But the biggest reason we don’t interrogate heterosexuality’s origins is probably because it seems so, well, natural. There are many reasons for this educational omission, including religious bias and other types of homophobia. What we’re not taught, though, is that a similar phenomenon brought heterosexuality into its existence. As a result, few would bat an eye when there’s talk of “the rise of the homosexual” – indeed, most of us have learned that homosexual identity did come into existence at a specific point in human history. There’s been a lot of good work, both scholarly and popular, on the social construction of homosexual desire and identity. It seems not to have occurred to those who made the video, or the millions who shared it, that we actually need an explanation for both. The video’s takeaway seemed to suggest that all of our sexualities are “just there” that we don’t need an explanation for homosexuality just as we don’t need one for heterosexuality. Feeling that their prejudices had been exposed, they ended up swiftly conceding the videographer’s obvious point: gay people were born gay just like straight people were born straight. Responses were varied, with most saying something like, “It’s a combination of nature and nurture.” The interviewer then asked a follow-up question, which was crucial to the experiment: “When did you choose to be straight?” Most were taken back, confessing, rather sheepishly, never to have thought about it. It feels as if heterosexuality has always “just been there.”Ī few years ago, there began circulating a “man on the street” video, in which the creator asked people if they thought homosexuals were born with their sexual orientations. That can’t be right! Well, it certainly doesn’t feel right. Whenever I tell this to people, they respond with dramatic incredulity. The 1901 Dorland’s Medical Dictionary defined heterosexuality as an “abnormal or perverted appetite toward the opposite sex.” More than two decades later, in 1923, Merriam Webster’s dictionary similarly defined it as “morbid sexual passion for one of the opposite sex.” It wasn’t until 1934 that heterosexuality was graced with the meaning we’re familiar with today: “manifestation of sexual passion for one of the opposite sex normal sexuality.” This story is featured in BBC Future’s “Best of 2017” collection.
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