Debating the Morality of Heterosexuality
Photo by Wedding Photography on Unsplash
It’s time someone finally spoke up against the institution of heterosexuality. For far too long, “straight” people have insisted that their lifestyle is “natural” and “right.” They have devoted hundreds of books, shows, speeches, and far too much of our time to the idea that their way is the only way to go, and it's infuriating.
I want to emphasize there is nothing wrong with either hetero or homosexual activity. You, as an individual, should engage in any consensual activity you want to. However, I do want to challenge the belief that heterosexuality as an identity, or the idea that our species is naturally inclined to confine itself exclusively to opposite-sex pairings, is an ingrained aspect of human nature.
As we shall soon see, the opposite is the case. Heterosexuality is a recent invention that goes against how our species organizes itself. There is nothing natural about the heterosexual way of life, and while it’s all well in good if that’s something you “choose to do,” it’s not an ideal we should claim is innate to the human condition.
A frustrating element of the “straightness is natural” discourse is that it’s hard to take seriously if you have an even passing understanding of history. Bigoted men and women will spend hours talking about how opposite-sex attractions are the only ones that matter, but, of course, our recent past is filled with examples of non-straight sexual behavior and gender expression being perceived as normal or accepted.
It’s hard to know where to even begin here with counterexamples because there are so many throughout history. People will often bring up ancient Greece, particularly Athens, to emphasize the oldness of queerness. The Athenian gymnasium was where a lot of the recorded same-sex attraction between aristocratic men went down. Far different than the gymnasium of today, it had its own rituals and rules. Courtship typically happened between older men and “boys” (a term that could vary greatly between those below the age of 18 to those slightly above it, the latter referred to as Striplings or Cadets). The younger boys (i.e., below 18) were more closely guarded, usually by slaves. Most sexual activities came in the way of standing frottage, termed diamerion (meaning “between the thighs”), and typically occurred between older men and striplings or cadets — although sex with younger boys did happen. The power dynamic here should not be romanticized.
Acceptance of same-sex attraction in ancient Greece and even in ancient Athens varied across time and place. Athens would become decidedly less tolerant of the practice in the 4th Century as a more robust slave market challenged the “dignified” culture of the gymnasium. This would not be the end of same-sex courting in Athens, and we would see similar courtship centuries later, in places like the Roman Empire, where Emperors such as Nero took on male lovers. Fun fact, Nero is rumored to have enjoyed being penetrated by his well-endowed husband.
Halfway across the world in Han China (202 BCE — 220 CE), bisexuality was the norm for much of the nobility. According to folklore, Emperor Ai (27-2 BCE) famously found himself waking up from an afternoon nap to see his lover Dong Xian sleeping on his robe. Deeply in love, Ai refused to disturb him. He instead opted to cut the sleeve off his own robe. The tale quickly spread to Ai's court, and to this day, “the passion of the cut sleeve” is a Chinese euphemism for “intimacy” between two men. The majority of Western Han emperors had both male and female companions. According to anthropologist Vincent E. Gil, “[China had] a long history of dynastic homosexuality…with courtly love among rulers and subjects of the same sex being elevated to noble virtues.”
Historical records show us that LGBTQIA2+ people have existed all across Asia. It would not be until Ghengis, or Chinggis Khan (1158-1227 CE) declared sodomy an offense punishable by death in his public code of laws known as the Yasa (probably introduced in 1206 CE, well after the Han dynasty) that the tide started to change. The Yasa is one of the earliest documented instances of a sodomy law (i.e., a law outlawing certain nonprocreative sexual acts). A sad ordeal, to be sure, but it indicates how this was not a common practice for most of human history. It should also be noted that death, particularly through decapitation, was a common punishment for most offenses in the Yasa and should not be seen as an inditement of sodomy in particular. You could receive a similar fate for stealing someone's cattle or hunting certain game from March to October.
As with sexuality, genders outside the male-female binary have also emerged throughout history. We know, for example, that there were more than 150 different pre-colonial Native American tribes that acknowledged third genders within their communities. As Duane Brayboy writes in Indian Country Today: “At the point of contact, all Native American societies acknowledged three to five gender roles: Female, male, Two Spirit female, Two Spirit male and transgendered.”
They go on to write that the term Two-Spirit was adopted from the Ojibwe language during a conference in Winnipeg, Manitoba, in 1990. This was done to communicate with the general population, as well as to distinguish from other more harmful terminology. Two-Spirit, therefore, doesn’t necessarily have a direct translation in every tribal language, with each tribe having its own wording. The Navajo have the Nadleehi, meaning “the transformed,” who have both masculine and feminine energy. The Lakota have the Winkté, roughly translating to a man who desires to behave as a woman.
Not all these tribes celebrated these various identities. From the accounts of European colonizers, which should be taken with the heaviest grains of salt you can muster, some may have been conquered warriors forced to wear feminine clothing as a form of humiliation. Yet, gender expression was still much more fluid than in puritanical European society, whose missionaries were horrified by the varied gender expression they saw in the “New World” and considered it a sign of the inhabitant’s “uncivilized nature.”
