Sexuality Historian, Author Hanne Blank Sets the Record Straight About Heterosexuality

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Medical texts describe human males as having an X and a Y sex chromosome. Females have two Xs. Hanne Blank's partner has two Xs and a Y. Discovering that her partner had Klinefelter's Syndrome while visiting a fertility specialist, Blank gained a new perspective about her own sexuality and her love for a "man" who has at various times passed for a feminine gay man, a butch lesbian and a female-to-male transsexual.

In her new book, Straight: The Surprisingly Short History of Heterosexuality, Blank explores the reasons behind the creation of the term "heterosexual," and how this word has changed our relationships and our world.

Your book seems to suggest that the naming of heterosexuality and homosexuality in 1868 was a negative thing, as it limited people to specific sexual identities. Given a choice, do you think people who identify as non-heterosexuals have more freedom to embrace their sexual identities today or before 1868?

The notion of a "sexual identity" is also a new thing, even newer than the words "homosexuality" and "heterosexuality." The idea that "homosexual" and "heterosexual" represent two possible options of some larger category of "sexual identity" is a twentieth-century conceit.

So on one level, I don't think you can actually talk about people having freedom to embrace a "sexual identity" at a time in history when no one would have had any notion that they had a "sexual identity" to embrace.

If what you're asking is whether people whom we would today describe as non-heterosexual were more or less free to pursue their particular sexual, emotional or relational desires prior to the invention of "homosexual" and "heterosexual" and so on, that's a different question and it has a very different answer.

The answer to that question is that it would've depended on who you were, and where and when you lived. There have been times and places where some people -- notably elite males -- have been able to pursue their sexual interests relatively unfettered, regardless of current social mores and norms. There have been times and places where some people who flew well under the radar of most authority figures -- Victorian housewives, for instance -- have been able to pursue theirs relatively undetected. But it would be incorrect to claim that there was some golden age of sexual flexibility and possibility that existed just because we hadn't yet built the pigeonholes into which we now stuff ourselves. Human beings have never, to my knowledge, failed to at least attempt to police the desires and sexuality of most of the people, most of the time.

If we were to abolish the terms heterosexual and homosexual, who, if anyone, do you think would protest this dissolution more: the hetero or homosexual community?

Hard to say. Many people -- regardless of how they label their own sexual selves -- have bought into these labels and the whole schema very thoroughly, and would have a very hard time imagining themselves or the rest of the world if they could not use this lens.

Really, part of the challenge of writing this book was to struggle, intellectually, with the problem of how indeed a person steeped in our current culture could begin to conceptualize a world without "heterosexual." Demonstrably, it at one point existed. But it is hellaciously hard, thanks to the doxa in which we are all so steeped, to find a place to stand where we can get a clear view of what that might have been like (or might be like in the future). I think that this difficulty is of equal magnitude for anyone who has grown up in our particular sexual culture, regardless of one's personal constellation of desire and behavior and self-concept.

Do you think it would be a positive thing to eliminate all demographic labels like sexual preference, gender, and race? Would it be fairer to have unisex prisons, to combine boys and girls sports teams in high school, or to delete race as a factor on college applications and scholarships? Are these labels a necessary evil in striving for equality?

Social categories are absolutely social, and to that degree, fictions -- not indicators of inherent difference. But this does not mean they are not material in their effects and in their presence in our lives. In terms of what social categories are allowed to do, and the ways that they influence how we behave toward people, how we treat them, what we allow them and disallow them, they are very real indeed.

Addressing the differences in how we treat people on the basis of the social categories to which we assign them (or that they assign themselves to) is an important project. Abolishing a label or a term isn't going to necessarily abolish the social category that term describes.

The important things to address, when addressing systematic prejudice and discrimination, is that it is systematic and that it is discriminatory. Refusing to use a certain label for a certain discriminated-against group does not automatically produce that awareness, and it certainly doesn't produce the necessary action to stop the prejudicial attitudes and behaviors. To think that it would is to believe in a kind of sympathetic magic that does not in fact exist.