 Today, the words heterosexual and homosexual are wielded as weapons in real life battles. For example, in a recent defense of the so-called Defense of Marriage Act, the bill's author in the House of Representatives, Bob Barr, declared, quote, America will not be the first country in the world that says that homosexual marriages are as important as and rise to the level of the legal and moral equivalency of heterosexual marriage. Responding to such fighting statements, Representative Barney Frank uncovered their hidden logic, quote, if you want to say, hey, look, we've got to protect all these heterosexuals from the notion that two men might love each other, and we've got to prevent heterosexuals from getting divorced because they've heard two women live together in a loving relationship. Say it. Frank urged defenders of the Defense of Marriage Act to come right out with the unspoken, deeply suspect rationales for state-supported, exclusively heterosexual marriage. Today, as homosexuals and our allies struggle for gay and lesbian civil rights, and for a more pleasure-friendly social order, the word heterosexual appears often in the news. But taking a historical view, this common appearance of the heterosexual is something remarkably new. Before the late 19th century, the word heterosexual didn't exist. For most of the 20th century, the word heterosexual was a powerful but not a popular signifier. Not often did explicit references to heterosexuality appear in this nation's national media. In this century, with barely a whisper of discussion, something called heterosexuality was constructed as the way we are all supposed to feel, act, and be. Only in the last 10 or 20 years has the mass organization of homosexuals and of feminist women problematized heterosexuality as we put into question the old, assumed arrangement of heterosexual and male privilege. That undemocratic system Christopher Isherwood called a heterosexual dictatorship. The now common appearance of the word heterosexual in our national media reflects, I argue, a historic shift in the power relations of homosexuals and heterosexuals, women and men. But how did the heterosexual agenda come to be exposed to public view? This talk traces the history of the word heterosexual as one clue to its changing definitions, and those definitions are traced as clues to the changing social structure of the heterosexual order. That system of privilege in which in the 20th century U.S. those called heterosexual are treated as superior, those called homosexual and queer as inferior. So for the occasion of this talk, I ask you to suspend temporarily at least our usual heterosexual hypothesis, our assumption of an ahistorical unchanging heterosexuality. Come with me on a journey into the sexual past to observe and ponder the historical invention of heterosexuality. In the first inaugurating strand of the heterosexual categories history, we may be surprised to discover the part played by an early theorist and defender of same sex love. In Germany on May 6th, 1868, Karl Maria Kurtbeine writes to a fellow reformer of the unnatural fornication law, privately using several self coined terms. Among these are heterosexual and homosexual, the debut of the modern lingo. Kurtbeine's term heterosexual refers to erotic acts of men and women, but his word is no signifier of an ideal. His heterosexuals are characterized by their quote unfettered capacity for degeneracy. He who coins the terms loads the dice. Kurtbeine says that heterosexual men and women participate with each other, quote, in so-called natural as well as unnatural coitus. By natural here he means prokretive, by unnatural non-prokretive. His heterosexuals are, quote, also capable of giving themselves over to the same sex excesses. Additionally, normally sexed individuals are no less likely to engage in self defilement, he means masturbation, and they are equally likely to assault male, but especially female minors, to indulge in incest, to engage in bestiality, and even to behave depravityly with corpses. Kurtbeine's heterosexuals are certainly no paragons or virtue. Later, psychiatrists would co-opt Kurtbeine's term heterosexual to affirm the superiority of different sex eroticism, the inferiority of same sex sexuality. Considering Kurtbeine's coinage of heterosexual in the service of homosexual liberation, the psychiatrist's thievery of his term is one of sex history's great ironies. Kurtbeine first publicly used his new term homosexuality in the fall of 1869 in an anonymous appeal for reform of that unnatural fornication law. The public proclamation of the homosexual's existence preceded the public unveiling of the heterosexual. The first public use of Kurtbeine's word heterosexual occurred in Germany in 1880 in a published defense of homosexuality. The earliest known use of the word heterosexual in the U.S. occurs in a Chicago medical journal article by Dr. James G. Kiernan published in May 1892, a portentous month in heterosexual history. In surprising contrast to the later equation of heterosexual with normal sex, the heterosexual category first arrived on U.S. shores linked to one of several, quote, abnormal manifestations of the sexual appetite, unquote, in a list of sexual perversions proper in an article on sexual perversion. The heterosexuals