Straight (7 page)

As Jonathan Ned Katz writes in his
The Invention of Heterosexuality,
Krafft-Ebing's “disturbing (and fascinating) examples of a sex called sick began quietly to define a new idea of a sex perceived as healthy.” That healthy sexuality centered around reproduction, but Krafft-Ebing grudgingly acknowledged that it also encompassed the desire for and pursuit of erotic pleasure. This was a watershed. After Krafft-Ebing, the “sexual instinct” could refer to erotic desire as well as reproductive potential.

“Heterosexual” did not, however, spring forth as a household word with a single uncontested meaning. For a few years, it was used as a term of pathology. The first time the word appeared in English, predating the English translation of
Psychopathia Sexualis
by a year, was in an 1892 journal article by Chicago physician James G. Kiernan. Kiernan and a few contemporaries employed “heterosexual” using a different understanding of the Greek “hetero,” or “different,” to mean “both.” Kiernan's “heterosexuals” were people we would now call bisexual.
Dorland's Medical Dictionary
of 1901 repeats this, but additionally defines the term to mean an “abnormal or perverted appetite toward the opposite sex.” That definition was echoed in the Merriam-Webster
New International Dictionary
of 1923. The early use of “heterosexual” to describe behaviors that were considered pathological reflects, more than anything else, a deep-seated anxiety about sexual desire. It took English sexologist Havelock Ellis to resolve these anxieties and to stabilize “heterosexual” with a meaning that approaches the way we use the word today. By 1915, Ellis had begun to use the word “heterosexual” as shorthand for a type of relationship between male/female pairs that simultaneously included the ennobling emotion of love, the potential for procreation, and the experience of erotic pleasure.

By the time the unabridged second edition of the Merriam-Webster dictionary was published in 1934, “heterosexual” had appeared in mainstream print in both England and the United States.[
11
] The 1934 definition of the term, according to Merriam-Webster, was “manifestation of sexual passion for one of the opposite sex; normal sexuality.” The normal-sexual was the heterosexual, and the heterosexual was normally, typically, acceptably, even laudably sexual. With the help of
good old-fashioned scientific taxonomy, a model for sexual desire and activity between men and women had not only been legitimized; it had been made emblematic of an inherent physical and psychological normalcy that suited both respectable middle-class families and the well-regulated secular state. The modern heterosexual had officially been born.

Imagine yourself poking around the attic of your grandmother's house. Breathing the dusty, close air under the eaves, you open an old trunk to find several diaries bound in old, cracked leather, all written in the same gracefully looping hand. The name written on the flyleaf is familiar, a great-great uncle's. Intrigued, you flip through the yellowed pages, only to stop when something catches your eye, a passage in which your long-dead ancestor wrote that he and a friend named William “retired early and in each other's arms did friendship sink peacefully to sleep.”[
1
]

You look back a few pages. It seems that this is an old boarding school friend of your great-great uncle's he's talking about, who came to visit him at home several years after they had both graduated. They would both have been grown men by then, though still on the young side, early twenties, perhaps. These two were sharing a bed? Falling asleep in each other's arms? Hmmm. Maybe it was just a figure of speech.

Next you sift through a bundle of letters addressed to your great-great-grandfather, each still tucked into its brittle old envelope. You open one, a long, chatty missive from one of his law school classmates, commiserating with your great-great-grandfather about the difficulties of starting a law practice in a strange town. Maybe, the letter writer ventures, it would be easier if they could cooperate somehow. Then
you turn the page. “Yes, James, I must come; we will yoke together again; your little bed is just wide enough; we will practise at the same bar, and be as friendly a pair of single fellows as ever cracked a nut.”[
2
]

What would you think if you stumbled across these family heirlooms? Would you think you came from a long line of closet cases? Would you assume, based on the available evidence, that your great-great-grandfather must have been bisexual at the very least? It would make sense if you did. Men don't generally share beds unless they're sexually involved with one another, after all. Everybody knows what sleeping together means.

