falling in love follow a traditionally heterosexual pattern?”
It is decidedly so.
“Does the fact that we aren't legally married make us less straight than we would be if we were?”
Reply hazy, try again later.
“Does my attraction to my partner's androgynous body characteristics make me nonheterosexual?”
Signs point to yes.
“Would Sigmund Freud characterize our sex life as heterosexual?”
My sources say no.
“How about the American Psychological Association?”
Reply hazy, try again.
Perhaps I will just alternate which box I check off on those clinic forms, a different one each time.

Fortunately, I am not dismayed to discover that in the end, I cannot really lay claim to the much-vaunted label of heterosexual. It bothers me much more, in fact, that I sometimes claim it, or have it claimed for me, without intending to. To lay claim to heterosexuality, it seems to me at the end of all my explorations into its history and its nature, is not so much to claim any upper hand as it is to pledge allegiance to a particular configuration of sex and power in a particular historical moment. There isn't much in that configuration, or its heritage of classism and misogyny, that I find appealing enough to want to claim as my own.

Heterosexuality seems to be bigger than we are, independent, more powerful. It is not. In reality, we are the ones whose imaginations created the heterosexual/homosexual scheme, and we are also the ones whose multitudes that scheme ultimately cannot contain. Eventually as a culture we will imagine our way into some different grand explanation, some other scheme for explaining our emotions and our desires and our passionate entanglements. For now, we believe in heterosexual. And this, too, shall pass.

My heartfelt thanks and deep admiration go to many, including but definitely not limited to S. Bear Bergman, Leigh Ann Craig, Anne Gwin, Lesley A. Hall, Patrick Harris, Arianna Iliff, Laura Waters Jackson, Lisa Buckley, Keridwen Luis, China Martens, Judith McLaughlin, Kelly Morris, Moira Russell, Danya Ruttenberg, Christopher Schelling, Jordan Stein, Mary Sykes, Elizabeth Tamny, and Rhetta Wiley. I also salute and thank those academics and researchers without whose work this book would have been completely impossible, including Stephanie Coontz, Peter Gay, Chrys Ingraham, Stevi Jackson, Angus McLaren, Steven Seidman, Edward Stein, Lawrence Stone, Jeffrey Weeks, Marilyn Yalom, and the late, much-missed Vern Bullough and Roy Porter. Especial intellectual thanks are due to the redoubtable Jonathan Ned Katz, to whose
The Invention of Heterosexuality
this book owes so much. Much that is good and right about this book is owed to these people, either directly or indirectly. Whatever faults or errors may remain are mine alone.

Thanks are also due to the Creative Baltimore Fund, and to Edenfred and its sponsoring organization, the Terry Family Foundation, for a bit of world enough and time.

Finally, there is not enough gratitude to convey my thanks to my beautiful and bold partner, Malcolm Gin, for everything, very much including being such a good sport about being made into a framing device for a history book.