cited by Dr. Kiernan were definitely not exemplars of normality. In the late 19th century, the normal was defined according to an absolute procreative standard. And since heterosexuals were not always procreating, they were perverted. Kiernan's heterosexuals are said to betray inclinations to, quote, abnormal methods of gratification. In context, he means techniques to ensure pleasure without reproducing. Kiernan's heterosexuals are also said to demonstrate, quote, traces of the normal sexual appetite, a touch of reproductive desire. Dr. Kiernan's article of 1892 also includes the earliest known publication of the word homosexual. The pure homosexuals cited by Kiernan are defined as persons whose, quote, general mental state is that of the opposite sex, unquote. Deviating from the procreative norm meant deviating from your sex. But Kiernan's heterosexuals were also sex deviates, deviators from reproduction. Kiernan's article was the first in the US to implore the new words, heterosexual and homosexual. But his conception of these terms was ruled by an old reproductive ideal. The heterosexual in this text described a mixed person and compound urge, abnormal because they wantonly included procreative and non-properative urges. As we'll see, the idea of the heterosexual as a perverted traitor to reproduction would last surprisingly well into the 20th century. This is one of the things I was most surprised to discover in doing the research for this book. The new term heterosexual next appeared early in 1893 in the first US publication of Psychopathia's Sexualis by Richard von Kraft Ebbing, professor of psychiatry and neurology at the University of Vienna. His book would appear in numerous later US editions becoming one of the most famous influential texts on pathological sexuality. In this primer, the pathological sexual instinct focuses on what to us now seem a very wide assortment of sexual practices from masturbation to lust murder. The pathological sexual instinct opposite the sexual instinct is no longer so clearly ruled by a procreative norm conspicuously absent from Kraft Ebbing's large tome on all varieties of sick sex as any reference to what some other doctors called, quote, conjugal onanism or, quote, frauds in the accomplishment of the generative function, birth control. In the heat of different sex lust declares Kraft Ebbing, men and women are not usually thinking of baby making, quote. In sexual love, the real purpose of the instinct, the propagation of the species, does not enter into consciousness, unquote. Placing the reproductive aside in the unconscious, Kraft Ebbing creates a small obscure space in which a new different sex pleasure norm begins to grow. Kraft Ebbing's book introduced the word heterosexual, it's hyphenated in his usage, heterosexual, to many Americans. A hyphen between Kraft Ebbing's heterosexual and heterosexual newly splices sex difference and eroticism. Kraft Ebbing consistently uses heterosexual to refer to a sexual instinct good and unhealthy because it adheres unconsciously to reproduction. But other American medical men following Dr. Kiernan's lead continue to understand the heterosexual, homosexual duo as two kinds of perverts. In 1893, for example, Charles Hughes assured his fellow doctors that by medical treatment the mind and feelings could be, quote, turned back into normal channels. The homo and heterosexual changed into beings of natural erotic inclination with normal impulsions. I love the sound of these old medical journal texts. As treatment for his abnormal heteros and homos, Dr. Hughes suggested heroic measures, hypnosis, and sometimes surgery. For Hughes, the heterosexual as person of mixed, prokretive, and non-prokretive disposition still stood with the non-prokretive homo as abnormal characters in the late 19th century pantheon of sexual perverts. In the 20th century, creatures called heterosexuals emerged from the dark shadows of the 19th century medical world in a little known doctor discourse to become common types acknowledged in the bright white light of the modern day. In the first quarter of the 20th century, the heterosexuals struggled to come out. A public self-perfirming debut, the homosexual, would duplicate at centuries end. Heterosexuality, it seems, had a protracted coming out, not completed in popular culture until around the mid-1920s. In 1901, for example, in the first edition of the H-volume of the Comprehensive Oxford English Dictionary, heterosexual and homosexual had not yet made it. The same year, Dorlan's Medical Dictionary, published in Philadelphia, still defined heterosexuality as, quote, abnormal or perverted appetite toward the opposite sex, unquote. Dorlan's calling heterosexuality abnormal or perverted is according to the 1933 Oxford English Dictionary a misapplied definition. But to the contrary, Dorlan's is a perfectly legitimate understanding of heterosexuality according to a procreative norm. The 20th century witnessed the decreasing legitimacy of that procreative imperative, the increasing public acceptance of a new hetero-pleasure, hetero-relational principle. Gradually, doctors agreed that heterosexuality referred to a normal other-sex sexuality. Between 1877 and 1920, disordered Americans were embarked on the search for order, documented in historian