Or do we? To us today, sleeping together almost invariably means sexual activity. But as it turns out this assumption is of fairly recent vintage. For most of human history it just meant sharing a bed, a pragmatic solution to the problem of expensive beds, bed linens, and bedrooms. In an era before central heat, sharing a bed also meant you'd be warm at night. To be sure, bed sharing wasn't always pleasant, as letters written by travelers sharing inn-house beds with lousy, farty, unmannerly strangers attest. But in many people's lives, bed sharing, which always involved members of the same biological sex, represented not only a common but an emotionally intimate refuge, so tender that Herman Melville compared it, in the pages of
Moby Dick,
to the intimacy of long-married couples.

By and large, our ancestors seem to have appreciated sharing their beds. Even younger siblings, who we might think would've welcomed finally having a bed to themselves after an older sibling they'd had to share with left home, sometimes missed it terribly. The teenaged Elisha Whittlesey, later a US congressman during Abraham Lincoln's term, wrote to his older brother William, “I never knew what it was before to be separated from a dear Brother. . . . You and I was always together. . . . I miss you most when I go to bed.” Indeed, Lincoln himself is well known to have been a bed sharer, a fact on which many speculations about his sexuality have been based. As a penniless law student, he rented lodgings whose low cost was partly due to the fact that the bed was shared. The man with whom Lincoln shared that bed, Joshua Speed, became one of Lincoln's closest and dearest friends. Both male and female same-sex friends frequently shared beds out of affection, with women friends sometimes even, as historian
Carroll Smith-Rosenberg notes, “dislodging husbands from their beds and bedrooms so that dear friends might spend every hour of every day together” during visits.

No responsible historian would claim that all bed sharing, always, was strictly nonsexual. It would be naive to think that proximity and opportunity never led to things going bump in the night. Some relationships we would now describe as “homosexual” or “homoerotic” undoubtedly flourished without comment behind the scrim of propriety granted by this unremarkably common practice. But the fact is that bed sharing
was
common, and it
was
seen as proper. The simple fact that bed sharing was assumed to be an unremarkable, nonsexual experience suggests that this, in the vast majority of cases, is exactly what it was.

Clearly, what “everybody knows” about sharing a bed has changed. Once what “everybody knows” was that it was commonplace for friends, family members, and fellow travelers to share beds on a regular basis, and that sharing a bed was all there was to it. Now, what “everybody knows” is that “let's spend the night together” has only one unequivocal meaning—to the point that the Rolling Stones were forbidden to sing the original lyrics on
The Ed Sullivan Show
in 1967 and from performing it altogether in their first appearance in China in 2006.

Although the things “everyone knows” seem like common-sense realities, inevitable and unshakable facts, the truth is that they aren't. They change. But if what “everyone knows” can change, then how is it that everybody still seems to know it? How do we know what we know about sex? How do we arrive at our expectations, our interpretations of words and behaviors and appearances, our opinions of ourselves and of others where sexuality is concerned? Does it matter?

KNOWING WHAT TO THINK

When anthropologists talk about this “stuff everyone knows,” they use the term
doxa.
[
3
] Doxa comes from the Greek for “common knowledge,” and that's a pretty good description of what it is: the understanding we absorb from our native culture that we use to make sense of the world. Doxa is, quite literally in most cases, the stuff that “goes without saying,” the assumptions and presumptions and “common sense”
ideas we have about our world and how it works. Virtually everything we know about sexuality, and heterosexuality, we know—or think we know—because of doxa. Perhaps the best way for me to express the power of doxa is that it is the reason that, even as you read these words, some of you are probably secretly telling yourselves that it doesn't matter what some silly historian says, those sentimental gentlemen sleeping in one another's arms were
clearly
gay.