Obviously, there are so many examples I am leaving out. This topic of “alternative” genders and sexualities is a subject that could not be contained in a single book series, let alone one article. We could talk about Bushman artwork depicting same-sex acts or the queer Kings and Queens of Europe. We could spend ages examining the Bakla in the pre-colonial Philippines and Hijra in South Asia.
There are also all the stories we can never know about because they were not recorded. The history I cited here has been overwhelmingly about male nobility. We cannot know of the passionate trysts between poor queer people during most of history, especially poor queer women, because they didn’t have the ability to preserve their own stories until very recently. It’s highly likely they happened, though, because the rich are not unique in their desire to express themselves.
We can say without a shadow of a doubt that queerness can be found throughout time and place. It's not only natural, but it emerges in even the most repressive and dire of circumstances. The reason people are ignorant of this information now is that we are exiting a political regime that not only criminalized queer behavior — and hence our recording and preservation of queer history — but fabricated the queer-straight divide we currently live under.
For while I can find hundreds of years of queer history, the same cannot be said for straight people: who, as far as I can tell, do not really exist.
This position may confuse you because clearly “straight” people must have existed throughout history. People have had opposite-sex intimate activity before — it’s probably the reason why you are here.
However, for most of human civilization, heterosexuality and homosexuality were not identities. Sexuality was something that you did — not something that you were. When we look at the criminalization of same-sex activity throughout history, which, again, has not been dominant until after the rise of Christianity (let’s put a pin in that for now), it was the act of sodomy that was mostly banned. Genghis Khan was not trying to stop sodomy for moral reasons. He seems to have been concerned about increasing his military forces to combat the far more populous Song Dynasty (960-1279 CE).
Similarly, sodomy or “buggery” laws in Europe and the Americas were initially geared towards stopping non-procreative sex with both humans and animals — not against homosexuals specifically as an identity. This framing was heavily religious in nature. The word buggery is believed to derive from the Bogomil heresy — a religious group during the early tenth century that rejected the Church’s power in exchange for a form of worship that was far more decentralized. This movement was, unsurprisingly, violently suppressed and was purposefully associated with sodomy by Christian leadership. Buggery laws were designed to “protect” society from “moral degeneracy.” “Straights” were punished for these nonprocreative acts alongside queer people, though sodomy laws were sparingly enforced throughout the early colonial period.
It was not until the 19th and 20th centuries that we really started to see these laws geared towards demonizing “queer people” specifically, and that’s more or less when heterosexuality was invented. The terms heterosexuality and homosexuality were not coined until the late 1860s, initially by Hungarian journalist Karl Maria Kertbeny and later adopted by psychiatrist Richard von Krafft-Ebing. This lack of terminology did not make Europe a queer utopia before the invention of these terms. Acts of queer sex remained heavily taboo, but it did take a while for the current framing of heterosexuality to become mainstream. As recently as 1923, Merriam Webster’s dictionary defined heterosexuality as “morbid sexual passion for one of the opposite sex.”
As European influence spread during the age of colonialism (i.e., 1415 CE to the 1950s and um, now?), this emerging definition of “straightness,” alongside a general demonization of same-sex attraction and non-normative gender expression, was imposed onto the world. The superior military capabilities of European powers meant that they had the ability to force their will onto many different polities, allowing them to rewrite norms that had existed for hundreds of years within one or two generations.
India, for example, is the birthplace of the Kama Sutra, which is an ancient Sanskrit text written allegedly by sage Vatsyayana, devoted to, among many other things, sexuality and eroticism. There is an entire section within this text devoted to homosexual sex, Vatsyayana writing: “it is to be engaged in and enjoyed for its own sake as one of the arts.” Hindu epics are dotted with examples of Gods engaging in same-sex activity (see Agni) and varied gender expressions (see Ardhanarishvara).
Within a generation of British occupation, many polities in India went from being relatively progressive on these issues to downright conservative. Victorian British administrators, horrified by India's more flexible views of sexuality and gender roles, criminalized such activity in 1860 under section 377 of the Penal code. The legacy of which lasted nearly 160 years. It was not repealed until the country's Supreme Court struck it down in 2018.
Conservative leaders across the country opposed this decision. “You can’t change the mindset of the society by using the hammer of law. This is against the … religious values of this country,” remarked the chief of the xenophobic Hum Hindu group, Mr. Ajay Gautam. Men like Gautam claim to fight for traditional and conservative values, but most ironically, these are very clearly British ones — as we have already covered: aspects of Indian society were far more permissive of homosexual activity before the British occupation.
This irony is seen the world over as conservative movements complain that the LGBTQIA2+ community is a western import or invention. In Uganda, as another example, homosexual acts were made punishable in 2014 by life in prison. The International community reacted negatively to this decision. The then-United Nations High Commissioner for Human Rights, Navi Pillay, called it a violation of “fundamental human rights.” Uganda President Yoweri Museveni reacted to this criticism by telling the International community to “Respect African societies and their values,” claiming that Westerners brought homosexuality to his country.
