Back in 2019, a group of neckbeard white nationalists rallied in Boston, Massachusetts for the truly depressing inauguration of a new, annual ‘Straight Pride’ event.
The scenes were predictable: bootcut jeans aplenty, hand-made signs declaring ‘It’s Great To Be Straight’ and enough Trump merchandise to settle even the heftiest of unpaid tax bills. It was already obvious to anyone researching that this wasn’t ever meant to be a good-faith celebration of ‘straight culture’, as the organisers claimed, but instead a bunch of bigots stamping their feet at the thought of queer people having something, anything for ourselves.
Yet the end result was actually kind of an own goal, as it sparked discussions – to which I contributed, for Dazed – about heterosexuality as a bland, beige construct, littered with regressive ideals and Live, Laugh, Love posters. I asked people to sum up ‘straight culture’, and the answers ranged from ‘Pawsecco’ and ‘ball-and-chain jokes’ to shit taste (the aforementioned bootcut jeans) and Maroon 5.
A year or so later, The New Inquiry ran a piece about ‘heteropessimism’ – which I can only summarise as that one drunk girl in the club slurring: “if sexuality is a choice, then why am I attracted to men, right?!” Now, in 2021, as more studies and statistics show that less of us identify as ‘straight’ than ever before, it’s no exaggeration to say that heterosexuality is in crisis.
That’s where this newsletter comes in. It should go without saying, but the title is rhetorical. “Are straight people OK?” Um, apparently not!
In a nutshell, the aim of this newsletter is to reframe the conversation. When we talk about gender and sexuality, we’re normally talking about those which are different. Heterosexuality is framed as this invisible norm, which is rarely questioned or qualified at length. But if an increasing number of straight people seem to hate it so damn much, then surely it’s worth delving deeper?
There’s a brilliantly sarcastic ‘Heterosexual Questionnaire’, written in 1977, which gives straight people a tongue-in-cheek glimpse into what it feels like to have your life, identity and desires treated as a curiosity or an aberration. It also gives a sense of the pressure loaded onto the shoulders of queer people to be perfect representatives of some mythical, singular queer ‘community’, and spotlights the way in which individual bad actors are framed by the media as representative of some inherently queer deviance.
Here’s a few examples:
5. Isn't it possible that all you need is a good gay lover?
8. If heterosexuality is normal, why are a disproportionate number of mental patients heterosexual?
12. The great majority of child molesters are heterosexuals. Do you really consider it safe to expose your children to heterosexual teachers?
These questions are incisive, witty examples of how conversations could more meaningfully interrogate heterosexuality, but most of them are rhetorical; they’re not genuine, in-depth inquiries, more like biting, bite-size glimpses into the ridiculous questions that queer people are made to answer on a regular basis.
I’m hoping to go a step further, delving into everything from ‘heteroflexibility’ and kink to traditional family structures, incels and the ever-present ‘orgasm gap’. By casting a queer eye across the dominant culture, the goal is to interrogate the norm and understand how it got there, why it lingers and what good it actually does any of us.
Now, I’m not saying you should trust me. At all. I’m a perpetually horny queer leftist with a hidden stash of glitter eye gels and prostate massagers. Under absolutely no circumstances do I ever claim to have my shit together – in fact, just two weeks ago, I drank too many beers and fell asleep at 11pm with a half-opened packet of crab-sticks watching cartoons on loop.
I’m definitely kind of messy, but I’ve also spent the last two decades struggling to navigate a dominant culture which makes little to no room for queerness. I used to think this was pretty shitty, but it can actually be kind of liberating. There is no blueprint for your experience, so you have to build your own.
Now, I’m at a point where I feel like I’ve got enough of it figured out that I can write something like this.
Telling our stories is always tricky, especially because centrist campaigners have long leaned on the language of respectability politics when it comes to advocating for gay rights – and, throughout history, this campaigning has disproportionately centred the most palatable, privileged swathes of the community. Viewed in this context, it’s easy to take statements like “we’re all human” with a huge pinch of salt. There’s an obvious fundamental truth there, but slogans like these have been diluted into the weakest of political clichés, usually weaponised to flatten out hierarchies of privilege and avoid serious discussions of structural inequality.
In Carmen Maria Machado’s beautiful, brutal memoir In The Dream House, she writes about the fear that sharing her experiences of an abusive relationship with a queer woman would be ‘bad publicity’ for the community, and that it would feed into existing narratives that we’re all damaged, broken, hurt. On the other hand, it was the total invisibility of queer people in mainstream abuse narratives that had Machado convinced that her experiences weren’t like others; that only straight men could be abusers, and that she must be going through something different, lesser.
It’s both a compelling argument both for and against visibility, a Catch 22 which can still feel impossible to resolve.
Wider conversations aside, the bottom line is that Machado endured being gaslit, controlled and manipulated, not just because she was trapped in a blinkered, tunnel-vision love, but because she didn’t have a queer blueprint to refer to. So Machado convincingly reframes the “we’re all human” narrative in a short essay on queer villains. Allow us our humanity, she says. Don’t tokenise us; let us have full, messy back-stories in the same way that straight protagonists do. Accept that we can be heroes as well as villains, and don’t buy into the idea that one queer villain equals an entirely villainous community. That way, we can write our stories in a way which is honest, unflinching and eternally necessary.
These stories are now being written, and they’re endlessly useful – not just to the queer people like Machado searching for themselves in existing narratives, but to people across the board. Still, these stories are pigeonholed. They’re slotted neatly into the ‘other’ box, commissioned by designated LGBTQ+ departments who offer us ‘visibility’ alongside a lower pay-grade than straight authors because we’re ‘niche’.
We are not a niche. There’s a never-ending wealth of knowledge that comes from queer narratives, thought and theory. Not only could this help to build bridges between communities and trace threads of commonality in our experiences (which, as many activists believe, could then lead to empathy, humanisation and, ultimately, a shared fight), it could go a long way towards healing the so-called ‘crisis of heterosexuality’ that spawned the god-awful rally in 2019.