by Jonathan Ned Katz
In the twentieth century, creatures called heterosexuals emerged from the dark shadows of the nineteenth-century medical world to become common types acknowledged in the bright light of the modern day.
Heterosexuality began this century defensively, as the publicly unsanctioned private practice of the respectable middle class, and as the publicly put-clown pleasure-affirming practice of urban working-class youths, southern blacks, and Greenwich Village bohemians. But by the end of the 1920s, heterosexuality had triumphed as dominant, sanctified culture.’ In the first quarter of the twentieth century the heterosexual came out, a public, self-affirming debut the homosexual would duplicate near the century’s end.
The discourse on heterosexuality had a protracted coming out, not completed in American popular culture until the 1920s. Only slowly was heterosexuality established as a stable sign of normal sex. The association of heterosexuality with perversion continued as well into the twentieth century. . . .
In the first years of the twentieth century heterosexual and homosexual were still obscure medical terms, not yet standard English. In the first 1901 edition of the “H” volume of the comprehensive Oxford English Dictionary, heterosexual and homosexual had not yet made it.
Neither had heterosexuality yet attained the status of normal. In 1901, Dorland’s Medical Dictionary, published in Philadelphia, continued to define “Heterosexuality” as “Abnormal or perverted appetite toward the opposite sex.”" Dorland’s heterosexuality, a new “appetite,” was clearly identified with an “opposite sex” hunger. But that craving was still aberrant. Dorland’s calling heterosexuality “abnormal or perverted” is, according to the Oxford English Dictionary’s first Supplement (1933), a “misapplied” definition. But contrary to the OED, Dorland’s is a perfectly legitimate understanding of heterosexuality according to a procreative norm.
The twentieth century witnessed the decreasing legitimacy of that procreative imperative, and the increasing public acceptance of a new hetero pleasure principle. Gradually, heterosexuality came to refer to a normal other-sex sensuality free of any essential tie to procreation. But only in the mid- 1960s would heteroeroticism be distinguished completely from reproduction, and male-female pleasure sex justified for itself. …
Between 1877 and 1920 Americans were embarked on The Search for Order, documented in historian Robert H. Wiebe’s book of that title. Though Wiebe doesn’t mention it, this hunt for regularity gave rise in the arena of sex to the new standard model heterosexuality. This paralleled early-twentieth-century moves to standardize railroad track widths, time zones, business and manufacturing procedures (discussed by Wiebe), as well as to test and regularize intelligence and femininity and masculinity….
In 1923, “heterosexuality” made its debut in Merriam Webster’s authoritative New International Dictionary. “Homosexuality” had, surprisingly, made its debut fourteen years earlier, in 1909, defined as a medical term meaning “morbid sexual passion for one of the same sex.” The advertising of a diseased homosexuality preceded the publicizing of a sick heterosexuality. For in 1923 Webster’s defined “heterosexuality” as a “Med.” term meaning “morbid sexual passion for one of the opposite sex.” Only in 1934 does “heterosexuality” first appear in Webster’s hefty Second Edition Unabridged defined in what is still the dominant modern mode. There, heterosexuality is finally a “manifestation of sexual passion for one of the opposite sex; normal sexuality.” Heterosexuality had finally attained the status of norm.
In the same 1934 Webster’s”homosexuality” had changed as well. It’s simply “eroticism for one of the same sex.” Both terms’ medical origins are no longer cited. Heterosexuality and homosexuality had settled into standard American.
In 1924, in The New York Times, heterosexuality first became a love that dared to speak its name. On September 7 of that year the word “hetero-sexual” made its first known appearance in The New York Times Book Review significantly, in a comment on Sigmund Freud. There, in a long, turgid review of Freud’s Group Psychology and the Analysis of the Ego one Mary Keyt Isham spoke of “repressed hetero-sexuality” and “hetero-sexual love”. . . .
By December 1940, when the risque musical “Pal Joey” opened on Broadway, a tune titled “Zip” satirized the striptease artist Gypsy Rose Lee, by way of a character who, unzipping, sang of her dislike for a deep-voiced woman or high-pitched man and proclaimed her heterosexuality. That lyric registered the emergence in popular culture of a heterosexual identity.
By 1941, the glossary of a book about “sex variants” said that “straight” is being employed by homosexuals as meaning not homosexual. To go straight is to cease homosexual practices and to indulge–usually to reindulge–in heterosexuality.
The “not homosexual,” a new creature, defined by what he or she isn’t, had emerged among the cast of erotic characters on the twentieth-century stage. Here, “straight” is a condition toward which one may venture or not, depending on one’s “practices” (feeling is not the issue). Now, the sex variants are doing the defining–categorizing is a game that two preferences can play.