Robert H. Veeba's book of that title. So Veeba doesn't mention it, this hunt for regularity gave rise in the arena of sex to the new standard model heterosexuality. The construction of this gendered sexual norm provided the pivotal term for a modern regularization of errors. This paralleled early 20th century moves to standardize railroad track widths, time zones, intelligence, business procedures, manufacturing, and femininity and masculinity. In the 20th century, doctors of the mind formed a powerful bureau of sexual standards, constituting heterosexuality as the new national standard brand. Suppressing the normative character of their work, however, these sex scientists presented themselves as pursuers of pure truth and objectivity, proffering heterosexuality to the public as fact of life. Their medical model heterosexuality's founding framework honored the new different sex love as the standard of the normal and the atme of health. The first part of the new sex norm, hetero, posited a fundamental divergence of the sexes. The oppositeness of the sexes was alleged to be the basis for a universal normal erotic attraction between males and females. That stress on the sexes' oppositeness, harking back to the early 19th century, by no means simply registered biological structures and functions unique to females and males. The early 20th century focus on physiological and gender difference reflected the deep anxieties of men about the shifting work social roles and power of men over women and the changing ideals of womanhood and manhood. Men's gender anxiety peaked in the early years of this century. The second part of the new heteronorm referred positively to a bodily pleasure called sexuality. That novel upbeat focus on the hedonistic possibilities of male-female bodies also reflected a social transformation, a revaluing of pleasure and procreation, consumption and work in commercial capitalist society. In particular, the democratic attribution of a normal lust to human females as well as to human males helped to newly and officially authorize women's enjoyment of their own bodies, a sex affirmative action still part of women's struggle as feminist sex radicals stress. The 20th century ideal of the heteroerotic woman also finally undermined the 19th century ideal of the pure true woman. The new heterosexual woman ideal undercut 19th century feminist assertion of women's moral superiority and cast suspicions of carnal lust on women's passionate romantic friendships with women. The newly heterosexualized woman made possible her opposite, a menacing female monster, the lesbian. In the perspective of heterosexual history, the early 20th century emergence of the lesbian in popular culture derives from the interest in defining the lesbian's opposite, the new female heterosexual. A striking bit of evidence from across the Atlantic suggests that in the late teens of the 20th century, the terms heterosexual and homosexual were slowly making their way into England's standard English, standard thought and standard ethic. Around 1918, J.R. Ackerly, an intelligent young middle-class Englishman in his early 20s, quote, met in Switzerland a mocking and amusing fellow Arnold Lund with a, quote, rasping demonic laugh that made him, quote, the vitality and terror of the community. Ackerly reports, quote, almost the first mischievous question he shot at me was, are you homo or hetero? I had never heard either term before. They were explained, and there seemed only one answer. Ackerly identified as homo. He'd already privately acknowledged to himself his attraction to men, but it had not occurred to him to name himself after that attraction. Lund's question gave Ackerly a name for an identity based on his desire. So it was that heteros and homos entered 20th century English consciousness, culture, and conversation. In 1909, homosexuality made its debut in the Merriam Webster's company, authoritative Webster's new international dictionary, defined as a medical term, meaning, quote, morbid sexual passion for one of the same sex. Heterosexuality was not listed in Webster's until 14 years later. After homosexuality, the advertising of a diseased homosexuality preceded the publicizing of a sick heterosexuality. For in 1923, when heterosexuality first appeared in Webster's, this respected arbiter of the verbally correct, was still defining it as illness. Heterosexuality Webster's tells us in 1923 is a, quote, med term, medical term, meaning, quote, morbid sexual passion for one of the opposite sex. Different sex sex love was still tainted by reproductive ambiguity, which made it perverted, morbid. Only in 1934 does heterosexuality first appear in Webster's second edition, unabridged, defined in what's now the dominant mode. There, heterosexuality is finally, quote, a state or manifestation of sexual passion for one of the opposite sex, normal sexuality. In 1924, in the New York Times, heterosexuality first became a love that dared to speak its name. I love that line. On September 7 of that year, the word heterosexual is first known to have appeared in the New York Times book review. There, in a long, turgid review of Sigmund Freud's group psychology and the analysis of the ego, a Times reviewer spoke of repressed heterosexuality and heterosexual love. In this review