Absorbing a culture's doxa, very much including its doxa regarding sexuality, is an inescapable cultural process that starts at birth. Doxa influences virtually everything we do, including the ways in which we handle infants. For instance, the crying of baby boys is more likely to be perceived by caregivers as being “excessive,” whereas the crying of baby girls is more likely to be perceived as normal. Baby boys are therefore more likely to be punished for excessive crying, not because they actually cry excessively but because they are boys.[
4
]

This is simultaneously an expression and a teaching of doxa. Baby boys do not know that they are learning doxa when they are punished for crying. The big brothers and sisters of those baby boys don't know they are learning doxa when they see it happen. Caregivers are not necessarily aware that they are teaching doxa to children, or that they are treating boy children differently than girl children because doxa has taught them to. People don't experience doxa as an external force; they experience it as internal knowledge: the stuff that “everyone knows.” Yet if what “everyone knows” is that “boys don't cry,” then the likelihood that boys will be punished if they do cry becomes greater. And if “everyone knows” that boys who cry are punished, the likelihood is that boys won't cry if they can possibly help it.

“Doxa” may, in its unfamiliar Greek, sound like abstruse ivory-tower theory, but it's just a name for a very real, mundane, routinely overlooked everyday process. “Boys don't cry” is doxa. But it is not just an abstract belief; it is also a daily influence on how people think, speak, and act. This is precisely how doxa becomes seamless and invisible and, for better or worse, “just the way things are.” Knowingly and unknowingly, willingly and unwillingly, we participate in doxa because it is how we know what is desirable and undesirable to the people we deal with daily, what is acceptable and unacceptable, what will get us punished and what will get us praised. Doxa is made up of
all the things we need to know reflexively if we are to succeed in navigating the expectations of our culture.

At the same time, doxa needs us. Doxa does not, and cannot, exist without people or culture. And as people change and cultures change, so, as we've seen with the example of bed sharing, does doxa. But doxa does not change because some top-down authority tells it to. Our big cultural authorities—organized religion, medicine, the sciences, the law, the media, and so on—can exert a lot of influence on doxa, but they cannot simply create it from nothing. The creation of doxa is a folk process. We all create it, together, mostly unintentionally.

The folk process of doxa becomes very clear to us when we look at the different ways that the things “everyone knows” about heterosexuality have been created. Whether it involves assimilating information that originates with authority figures, creating marked categories, invoking God and nature, or interpreting statistics with a decidedly populist bent, we take part in a large cultural conversation that selects, shapes, and distributes knowledge. In these ways and many others, we participate—and are always participating, whether we realize it or not—in the process of creating what “everyone knows” about heterosexuality.

HOMEOPATHIC FREUD

The process by which cultures create doxa is noisy. It relies on the existence of many different voices, a vast cloud of information and opinion and back-and-forth with a decidedly low ratio of signal to noise. Noisy, however, does not mean random. If you are familiar with the social media platform Twitter, you have probably already seen the phenomenon of a large cultural conversation taking on distinct moods and subjects at specific times, simply by glancing at Twitter's automatically generated “trending topics” list. “Heterosexual” gained prominence in our thinking and our vocabulary in pretty much the same way as a trending topic does online: more and more people started talking about it until finally it came into its own.

Before this could happen, however, “heterosexual” had to get into the conversational flow. For Kertbeny and Krafft-Ebing, you will recall, “heterosexual” was nothing more than an experiment in classification, an attempt to define and categorize something that had not
previously had a name. For us, “heterosexual” is not an experiment but a cornerstone of how we organize our ideology of sex. As a culture, we believe that a thing called “heterosexuality” exists, inherent and irreducible. We believe it produces certain kinds of desires, behaviors, and relationships. In the late 1800s, hardly anyone had heard of such a thing as a “heterosexual.” By 1950, “heterosexuals” were everywhere, and most people firmly believed they always had been. Quite a bit had to happen in the intervening decades in order for “heterosexual” to go from being just an awkward neologism to being a primary and unquestioned tenet of sexuality doxa. One of the major forces in this transition was Sigmund Freud and, more importantly, the popularization of his work.