The “cult of domesticity” following World War II–the re-association of women with the home, motherhood, and child care, men with fatherhood and wage-work outside the home–was an era in which the predominance of the hetero norm went almost unchallenged. In the late 1940s and the 1950s, conservative mental-health professionals reasserted the old link between heterosexuality and procreation. In opposition, sex-liberals strove to expand the heterosexual ideal to include within the boundaries of the normal a wider-than-ever range of gender ideals and nonprocreative, premarital, and extramarital behavior. But that sex-liberal reform actually helped to secure the dominance of the heterosexual idea, as we shall see when we get to Kinsey. . . .
This sex scientist [Kinsey] popularized the idea of a “continuum” of activity and feeling between hetero and homo poles:
Only the human mind invents categories and tries to force facts into separated pigeon-holes. The living world is a continuum.
His recasting of the hetero/homo polarity did suggest that there are degrees of heterosexual and homosexual behavior and emotion. But that famous continuum also emphatically reaffirmed the idea of a sexuality divided between the hetero and homo.
Kinsey’s “heterosexual-homosexual rating scale,” from zero to six, sounded precise, quantitative, and scientific, fixing the het/homo binary in the public mind with new certainty. His science-dressed, influential sex-liberalism thus upheld the hetero/homo division, giving it new life and legitimacy.
Kinsey also explicitly contested the idea of an absolute either/or antithesis between hetero and homo persons. Stressing the variations between exclusive heterosexual and exclusive homosexual behavior and feeling, he denied that human beings “represent two discrete populations, heterosexual and homosexual.” The world’s population, he ordered, “is not to be divided into sheep and goats.” (That revealing Biblical metaphor positions heterosexuals as sheep, coupled with conformity, and homosexuals as goats, linked with licentiousness).
The hetero/homo division of persons is not nature’s doing, Kinsey stresses, but society’s. As sex-liberal reformer, he challenged the social and historical division of people into heterosexuals and homosexuals because he saw this person-labeling used to denigrate homosexuals. Motivated by a reformist impulse, he rejected the social reality and profound subjective force of a historically constructed tradition which, since the early twentieth century in the U.S., had cut the sexual population in two–and helped to establish the social and personal reality of a heterosexual and homosexual identity. . . .
Between the 1890s and the 1960s the terms heterosexual and homosexual moved into American popular culture, constructing in time a sexual solid citizen and a perverted unstable alien, a sensual insider and a lascivious outlaw, a hetero center and a homo margin, a hetero majority and a homo minority. The new, strict boundaries made the new gendered, erotic world less polymorphous. The term heterosexual manufactured a new sex-differentiated ideal of the erotically correct, a norm that worked to affirm the superiority of men over women and heterosexuals over homosexuals. Feminists questioned those gender and pleasure hierarchies.
Tuesday, September 16, 2008
How the concept of Sexual Orientation came about I
Review of the book by Wellcome Institute for the History of Medicine, London Lesley A. Hall
Sex and the Gender Revolution, Volume One: Heterosexuality and the Third Gender in Enlightenment London, by Randolph Trumbach. Chicago, University of Chicago Press, 1998. [xiv], 509 pp. $35US
This long-awaited work by Randolph Trumbach is a veritable tour-de-force of historical reconstruction and analysis . The final judgement on this massive project cannot be pronounced until Volume 2 has appeared, but the riches contained herein are plenty to be going on with, and indeed, require some time for adequate digestion.
Trumbach posits - and convincingly substantiates - significant changes in sexual mores during the eighteenth century. His focus is on London, the obvious location for new trends to manifest, for which copious archival resources survive enabling the reconstruction of sexual narratives for a range of social groups as well as both genders. He provides a dense account of the areas indicative of changing sexual mores: libertinism and prostitution; the vast increase in venereal diseases (a small quibble is Trumbach's use of the term 'cure': the most obvious symptoms of both syphilis and gonorrhoea disappear even without treatment); rising illegitimacy; the incidence of rape; adultery, violence and desertion within marriage.
Trumbach argues that changes in male sexual behaviour were due to the rise of a perceived 'sodomite identity' in urban locales during the early eighteenth century. Previously a degree of bisexuality, involving adult males having sexual relations with adolescent boys, had been conceptualized as the characteristic of the hypersexual libertine and conveyed no imputation against the manliness and full masculine identity of the male in question. For the younger partner, having engaged in such relations at a particular stage in the life-cycle was not carried over into a stigmatised adult identity. However, the early eighteenth century saw the rise of a distinctive 'molly' subculture of men who defined themselves by their sexual interaction with other adult males like themselves and were perceived as a third, transgressive, gender. The imputation of being a sodomite came to be regarded as a deleterious slur upon manly reputation, so that mere extortionary threats to make this accusation could be successful even without any apparent objective grounds for concern by the man accused.