of Freud, heterosexuality entered the mass marketplace. The Americanization of Freud and of heterosexuality went hand in hand. In the US in the 1920s, a mixed bag of novelists, playwrights, and sex educators and profit-seeking publishers and play producers struggled to establish the legal right to discuss and distribute a new commodity, the explicit for its time heterosexual drama, novel, and advice book. In the perspective of heterosexual history, this early 20th century struggle for the more explicit depiction of a different sex eros appears in a curious new light. Ironically, we find sex conservatives, the social purity advocates of censorship, repression, and reproduction fighting against the depiction, not just of sexual perversity, but also of the new normal heterosexuality. That a more open depiction of normal sex had to be defended against forces of propriety confirms that heterosexuality's predecessor, 19th century true love, had sanctioned reproduction, but no public official autonomous different sex eros. Before 1930 in the United States, heterosexuality was still fighting an uphill battle. As late as 1929, a federal court in Brooklyn, New York, found Mary Ware Dennett, author of a 21-page sex education pamphlet for young people guilty of male and obscene essay. Dennett's pamphlet criticized other sex education materials for not including, quote, a frank, unashamed declaration that the climax of sex emotion is an unsurpassed joy, something which rightly belongs to every normal human being. That is, she added, after they fell in love and married. If it seemed distasteful that the sex organs were, quote, so near our sewerage system, Dennett assured America's youth that this offensive positioning of parts was probably protective at any rate. There they are, she says, and our duty is to take mighty good care of them. The word heterosexual did not appear. But on April 30, 1930, the New York Times book review, the word heterosexual, appeared again. A critic described the subject of André Gide's novel, The Immoralist, proceeding, quote, from a heterosexual liaison to a homosexual one, unquote. The ability to slip between sexual categories was referred to rather casually as one human possibility. This is also the first known reference in the times to the hetero-homo duo. From there on out in the American mass media, the heterosexual and homosexual danced in close dialectical embrace, the hetero defined by the homo-alien, the homo defined by the hetero-other. In 1933, the Oxford English Dictionary tells us the colloquial abbreviation, hetero, made one of its earliest published appearances. In Eileen A. Robertson's novel, Ordinary Families, Ordinary Families, it's called, a satirical English novel reprinted in the US, Marnie Cottrell, a Cambridge University student, declares to a friend, quote, the odd thing about me is that as a picturesque type, I should be so purely hetero in spite of lack of opportunity. Quote marks around that hetero suggest the newness of the colloquialism. But the slang usage suggests that the advanced middle class was now on quite familiar terms with the hetero on both sides of the Atlantic. By December 1940, when the risque musical, Pal Joey, opened on Broadway, a number titled Zip satirized the striptease artist Gypsy Rose Lee by way of a character who sang that she didn't like a woman with a deep voice or a man with a high voice, quote, I don't like a deep contralto or a man whose voice is alto, zip, I'm a heterosexual. That lyric registered the historically new, self-conscious public proclamation of a heterosexual identity, that this lyrical declaration of heterosexual identity was written by Lorenz Hart, a guilt-ridden, closeted homosexual as another of heterosexual history's ironies. The cult of domesticity following World War II, the reassociation of women with the home, motherhood and childcare, men with fatherhood and wage work outside the home, was a period in which the predominance of the heteronorm went almost unchallenged, an era of heterosexual hegemony. The late 1940s and 50s were years in which conservative mental health professionals reasserted the old link between heterosexuality and procreation, a link which the mass distribution of condoms to thousands of soldier boys had done its bit to deconstruct. Contesting the sex conservatives, post-war sex liberals strove ultimately with success to expand the heterosexual ideal, to include within the boundaries of the normal a wider than ever range of non-procrative pre-marital and extramarital behaviors. The post-war sex conservative tendency is illustrated in 1947 in Ferdinand Lundberg and Dr. Marnia Farnum's book, Modern Woman, The Lost Sex. Improper masculinity and femininity is exemplified, the authors decree, quote, by engagement in heterosexual relations with the complete intent to see to it that they do not eventuate in reproduction, unquote. Their procreatively defined heterosex was one expression of a post-war ideology of fecundity, which internalized and dutifully enacted by a large part of the population gave rise to the post-war boom and babies. The idea of the feminine female and masculine male as prolific breeders was also reflected in the stress, beginning in the late 1940s, on the homosexual as sad symbol of sterility. That particular