Straight Read Free

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.
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    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 characterizedas 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