As a result, Trumbach claims, the idea of exclusive sexual interest in women as the desideratum of normal masculinity, i.e., heterosexuality as a distinct identity, arose. From around 1730 accusations of heterosexual whoremongery were no longer considered defamatory, but 'the fear of being exposed as a sodomite left men paralyzed' (p. 55). He connects the increasing demand that men should find sexual pleasure only with the female and not the male body with the abrupt rise of Onania-mania in the early eighteenth century - even a man=s own body was not to form a source of pleasure to him. Trumbach claims that boys= ideas and first experiences of sexuality were constructed in a predominantly homosocial male world: only later did they interact with females, with fears, fantasies and received myths already in place, providing the basis for profound anxieties.
Female sexual reputation continued to be judged along the axis of chaste maid or wife versus whore (a term of opprobrium not confined to professional prostitutes) for a great deal longer. Women's sexual lives were still structured by family institutions and forms - varying considerably according to social class - in ways that men's were ceasing to be. Sexual relations between women were not prosecuted, and it was 'always much more possible to be unaware that sexual relations between women existed' (p. 8).
Much of the ambivalent response of law, legislature, public opinion and voluntary bodies to brothels, soaring venereal disease rates, rising illegitimacy, rape and sexual assaults on women, can, Trumbach alleges, be explained by the belief that it was socially essential to provide men with heterosexual outlets (these were Bad Things, but the alternative was worse). It is not entirely clear whether this was only for fear of their resorting to 'unnatural' expedients, or whether there were concurrent changing perceptions of the nature of sexual desire, at least in the male, with this being envisaged as an imperative, potentially dangerously uncontrollable force of nature.
Can the anxieties of eighteenth century masculinity be attributed to other factors? Could it be that the male peer group, as opposed to hierarchical and age-structured relationships within a familial context, was playing a more important role in the lives of men (we may note the contemporary rise of Freemasonry and other institutionalized forms of male bonding), and new ways of >proving manhood= were having to be evolved (though fears relating to sodomy would doubtless fit in here anyway)? While much of the relentless, even obsessive, pursuit of heterosexual gratification reckless of any consequences either to the women involved or the dangers to themselves of venereal disease, may have been driven by intrapsychic fears about sexual identity, the male peer group doubtless played a part in establishing norms, and perhaps also generating an atmosphere of competition and rivalry over conquests. The emphasis seems to have been on doing it, almost on 'counting coup', except - perhaps - in the more élite social circles in which an ideology of companionate marriage and emotional intimacy between husband and wife was emerging (though Trumbach reveals how much this was aspiration rather than actuality). Quantity rather than quality appears to have been the keynote. I was somewhat surprised to find no discussion of any trade in impotence remedies, given the counter-productive performance pressures involved in conceiving the proof of normal masculinity as getting it up and into a woman as often as possible. Trumbach suggests that at least for some men the prevalent violence of sexual relations - in honest courtship as well as rape and sexual harassment - was a (perhaps necessary) erotic stimulus.
Whether or not the reader concurs with Trumbach's theory of the motor driving the changes he describes, there is no doubt that the rich feast of empirical evidence based on extensive research in, and sensitive interpretation of, a wide range of archival materials which he sets before us will be of interest to historians in many fields. There is much here that is thought-provoking: tantalising glimpses of a world we have lost - for which it is hard to feel much nostalgia.
Wellcome Institute for the History of Medicine, London Lesley A. Hall
Sex and the Gender Revolution, Volume One: Heterosexuality and the Third Gender in Enlightenment London, by Randolph Trumbach. Chicago, University of Chicago Press, 1998. [xiv], 509 pp. $35US
This long-awaited work by Randolph Trumbach is a veritable tour-de-force of historical reconstruction and analysis . The final judgement on this massive project cannot be pronounced until Volume 2 has appeared, but the riches contained herein are plenty to be going on with, and indeed, require some time for adequate digestion.