loaded term appears incessantly on comments on homosex dating to what I call the fecund 40s and fertile 50s. In 1948 in the New York Times book review, sex liberalism was in ascendancy. Dr. Howard A. Rusk declared that Alfred Kinsey's just published report on sexual behavior in the human male had found, quote, wide variations in sex concepts and behavior. This raised the question, what is normal and abnormal? Good question. In particular, the report had found that, quote, homosexual experience is much more common than previously thought. And there is often a mixture of both homo and hetero experience. Kinsey's counting of orgasms indeed stressed the wide range of behaviors and feelings that fell within the boundaries of a quantitative, statistically accounted heterosexuality. Kinsey's liberal reform of the hetero-homodualism widened the narrow old hetero category to accord better with the actual varieties of social sexual experience. He thereby contradicted the older idea of a monolithic, qualitatively defined, natural, procreative act, experience, and person. Though Kinsey explicitly questioned, quote, whether the terms normal and abnormal belong in a scientific vocabulary, unquote, his counting of climaxes was generally understood to define normal sex as majority sex. This quantified norm constituted a final society-wide break with the old qualitatively defined reproductive standard. Though conceived of as purely scientific, Kinsey's statistical focus on the sex most people are having helped to substitute a new quantitative moral standard for the old qualitative, reproductive ethic, another triumph, the spirit of capitalism. Kinsey also explicitly contested the idea of an absolute distinction between hetero and homo persons. He denied that human beings, quote, represent two discrete populations, heterosexual and homosexual. The world he ordered is, quote, is not to be divided into sheep and goats, unquote. His biblical metaphor, interestingly, positions heterosexuals as sheep, homosexuals as goats, a revealing glimpse into the cultural unconscious, or at least the Kinsey unconscious. The hetero division is not nature's doing, Kinsey stresses, quote, only the human mind invents categories and tries to force facts into integrated, separated pigeon holes. The living world is a continuum. With a wave of the classifier's hand, Kinsey dismissed the social and historical division of people into heteros and homos. His denial of heterosexual and homosexual personhood rejected the social reality and profound subjective force of a historically constructed tradition. Since the early 20th century in the US, hetero and homo categories had cut the sexual population in two and helped to establish the social and personal reality of a heterosexual and homosexual identity. On the one hand, the historical establishment of a heterosexual identity as universal, presumed, and normal has supported the formation of heterosexual supremacy. On the other hand, the historical establishment of a female heterosexual identity has encouraged 20th century women to pursue erotic enjoyments probably unknown to many of their 19th century foremothers. But women's pursuit of heterosexual happiness has often been co-opted and endangered by male supremacy. The historical emergence of a homosexual identity has since 1969, probably earlier, led to the development of a powerful gay liberation identity politics. Based on an ethnic group model, this mass coming out as gay or enlasbian has freed millions of women and men from a deep, painful, socially induced sense of inferiority and shame, something which I and many others suffered from. This major social movement has helped to bring about a society-wide liberalization of attitudes and responses to persons self-identified as homosexuals. But challenging the idea of a homosexual and heterosexual identity, contesting the notion of homosexual and heterosexual persons, began as one early partial response to the idealizing of heterosexuals, the inferiorizing of homosexuals. For years now, for example, Gore Vidal has been joyfully proclaiming, quote, there is no such thing as a homosexual or a heterosexual person. There are only homo or heterosexual acts most people are a mixture of impulses, if not practices. And what anyone does with the willing partners of no social or cosmic significance. So why all the fuss, he asks. In order, he says, in order for a ruling class to rule, there must be arbitrary prohibitions. Of all prohibitions, sexual taboo is the most useful because sex involves everyone. We have allowed our governors to divide the population into two teams. One team is good, godly, straight, the other is evil, sick, vicious. The Dallas analysis of our wacky division is persuasive, I think, as far as he takes it. But can't we now extend his critique of divisions one step further? Can't we now question not only the division into hetero and homo persons, but the hetero-homo division itself? Kinsey popularized the idea of a continuum of activity and feeling between hetero and homo poles. There are these two poles and hetero's on one side and homo is on the other. His liberal reform of the hetero-homo dualism did widen the narrow old hetero category. There are degrees of heterosexual and homosexual behavior and emotion, he suggested. But