However, this distaste for same-sex activity and non-normative gender expression, as well as the framing of heterosexuality itself, is a Western import. Uganda’s history of sexuality and gender is far more fluid than men like Museveni claim. In the Kingdom of Buganda, which is inside modern-day Uganda, a king there, Mwanga II, was reportedly an open bisexual. He had relatively positive relations with his people, and it was not until Christian missionaries started converting people to Christianity that widespread calls for his removal were made. Mwanga II’s refusal to bow to British rule led to him being deposed from the throne and provides a visceral example of how western imperialism has imposed heterosexuality onto the world.
We likewise saw a similar experience in how Westerners “civilized” the Indian tribes of the Americas. When Western colonizers came to the Americas, they were horrified by the sexual and gender fluidity of many tribal cultures. This led the US government, my government, to “correct” this with assimilationist policies — the most notable policy being the Civilization Fund Act of 1819. The fund paid missionaries and church leaders to work with the federal government to establish boarding schools in Indian territories that replaced tribal practices with Christian ones. As Mary Annette Pember writes in The Atlantic:
“This is what achieving civilization looked like in practice: Students were stripped of all things associated with Native life. Their long hair, a source of pride for many Native peoples, was cut short, usually into identical bowl haircuts. They exchanged traditional clothing for uniforms, and embarked on a life influenced by strict military-style regimentation. Students were physically punished for speaking their Native languages. Contact with family and community members was discouraged or forbidden altogether. Survivors have described a culture of pervasive physical and sexual abuse at the schools. Food and medical attention were often scarce; many students died. Their parents sometimes learned of their death only after they had been buried in school cemeteries, some of which were unmarked.”
The ones who survived returned with new “Christian” values. Soon tribal leaders started to forbid Two-Spirit marriages and other acts of queer self-expression. As we have seen elsewhere in the world, this created a lasting legacy. Activist Christine Diindiisi McCleave describes how her grandfather disowned her gay uncle because of the values he learned at one Catholic boarding school, writing: “This was the direct result of what my grandfather learned at boarding school — the rhetoric that homosexuality is a sin.”
When people claim that heterosexual norms and the gender binary are worldwide, they forget that they were spread there by some of the most aggressive empires in modern history. The concept of straightness that we have is a fabrication backed by force. These entrenched norms have not only caused people to be ignorant of reality, but they shaped how we perceived the recorded history we do have. People are claiming that heterosexuality is an institution going back forever, when in reality, it’s a concept that has barely lasted one hundred years.
If you pause to actually consider everything above, you may hopefully realize that if humanity’s default status were truly straight, there would be no need for these oppressive laws and institutions. Equilibrium would sort itself out. We would see queer people be a relatively obscure, somewhat stable number in the population rather than an ever visible and growing part of society.
There was a controversy a little while back on Twitter when commentator Glenn Greenwald retweeted a Gallup poll, which he then used to insinuate that gays and lesbians were disappearing and being replaced by trans and nonbinary people. The data doesn’t support this conclusion — gays and lesbians did increase in number as well. It’s just that there are more self-reported transgender people now among Gen Zers than there are lesbians. There are also a lot more bisexuals!
However, there was actually something more interesting in that poll than this controversy, and it's that the total number of queer people is increasing. It jumped to 5.6% overall and now sits at nearly 15.9% for Generation Zers. I think if we are honest with ourselves, this is a more accurate reflection of humanity. It’s not that the kids these days got a whole lot queerer, but that stigmatization that has been present in society for hundreds of years is being successfully (and hopefully permanently) chipped away. People feel more comfortable just doing what feels right. As acceptance of queerness in society continues to increase, it’s most likely going to implode our concepts of heterosexuality and homosexuality in general.
There is nothing wrong with identifying as gay, straight, bi, or pan on an individual level. You don’t have to have sex at all as far as I am concerned (shoutout to my aces). These are the labels we have, and for the time being, I intend to use them because I exist in a society that does. The label of heterosexuality, however, is based on an imperialist dichotomy. The people who defend it have, for far too long, pretended to base their arguments on human nature when, in actuality, their rigid enforcement is entirely unnatural.
As we come to terms with queerness, straightness will eventually lose its meaning and become something less static. Have sex, kiss, cuddle, love, platonically hold hands, or spurn advances with whoever you want to, but we should philosophically question the need to create an identity around straightness. We should question why we demand rigidity in our society when it comes to the expression of sex and gender when historically, these things have been very fluid activities.
Again, I want to stress that I politically see the usefulness of labels for the sake of organizing. However, our species does not default to heterosexuality or, for that matter, homosexuality, as a point of nature. These are social constructions used to describe acts that are present in large swathes of the population. Humans have a propensity for both hetero and homosexual activity as well as a multitude of gender expressions. Hopefully, we can one day be mature about that as a species.
In other words, humanity is queer as f@ck, and the “straights” better get used to it.