Trumbach posits - and convincingly substantiates - significant changes in sexual mores during the eighteenth century. His focus is on London, the obvious location for new trends to manifest, for which copious archival resources survive enabling the reconstruction of sexual narratives for a range of social groups as well as both genders. He provides a dense account of the areas indicative of changing sexual mores: libertinism and prostitution; the vast increase in venereal diseases (a small quibble is Trumbach's use of the term 'cure': the most obvious symptoms of both syphilis and gonorrhoea disappear even without treatment); rising illegitimacy; the incidence of rape; adultery, violence and desertion within marriage.
Trumbach argues that changes in male sexual behaviour were due to the rise of a perceived 'sodomite identity' in urban locales during the early eighteenth century. Previously a degree of bisexuality, involving adult males having sexual relations with adolescent boys, had been conceptualized as the characteristic of the hypersexual libertine and conveyed no imputation against the manliness and full masculine identity of the male in question. For the younger partner, having engaged in such relations at a particular stage in the life-cycle was not carried over into a stigmatised adult identity. However, the early eighteenth century saw the rise of a distinctive 'molly' subculture of men who defined themselves by their sexual interaction with other adult males like themselves and were perceived as a third, transgressive, gender. The imputation of being a sodomite came to be regarded as a deleterious slur upon manly reputation, so that mere extortionary threats to make this accusation could be successful even without any apparent objective grounds for concern by the man accused.
As a result, Trumbach claims, the idea of exclusive sexual interest in women as the desideratum of normal masculinity, i.e., heterosexuality as a distinct identity, arose. From around 1730 accusations of heterosexual whoremongery were no longer considered defamatory, but 'the fear of being exposed as a sodomite left men paralyzed' (p. 55). He connects the increasing demand that men should find sexual pleasure only with the female and not the male body with the abrupt rise of Onania-mania in the early eighteenth century - even a man=s own body was not to form a source of pleasure to him. Trumbach claims that boys= ideas and first experiences of sexuality were constructed in a predominantly homosocial male world: only later did they interact with females, with fears, fantasies and received myths already in place, providing the basis for profound anxieties.
Female sexual reputation continued to be judged along the axis of chaste maid or wife versus whore (a term of opprobrium not confined to professional prostitutes) for a great deal longer. Women's sexual lives were still structured by family institutions and forms - varying considerably according to social class - in ways that men's were ceasing to be. Sexual relations between women were not prosecuted, and it was 'always much more possible to be unaware that sexual relations between women existed' (p. 8).
Much of the ambivalent response of law, legislature, public opinion and voluntary bodies to brothels, soaring venereal disease rates, rising illegitimacy, rape and sexual assaults on women, can, Trumbach alleges, be explained by the belief that it was socially essential to provide men with heterosexual outlets (these were Bad Things, but the alternative was worse). It is not entirely clear whether this was only for fear of their resorting to 'unnatural' expedients, or whether there were concurrent changing perceptions of the nature of sexual desire, at least in the male, with this being envisaged as an imperative, potentially dangerously uncontrollable force of nature.
Can the anxieties of eighteenth century masculinity be attributed to other factors? Could it be that the male peer group, as opposed to hierarchical and age-structured relationships within a familial context, was playing a more important role in the lives of men (we may note the contemporary rise of Freemasonry and other institutionalized forms of male bonding), and new ways of >proving manhood= were having to be evolved (though fears relating to sodomy would doubtless fit in here anyway)? While much of the relentless, even obsessive, pursuit of heterosexual gratification reckless of any consequences either to the women involved or the dangers to themselves of venereal disease, may have been driven by intrapsychic fears about sexual identity, the male peer group doubtless played a part in establishing norms, and perhaps also generating an atmosphere of competition and rivalry over conquests. The emphasis seems to have been on doing it, almost on 'counting coup', except - perhaps - in the more élite social circles in which an ideology of companionate marriage and emotional intimacy between husband and wife was emerging (though Trumbach reveals how much this was aspiration rather than actuality). Quantity rather than quality appears to have been the keynote. I was somewhat surprised to find no discussion of any trade in impotence remedies, given the counter-productive performance pressures involved in conceiving the proof of normal masculinity as getting it up and into a woman as often as possible. Trumbach suggests that at least for some men the prevalent violence of sexual relations - in honest courtship as well as rape and sexual harassment - was a (perhaps necessary) erotic stimulus.
Whether or not the reader concurs with Trumbach's theory of the motor driving the changes he describes, there is no doubt that the rich feast of empirical evidence based on extensive research in, and sensitive interpretation of, a wide range of archival materials which he sets before us will be of interest to historians in many fields. There is much here that is thought-provoking: tantalising glimpses of a world we have lost - for which it is hard to feel much nostalgia.
Wellcome Institute for the History of Medicine, London Lesley A. Hall
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