that famous continuum of erotic acts and feelings also emphatically fixed the basic het-homo binary in the public mind with a new certainty. Kinsey's hetero-homo rating scale from zero to six was neat, tidy, and quantitative and therefore sounded ever so scientific. His science-dressed influential sex liberalism thus upheld the het-homo polarity, giving it new life and legitimacy. In 1953 in the New York Times Book Review, anthropologist Clyde Cluckholm reviewed the new Kinsey report on women. The word heterosexual appeared once. Cluckholm's complained that the report did not treat the quote, frequency of rectal heterosexual coitus, unquote, no doubt the first overt mention of heterosotomy in the decorous Sunday Times. Yes, I looked it up and it was indeed in Sunday Times. This historic, sodomitical occasion illustrates how the Kinsey reports and responses to them expanded the discussion of heterosex to include a wider range of variations than the respectable media had previously admitted. This era's liberalization of the heterosexual ideal is also illustrated by the play T and Sympathy reviewed in the Times in 1953 as the quote, story of a schoolboy falsely suspected of homosexuality. But the false homo is a true hetero. Though our 18-year-old hero is sensitive, gentle, quiet, shy, intellectual, guitar playing and non-conforming and he's prettied up his Spartan college room within, quote, an Indian bedspread and Indian print curtains. And I guess in the 1950s that was a sign that was something a little queer about you. The play, if you were a boy, the playwright finally certifies him as straight. As usual, it turns out the villain has homo tendencies. More about heterosexuality than homosexuality, the play decries the narrow, lautish, genderism of the 1950s, advocating the expansion of heterosex to include young men lacking in the brutish manly virtues. The progressive expansion of heterosexuality to include a wider than ever range of sex-appropriate behaviors and feelings serve to strengthen the dominance of the hetero ideal, the rule of the hetero homo dualism. But in the late 1960s, anti-establishment counter-culturalists, fledgling feminists and homosexual rights activists had begun to produce a powerful critique of sexual repression in general, of women's sexual repression in particular, of marriage and the family and of some forms of heterosexuality. This critique even found its way into the New York Times. In March 1968, in the theater section of that paper, Freelancer Roslyn Regelson cited a scene from a satirical review brought to New York by a San Francisco troupe. Quote, a heterosexual man wanders inadvertently into a homosexual bar. Before he realizes his mistake, he becomes involved with an aggressive queen who orders a drink for him. Being a broad-minded liberal and trying to play it cool until he can back out of the situation gracefully, he asks, how do you like being a homosexual to which the queen draws dryly? How do you like being whatever it is you are? Regelson continued, the two cultures in confrontation, the middle-class liberal challenged today on many fronts finds his last remaining fixed value as heterosexuality called into question. The theater recalls the strategies he uses in dealing with this ultimate threat to his worldview. The new heterodefensiveness was illustrated again six months later in the New York Times in a classic document of heterosexual history. In September 1968, Judy Clemserud's interview with Cliff Gorman, active of, quote, the definitive screaming queen in the boys in the band was headlined, quote, you don't have to be one to play one. Clemserud satirically skewered the macho excess of Gorman's nervous assertion of heterosexuality. The nasty subtext of Clemserud's humor suggested that the actor did protest too much. His uneasy heterosexuality implied revealed a hint of the homo. But whatever private psychodramas were performed on the stage of this particular male's mind, the exquisite anguish of this actor, desperate to dissociate himself from a homosexual role, was just an extreme example of many men's new need to publicly proclaim their heterosexuality, to come out in other words as heterosexual, to find themselves to the world as not one of those perverts now more openly portrayed in the media. The coming out of the homo provoked the coming out of the head. In this interview, Clemserud began, Gorman's flitting and floating and fluttering as Emory, the quote, pansy interior decorator, was not exactly the kind of part you'd imagine for a nice Jewish boy from Jamaica, Queens. But Gorman had taken the part and boys in the band had become a smash hit. Gorman had recently signed for television to play a rapist, Gorman was quoted. What can be more heterosexual than that? I didn't say it, he said it. Quote, with a can of Schlitz in his hand and notice that the actor had been drinking during this interview, Gorman wrapped with the reporter, quote, about what everyone's asking him these days, how can a straight guy like you play a fag in a gay play? It's simple, he says, I needed the money, he says in his very butch real life voice, I really don't give a damn what people think, there's no question in my mind of my gender and there's no question in my wife's mind, I'm buying my own beer now. If I was