A Brief History of Heterosexuality
Expect pervert catalogues, bestiality and a handful of forgotten queer heroes.
The first time I was asked if I had always known I was gay, I must have been around 14 years old. At this point, all I really knew was that my mum’s gifted David Beckham calendar caused a tingle between my legs. I told my best friend, and word got out to her family. Before I knew it, I was no longer just Jake. I was a homosexual.
Put bluntly, this is something that the vast majority of straight people will never experience. The woman at the off-licence checkout will probably never ask you in a conspiratorial whisper if you’ve ever had heterosexual intercourse ‘just to check’, and you probably won’t have every new relationship announcement met with the lingering suspicion that your tried-and-tested desires are ‘just a phase’. Only in gay bars and at Pride events do straight people ever really have to ‘come out’, and that’s only because we’ve fought for centuries to carve out those spaces where we can feel safe, like the ‘norm’. Even then, it’s not exactly a declaration that tends to get you beaten up or harassed – we’ll probably just crack a shit joke about your dress sense and then drag you into a Cher conga line to test the true extent of your allyship.
Heterosexuality might be treated as a fleshed-out identity and a fixed, unquestionable default now, but it hasn’t always been that way. Delving deep into horny history can teach us a little about how this came to be, and what that says about the rest of us.
For centuries, cultural views of sex in the UK were shaped by religion and morality. There were some intricacies and nuances, but the general consensus was that it should be vanilla – put away those hog-ties, lads! – and, ultimately, productive.
These views are made evident by the language of law at the time, which criminalised acts as opposed to people. The 1533 Buggery Act, passed during the reign of serial executioner and notorious bigamist Henry VIII, is exemplary. Early versions of the legislation forbade “unnatural sex acts”; later, the contours of these vague parameters were sketched out to specifically outlaw “anal penetration” and “bestiality”. In other words, in the eyes of 16th-century lawmakers, taking it up the arse (whether you were a man or a woman) was just as awful as fucking a cow.
Same-sex acts of desire between women, of course, weren’t mentioned – not because of any progressive intention, but because it was thought that lesbians didn’t exist.
It wasn’t until Britain entered the tail-end of the notoriously conservative Victorian era that a growing bunch of psychology bros became fascinated by the nuts and bolts of human sexuality. In 1902, their blossoming branch of sexy study was formally named: sexology.
This movement had been decades in the making, and some of its pioneers were specifically motivated by the desire to decriminalise same-sex attraction. One of these early, proto-sexologists was Hungarian journalist Károly Mária Kertbeny, a passionate human rights campaigner with a frankly magnificent moustache.
Kertbeny and his aforementioned moustache.
As a young man, Kertbeny became close friends with a gay man who died by suicide after being blackmailed by an extortionist. The story goes that he was so moved by the tragedy that he began to show serious academic interest not only in defining sexuality, but in using this study to advocate for decriminalisation – at least that’s the official line, although his diaries also suggest a string of clandestine, horny encounters which spurred this motivation. In 1868, he coined the terms ‘heterosexual’ and ‘homosexual’ in a book chapter which was eventually scrapped, with ‘heterosexuality’ also described as ‘normally sexed’. He also penned one of the earliest allusions to asexuality, which he referred to ‘monosexualism’.
His friend, queer activist and fellow proto-sexologist Karl Ulrichs had already been busy outlining theories of homosexuality, which were foundational in modern definitions of trans identity and gendered presentation, too. The aim was to codify queerness to advocate for its decriminalisation, but heterosexuality was also referred to as an unspoken benchmark of ‘normality’, whereas same-sex attraction was known as ‘inversion’.
Heterosexuality later appeared in Richard Von Krafft-Ebing’s sprawling encyclopaedia of all things sex, Psychopathia Sexualis, although the term was mentioned only a handful of times. Instead, the Austro-German psychiatrist, whose early years were mainly spent interrogating and dissecting the minds of patients in mental asylums, used detailed, sensationalist case studies to form a comprehensive list of perversions, most of which – sadism, mascochism, anilingus (rimming) – sound like the backbone of a truly cracking Friday night.
Suddenly, there were more ways to be a pervert than ever before. Although Krafft-Ebing’s text played a part in laying the foundations of sexuality studies as we know them today, it was ruthlessly prescriptive and designed to weed out any sniff of deviance. Even kinky straight folks weren’t immune to perversion, loosely defined by the following quote:
With opportunity for the natural satisfaction of the sexual instinct, every expression of it that does not correspond with the purpose of nature – i.e., propagation, – must be regarded as perverse.
Lesbians were mentioned briefly – a breakthrough considering cultural attitudes at the time – but mainly in case studies of women abusing children. With the exception of some of Freud’s theories, which are truly a wild ride, early sexologists glossed over the task of defining heterosexuality, instead dedicating their energy solely to the queers and the perverts.
Despite the initial, progressive intention of the likes of Kertbeny and Ulrichs, who aimed to understand and humanise homosexuality in order to advance gay rights, most early sexologists spent their time further pathologising anyone they saw as perverts – and by today’s standards, this still includes vanilla straights spicing it up with a pair of Ann Summers handcuffs on their anniversary.
As a result, ‘heterosexuality’ flew under the radar, a synonym for ‘normality’ treated as shorthand for ‘good’, ‘wholesome’, ‘productive’ ideals of human sexuality.
Things got more progressive over the years, especially as queer people gained traction in artistic circles (salon scenes, the Pansy Craze) and US sexologists like Alfred Kinsey reframed sexuality as a spectrum rather than a fixed binary, and to write on this more depth – which I will if you want me to, I promise – requires a book-length thesis.
Yet these early examples tell us plenty about heterosexuality as we know it today, and more specifically, why it’s treated as the norm.
For centuries, fucking was just something we do rather than any real indication of who we are. It was a means to an end; a tedious, inevitable component of reproduction. Even as discourse expanded, your sexuality only mattered if it marked you out as a deviant pervert, in which case you would have your kinks comprehensively documented by armchair psychiatrists cherry-picked from local asylums. ‘Good’, law-abiding, vanilla heterosexuals didn’t have their sex lives scrutinised, to the extent that Krafft-Ebing’s Psychopathia Sexualis doesn’t even feature ‘heterosexuality’ as a heading or chapter subtitle anywhere. If you’re ‘normal’ you can pass freely; if you’re a pervert, you get strapped into the chair and psychologically dissected.
Immense progress has been made, both culturally and politically, but the fact is that heterosexuality is still allowed to pass without scrutiny. It remains invisible, resistant to questioning.
Even more progress could come if we started to change this. The aim isn’t to pathologise straight people – and there’ll be more conversation in future about how the rigid, definitional boundaries of ‘heterosexuality’ aren’t exactly doing anybody any favours – but to understand that straightness is a construct, one which can be questioned and reconstructed over time.
If we start to treat it as an apolitical label on a vast spectrum, we can work towards undoing the idea that straightness and all of its connotations are the ‘norm’, and making life easier for everyone in the process.