The Invention of Heterosexuality

Fascinating stuff, eh? I'm moving from the social construction of leadership to the social construction of gender and sexuality...

Jonathan Ned Katz is a writer and historian. He is the editor of Gay American History (1976), the Gay/Lesbian Almanac (1994), and The Invention of Heterosexuality (1995).

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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.

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