playing a psychopath, that doesn't mean I'm psychopathic, his incredibly beautiful wife, Gail, tiptoes across the room and pours Cliff's beer into a glass. Cliff is still seething, people think it's so amazing that a guy can play a homosexual in such a flamboyant way and still be straight. I mean, I guess we publicize the point because it's a selling point and makes everybody wanna come and see the show. Cliff unties his bandana, flings it on the coffee table, shows a masculine he is, and strolls across the room to flip on a recording of the only kind of music that really moves him. Anybody wanna guess? Country and Western. Then he pops open his second schlitz. Quote, they told me they called a lot of gay actors but nobody wanted to do, Emery. I guess a real homosexual might be too inhibited. I didn't do anything special to prepare for the part, although the walk took a lot of practice, but I already knew how to list because I'd been telling gay jokes since I was a kid. After making it as an actor, said Gorman, I wanna have four kids and a stereo and a boat and move to Baja California and fish and skin dive and all that wholesome stuff. Printed with this Times interview was a large photograph of Gorman, his arms clasped tightly around his wife, both sad-eyed and clinging, a classic image in the historical iconography of heterosexuality, a historic picture of heterosex haunted by the specter of homosex. It's a bad, that's a bad Xerox of it. I didn't, I wasn't able to get the original, but it is to me an amazing picture of a haunting heterosexuality haunted. And you didn't know before you came tonight that there was such a thing as a iconography of heterosexuality, that there's a history of the visual image of heterosexuality. And I just brought along three others. That's the, that's the defensive, very defensive mayor of New York proclaiming his heterosexuality. And we're in now in a state where you have to, you know, say what your sexuality is. And he had to found himself in the position of having to proclaim it, yeah. Right, vote for Cuomo, not the homo was one of the lines that the opposition used. We have a nice politics in our home state. And there's, now this is a picture of heterosexual love. See, it says it right up there. That's what it looks like. See those monkeys? Now this is a really deep picture actually. It relates to all those scientific supposedly ideas that you know, that's, that's, those are heterosexual monkeys, how they know, I don't know, they know. Doctors know, science, scientists know. I mean, I guess they knew what was in that monkey's mind. And there's this equation of a humping position with heterosexuality and calling it heterosexual love. Now I don't know if those monkeys are feeling love. That's a pretty sort of complex emotion with a lot of, you know, so it's a interesting picture. You could, someday I'll write a book maybe about images like this. And here we have gay quotes that are on t-shirts that put heterosexuality into question in sort of a laughing way, which is a common procedure these, you know, among gays to sort of throw it back all the things that we've had for years. So that's the end. By 1992, 100 years after the earliest American reference to heterosexual, for the first time in history, the word heterosexual was appearing often in this nation's mass media, usually in the explicit company of homosexual. Almost daily usage now makes heterosexual and homosexual utterly ordinary, utterly ossified categories. But at this very moment in history, the trouble making feminists and contentious gay and lesbian liberators are questioning the essence of woman and man, female and male, lesbian and gay, homosexual and heterosexual in lots of other categories. At the same time, under the reign of today's universal pleasure ethic, heterosexual and homosexual start to seem ever more similar. Today, as many of us organize and struggle for sexual democracy, the upholders of the heterosexual dictatorship are on the defensive. For the first time in the short history of the heterosexual category, its ideologues are busy explaining why the state should now explicitly, officially and selectively uphold heterosexual marriage, a heterosexual military and heterosexual privilege of various kinds. Today, almost every day, you can remarkably, I think, read about heterosexuality in newspapers and magazines. Today, the system of heterosexual privilege is in crisis for the first time making that system structure apparent to many and opening it to questions. Why, for example, if we honor the traditional American value of fair play, shouldn't heterosexuals, homosexuals and assorted queer people have exactly the same civil rights and opportunities? The history and the politics to which I point focuses vigilantly on the problem of heterosexuality and specifically the system of heterosexual supremacy. Thank you. Thanks for joining us with historian Jonathan Ned Katz. Watch for other PFLAG Talks shows with Evan Wolfson, director of the Marriage Project of the Lambda Legal Defense and Education Fund and with glisten founder, Kevin Jennings. You can purchase a video cassette of this and others in the PFLAG Talks series by sending a check for $25 to Media Production, San Francisco Public Library, Civic Center, San Francisco, California, 94102.